An interesting read, but a bit heavy, this is more like an academic text. Good in-depth history but a bit dry.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. The book is called The Church and the Enlightenmet. It’s part of a series on Church history. One could reasonably expect that the Catholic Church would play a major part in the book. And certainly the way the Church reacted to the Enlightenment philosophers and why these ideas did not become widespread in certain countries is worth exploring.

But did the author do this? No.

Instesd he wrote a confusing and muddle-headed history of the Enlightenment with very little reference to the Church and almost only referring to Catholic figures in the “Up Close and Personal” sections. From the overall tone of the book, the author was probably asked to do this.

He appears to be putting his book into thematic, rather than historical order. This is fine as an approach to history, but his themes are extremely loose and obscure at best.

The book is not chronological except for the first chapter. From the chapter titles, the reader might think it’s thematic, but it’s not. Instead, each chapter goes wandering off into areas that only hang together in the author’s mind.

He pretty much ignores important figures and themes of these two centuries. Absolutism and important absolutist monarchs such as Maria Theresa and Louis XIV are ignored.

Colonization and mercantilism are not even mentioned until the last chapter and then largely glossed over except for a lengthy discussion of the Dutch East india Company.

Art and music are also important for this period. Although he does not ignore them, the author makes no attempt to integrate them into the wider picture of the times. When talking about Mozart, he spends the pages talking about Th Magic Flute, with a bizarre and incorrect description of the plot, instead of giving some time to say, The Marriage of Figaro or DonGiovanni, two operas that encapsulate the tensions of the period.

In these areas, the publisher made a big mistake; they chose to ask the reader to go to a website to hear the music or see the paintings instead of reproducing the works of art in the book. While this is understandable in the case of musical works, it makes no sense for paintings. Not every person who is reading the book will be near a computer or Web browser.

Although his last chapter is about the American and French Revolutions, he gives a brief nod to Romanticism in this chapter, even though the connection is slight at best. Also, he puts Edmund Burke and his thought in another chapter, even though Burke was an important commentator on both.

He completely ignores any Romantic thinker, writer, or artist except Beethoven in the book and instead spends time in the chapter on revolutions on Newman. His discussion of Newman ignores much of his thought and focuses on superficialities, as has been the case with almost all the Catholics in the book.

In his conclusion, he lives down to the rest of the book, continuing to refrain from talking about the subject at hand, the Catholic Church, and instead talking about progressivism without ever showing us how this is connected.

From using a different time period for his book (he ends the discussion with Napoleon) to ignoring important themes, people, and countries in the period, even if it were a straight history of these years, it would be bad. When you add in that he ignores the Catholic Church in a series of Church history, this book is not worth being included in this otherwise excellent history.

I received an ARC of, The Church and the Age of, Enlightenment (1648-1848), by Dominic A. Aquila. I found this book to be well written but dull. There is a lot of information in this book, i just found it a little boring.