The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public by Dorothea E. von Mücke (review)

As indicated by its title and subtitle, Dorothea E. von Mücke's study stakes out fields and subfields that are at once vast and specific. While the three trends named in the subtitle invoke established research areas, each of which has been the subject of countless monographs, the main title seeks to grasp these topics in the context of the more sweeping but still well-established terms of "enlightenment" and "practice," with the latter serving as a counterweight to definitions or self-definitions of the Enlightenment through its "ideas." Von Mücke seeks to provide both a supplement and an antidote to studies that look at the history of ideas in a relative vacuum, showing how, well before Kant, new forms of subjectivity were gaining recognition and taking root in religious spiritual exercises that tended toward their own secularization in systematic practices of attentiveness.