Dialogues of the Dead of the Early German Enlightenment

Riccarda Suitner, Ph.D. (2014), currently researches and teaches at the German Historical Institute in Rome and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Her publications focus on intellectual and religious history between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Reviews of the German edition:"[A] fascinating study (...). Quite apart from the mass of interesting information she provides, Riccarda Suitner can be credited with having salvaged a genre, not only neglected but on the verge of complete disappearance."- Alastair Hamilton, The Warburg Institute, in: Church History and Religious Culture, Volume 97 (2017)."The dialogues studied in her book shed new light on the early German Enlightenment (…). Suitner’s book tells a lot about how things really went." - Andreas Blank, Alpen‐Adria‐Universität Klagenfurt, in: Renaissance Quarterly Volume 71 (2018).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction1 Cheap Prints, Dialogues of the Dead, Pamphlets: The Anonymous World of the Early 18th-Century German Book Trade2 The Dialogues of the Dead of the Early German Enlightenment (1729–1734): An Unknown Corpus of Sources1 From Antiquity to the Enlightenment1 Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–180/192 CE): The Νεκρικοί διάλογοι2 Fontenelle: The Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683)3 David Fassmann: The Gespräche im Reich der Toten (1718–1739)2 The Examen Rigorosum1 The Judgment of Apollo2 The Business of “Pirated Editions”3 Student Rivalries3 The War of the Biographers1 The Pietist Front: Christian Gerber and the Historia derer Wiedergebohrnen in Sachsen2 The First Literary Depictions of the Lives of Christian Thomasius and August Hermann Francke3 The World of the Copper Engravers4 The Harsh Laws of Competition5 Eulogies, Dialogues of the Dead, (Auto)Biographies: The “Instability” of Literary Genres4 The Wolffian Leibniz1 S. W.2 The Argument with Johann Franz Budde3 Eclecticism, the Mathematical Method, Atheism4 How Many Authors?5 The Two Faces of Leibniz1 1745: Leibniz Becomes the Protagonist of a Dialogue of the Dead Once Again2 The Conversation with Ludwig Philipp Thümmig3 Gottsched, Mylius, Hagedorn, the “Swiss” Poets: The Disputes of the 1740s6 The Argument between Descartes and Rüdiger1 Arriving among the Stars2 Descartes as a Wolffian Philosopher3 Pietism and Materialism4 The Background of the Dialogue5 Role Play7 The Restoration of All Things1 Prefaces to Dialogues of the Dead: The Dialogue between Mayer and Petersen2 Ἀποκατάστασις πάντων: Origen, Leibniz, and Petersen8 Balthasar Bekker’s Remorse1 The Exorcism on Peter Otte2 Cartesianism and Demonology in 18th-Century Germany3 The Pact with the Devil4 More on the Engravers: The Identity of “M. B.”5 Some Deliberations on the Origin, Authorship, and Dissemination of the Dialogue6 Necromancy and Conversations in the Realm of SpiritsConclusion1 The “Underworlds” of the Dialogues of the Dead: Which Level of Clandestineness?2 Four Reasons for Anonymity3 “Material” Evidence and Intellectual History4 The Question of AuthorshipBibliographyIndex