Religion and Society at the Dawn of Modern Europe

This book reveals how, in confrontation with secularity, various new forms of Christianity evolved during the time of Europe's crisis of modernisation. Rudolf Schlögl provides a comprehensive overview of the development of religious institutions and piety in Protestant and Catholic Europe between 1750 and 1850; at the same time, he offers a detailed exposition of contemporary philosophical, theological and socio-theoretical thought on the nature and function of religion. This allows us to understand the importance of religion in the self-defining of European society during a period of great change and upheaval. Religion and Society at the Dawn of Modern Europe is a pivotal work – translated into English here for the first time – for all scholars and students of European society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Rudolf Schlögl is Chair of Modern History (Early Modern History) at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is the author of several books in German on religion and early modern Europe.

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick, UK, where he co-ordinates the Warwick Network for Parish Research & serves as an academic lead of the Global Research Priority on Food. His publications include Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (2007) and Imperial Villages: Cultures of Political Freedom in the German Lands (2019). He is also the (co-)editor of A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (2012), Pfarreien in der Vormoderne (2017) and The European World 1500-1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (4th edn, 2023).

Helen Imhoff is a Freelance Translator.

Brian Cowan is Associate Professor of History at McGill University, Canada. His publications include The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), and The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012). He contributed to the Multigraph Collective's Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation (2018). He is also the (co-)editor of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (2021) and President of the Board of Directors for the international research group 'Sociabilities in the Long Eighteenth Century'.