Apetrei Sarah Louise Trethewey - An introduction to Jacob Boehme four centuries of thought and reception

This companion will prove an invaluable resource for all those engaged in research or teaching on Jacob Boehme and his readers, as historians, philosophers, literary scholars or theologians. Boehme is on the radar of many researchers, but often avoided as there are relatively few aids to understanding his thought, its context and subsequent appeal. This book includes a fine spread of topics and specialists.

Cyril ORegan, University of Notre Dame, USA

This volume brings together for the first time some of the worlds leading authorities on the German mystic Jacob Boehme to illuminate his thought and its reception over four centuries for the benefit of students and advanced scholars alike. Boehmes theosophical works have influenced Western culture in profound ways since their dissemination in the early seventeenth century, and these interdisciplinary essays trace the social and cultural networks as well as the intellectual pathways involved in Boehmes enduring impact. The chapters range from situating Boehme in the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation to discussions of his significance in modern theology. They explore the major contexts for Boehmes reception, including the Pietist movement, Russian religious thought, and Western esotericism. In addition, they focus more closely on important readers, including the religious radicals of the English Civil Wars and the later English Behmenists, literary figures such as Goethe and Blake, and great philosophers of the modern age such as Schelling and Hegel. Together, the chapters illustrate the depth and variety of Boehmes influence, and a concluding chapter addresses directly an underlying theme of the volume, asking why Boehme matters today and how readers in the present might be enriched by a fresh engagement with his apparently opaque and complex writings.

Ariel Hessayon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published extensively on a variety of early modern topics, including antiscripturism, book burning, communism, environmentalism, esotericism, extra-canonical texts, heresy, crypto-Jews, Judaizing, millenarianism, mysticism, prophecy, and religious radicalism.

Sarah Apetrei is Departmental Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England and is currently working on a book dealing with the place of mystical theology in seventeenth-century British religion.

1 Judaism and Collective Life

Self and Community in the Religious Kibbutz

Aryei Fishman

2 Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue

Henrique Pinto

3 Religious Conversion and Identity

The Semiotic Analysis of Texts

Massimo Leone

4 Language, Desire, and Theology

A Genealogy of the Will to Speak

Nolle Vahanian

5 Metaphysics and Transcendence

Arthur Gibson

6 Sufism and Deconstruction

A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn Arabi

Ian Almond

7 Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism

A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlins Social Theory

Michael Jinkins

8 Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy

Arthur Bradley

9 Law and Religion

Edited by Peter Radan, Denise Meyerson and Rosalind F. Atherton

10 Religion, Language, and Power

Edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee

11 Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia

Edited by Kelly Pemberton and Michael Nijhawan

12 Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics

From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius Whitney Bauman

13 Material Religion and Popular Culture

E. Frances King

14 Adam Smith as Theologian

Edited by Paul Oslington

15 The Entangled God

Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics

Kirk Wegter-McNelly

16 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

A Critical Inquiry

Paul J. DeHart

17 Animal Ethics and Theology

The Lens of the Good Samaritan

Daniel K. Miller

18 The Origin of Heresy

A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity

Robert M. Royalty, Jr.

19 Buddhism and Violence

Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia

Edited by Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke

20 Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture

Stella Sai-Chun Lau

21 Theology and the Science of Moral Action

Virtue Ethics, Exemplarity, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Edited by James A. Van Slyke, Gregory R. Peterson, Kevin S. Reimer, Michael L. Spezio and Warren S. Brown

22 Abrogation in the Quran and Islamic Law

Louay Fatoohi

23 A New Science of Religion

Edited by Gregory W. Dawes and James Maclaurin

24 Making Sense of the Secular

Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia

Edited by Ranjan Ghosh

25 The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics

Extraordinary Movement

C. S. Monaco

26 Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality

Ethnographic Approaches

Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe

27 Religions in Movement

The Local and the Global in Contemporary Faith Traditions

Robert W. Hefner, John Hutchinson, Sara Mels and Christiane Timmerman

28 William Jamess Hidden Religious Imagination

A Universe of Relations

Jeremy Carrette

29 Theology and the Arts

Engaging Faith

Ruth Illman and W. Alan Smith

30 Religion, Gender, and the Public Sphere

Edited by Niamh Reilly and Stacey Scriver

31 An Introduction to Jacob Boehme

Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

Edited by Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei

Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

Edited by Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei

First published 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
An introduction to Jacob Boehme: four centuries of thought and reception / edited by Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei. 1st [edition].
pages cm. (Routledge studies in religion; 31)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Bhme, Jakob, 1575-1624. 2. MysticismHistory.
I. Hessayon, Ariel, editor of compilation.
BV5095.B7I64 2013
230'.044092dc23
2013008795

ISBN: 978-0-415-84357-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-75402-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
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Dedication