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Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness. By Thomas Albert Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 250 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Howard's masterful study of the contributions of de Wette and Burckhardt to European intellectual history presents de Wette, the biblical scholar, and his sometime student Burckhardt, historian of art and culture, both increasingly important for understanding how critical concerns about the use of history in examining religious texts, arising within the Protestant theological faculties at German Universities, led to a shift in the sense of significance of being in nature and history. That scholarship (Wissenschaft) fed the development of academic biblical criticism and recovered the value of myth as evidence of the historical process of composition of complex religious texts, while presenting some Christians a culture shock of such magnitude as to render them "honest heretic(s)" (110), unable to remain in theology as a vocation and, in the case of Burckhardt, committed to a pessimistic perspective on culture as a human enterprise that could be richly chronicled but that was finally devoid of transcendent significance. Juxtaposition of the personal and scholarly histories of the two figures carries the reader from the Enlightenment critique of orthodoxy through Schleiermacher and Strauss to the culture critiques of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, while engaging the contrasting contexts of Berlin and Basel as citadels of opposing theological spirits.