Jacob Böhme and His World ed. by Bo Andersson et al. (review)

Jacob Böhme, the seventeenth-century shoemaker turned radical Lutheran visionary author, has consistently attracted less scholarly interest than he deserves. Despite the immense popularity of his writings during the seventeenth century and his influence on figures like Hegel and Emerson (not to mention Rudolph Otto's and William James's theories of religious experience), there has been a consistent lack of reliable scholarly material on Böhme, especially in English.

This situation is, happily, beginning to change. In his 2016 dissertation Imaginal Renaissance: Desire, Corporeality, and Rebirth in the work of Jacob Böhme, Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke turned to the embodied and ecological dimensions of Böhme's thought as no one else has, illuminating this early modern author in light of the contemporary theory of religious studies. Gentzke's admirable literature review sums up the paucity of secondary literature to draw on: he lists two major English monographs, from 1958 and 1991 respectively. While all of these works are excellent, there is clearly more to be done in understanding this shoemaker from Gorlitz toward whom so many religious and philosophical trends of the modern period seem to lead back.

This challenge facing would-be Böhme scholars is one of many reasons to welcome Jacob Böhme and His World edited by Bo Andersson, Lucinda Martin, Leigh Penman, and Andrew Weeks. This collection of essays shares the common goal of contextualizing Böhme with an emphasis on his historical and religious milieu. The reason for this emphasis on context is simple. Böhme is best known today not for any of his specific works or theological ideas, but for the legendary account of the mystical episode which sparked them in 1600. When Böhme appears in the work of James and Otto, it is not as an author of theological or devotional literature, but as an experiencer, a case study. "The problem is that the aura of his illumination is so engaging and his reputation as a mystic so beguiling that his legend outshines not only the literary corpus but also the world that nourished and informed it," write Weeks and Andersson in their introduction (xii). This collection does a great deal to illuminate the world behind the mystic and makes its central point well: for all of Böhme's immense insight and the preternatural confidence of his writing style, he was very much the product of his own time and place.

The essays contextualize Böhme within a few areas: his immediate historical context; the state of Lutheranism and Protestant devotional literature at his time; and his connection to specific esoteric religious ideas. One outlier in these three categories is Cecilia Muratori's essay on Böhme's legacy and reception as a philosopher, which very capably shows some of the contours of a modern philosophy trying to distinguish itself from religion.

Readers of this publication will be particularly interested in Urs Leo Gantenbein's essay on Böhme and the theology of Paracelsus, Gerold Necker's essay on Böhme and Kabbalah, Lutz Pannier's essay on Böhme and astrology, and Mike A. Zuber's essay on Böhme and alchemy. These four pieces, taken together, represent an excellent collection of contemporary research into esoteric and heterodox religious ideas in Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The essays on Böhme's context as a Lutheran and his relationship with the church are also excellent, and they do a great deal to locate Böhme within the broader trends of early modern Protestantism and the "Crisis of Piety" of the seventeenth century. Essays by Kristine Hannak on Johann Arndt and by Lucinda Martin on Martin Moller stand out and show some of the ways in which Böhme's ideas fit in with other radical (and not so radical) Protestant authors of his...