The Dark Side of the Enlightenment | John V. Fleming

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment―generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion―were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy.

Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age.

Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet.

Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.

20 illustrations

About the Author

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild, '24 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for forty years before retiring in 2006. Fleming graduated from Sewanee (the University of the South) in 1958, before spending three years in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After taking his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He has published widely in the fields of medieval literature, art history, and religious history. As a teacher he was particularly well-known for his unusual course in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. In retirement he has begun to publish, outside medieval studies, on subjects which he has long pursued on an amateur basis. He is a former president of the Medieval Academy of America and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife Joan, a retired Episcopal priest—whose thumb, one hopes in "up" position, is in the author photograph—are the parents of three adult children. They live in Princeton, N.J., and spend extended periods of time in Paris. Fleming is the recent recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Emeriti Faculty (affectionately known as a Geezer Grant) which he hopes will allow him to complete a book about the religious poetry of Luis de Camões. He is actively involved in several other scholarly projects, and he is beginning a second trade book for the W. W. Norton Co., the publishers of The Anti-Communist Manifestos. There is more, including a portal to his weekly blog, at www.johnvfleming.com.