Jean Barbeyrac’s many-sided career as translator, editor, intellectual controversialist, and moral philosopher within the Huguenot Republic of Letters is difficult to make sense of as a whole but the means of doing so are now available in this authoritative account of his early years in the Consistory of Berlin. With the depth of scholarship and archival research for which she is renowned from her earlier work on Samuel Pufendorf, Fiammetta Palladini uncovers here the detailed story of his conflicts with the Orthodox Huguenots in the Berlin Refuge and thus provides a richly textured account of the Berlin Refuge in all aspects — whether political, philosophical, cultural, or social — and in so doing creates a portrait of one of the main locations of the Huguenot Enlightenment, its achievements, conflicts, and contradictions.

This book well complements another recent Brill collection edited by Pott, Mulsow, and Danneberg (The Berlin Refuge 1680–1780: Learning and Science in European Context); but where the latter dwelt more on the intellectual outreach and relationships between the Berlin Refuge and the rest of Europe, Palladini focuses just as much on the tangled and combustible relationships within the community itself. Her account therefore goes far beyond the coverage offered many years ago in important texts by Sieglinde Othmer and Erich Haase. There are perhaps two important historiographical lessons to be found in this work: the first is that the history of the Refuge in Berlin and more general developments in Prussian political, cultural, and social history really have to be studied together rather than separately, and that both benefit from the enrichment of perspective provided by the other. The second, as is so often the case in the face of detailed archival scholarship of this quality, is that the conventional interpretation of this episode as a heroic act of assertion both of the idea of toleration and of intellectual freedom is hard to square with the fresh understanding we have of exactly how these quarrels developed locally. As a result this book will doubtless help to reshape our understanding of this era in a Weberian history of the disenchantment of the world.

In the introduction Palladini explains helpfully the crucial points at issue between Socinians and the Orthodox, while illustrating them with cases of heterodoxy that preceded Barbeyrac’s own. She then moves on to consider the accusation of Socinianism against Barbeyrac himself and provides a definitive revisionist account of this episode, revealing along the way that the attack was not the work of obscurantist conservatives but of those who wished to target Jean Le Clerc and his main ally in the Berlin Refuge, Jacques Lenfant. In some respects the sequence of chapters that follows is the most revealing in the volume: devoted to revealing more of the identity and intellectual character of some of the key enemies (Gaultier) and friends (Chauvin and Lenfant) of Barbeyrac in Berlin, they reveal the level of intellectual sophistication that operated on both sides of this conflict and demonstrate clearly how well integrated all sides were in the international world of the Huguenot diaspora. Palladini makes particularly good use here of unpublished correspondence from the Genevan theologians Turrettini and Tronchin and thereby of the integration of Berlin with communities well beyond the traditional Netherlandic point of reference. For historians with particular interests in the development of religious policy by the Prussian state, the most significant materials are found in chapters 6 and 7: Palladini offers a fascinating account of the process whereby Leclerc’s translation of the New Testament was proscribed and unearths the full paper-trail of contacts with the ruler; and this is supplemented with a most informative account of Alexander von Dohna, who combined a career as a general and adviser to the queen with his role as main spokesman for the interests of the French colony in Berlin. The volume ends with a brief account of Barbeyrac’s later career where the revisionist emphasis is as much on the intellectual quality of his main Berlin opponents, as on Barbeyrac’s conventionally heroic status as a founder of modernity. So far from being isolated, he was a member of a liberal faction that lost a battle but ultimately prevailed. Moreover his opponents were men of real caliber who argued their theological and philological case with precision and flair.

This book is a model of precise, scrupulous, and unfashionably modest scholarship that in its wealth of newly discovered materials and discreetly advanced reinterpretations provides a suitable capstone to a career devoted to recovering and contextualizing key debates in the early French and German enlightenments.