This book presents studies of early-nineteenth-century religious thought in Germany, France and Italy in so far as it reflected the influence of the Romantic movement. Romanticism may be notoriously difficult to define, but the cast of mind usually associated with it -- manifest in philosophy, theology and social theory as well as in literature, music and the visual arts -- is never hard to detect, even though the forms of its expression may vary widely.

This book sets out to present Kant as a theological thinker. His critical philosophy was not only destructive of 'natural' theology, with its attempt to prove divine existence by logical argument, it also left no room for 'revelation' in the traditional sense. Yet Kant himself, who was brought up in Lutheran pietism, certainly believed in God, and could fairly be described as a religious man. But he held that religion can be based only on the moral consciousness, and in his last major work, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone - discussed here in detail - he interpreted Christianity...

This is a clear picture of the main currents of Western religious thought in the nineteenth century.

Most general accounts of the reformation concentrate on its events and personalities while recent scholarship has been largely devoted to its social and economic consequences. Benard Reardon's famous book has been designed specifically to reassert the role of religion in the study of reformation history and make the theological issues and arguments that fuelled it accessible to non-specialists today.