| Communications | The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.2

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| Communications | The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.2 | The History Cooperative

Communications

TO THE EDITOR:

It is not my wont to offer rejoinders to reviews, but Margaret C. Jacob's is such a gross mischaracterization of Hearing Things that I feel compelled to offer a handful of clarifications.¹ The sloppiness of the review, including misquotation, is surprising, but worse is the willful distortion of the book to grind what are by now old and dull axes.

First, she presents the book in alarmist fashion as "a repudiation of the Enlightenment" (p. 992), ignoring that from the first page of the preface I disclaim "that favored postmodern sport of Enlightenment trashing" (Hearing Things, vii) and make plain an appreciation for the playful curiosity of the learned, whether Christian Baconians or radical freethinkers. Indiscriminate in her own waging of the science and culture wars, Jacob is all too ready to kill off even those of us who are noncombatants. For the record, and this should come as a surprise to no one, the book embraces the freedom to study religion on historical and cultural terms as a great achievement of the Enlightenment. Still, the creation of a natural history of religion left ambiguous legacies that, in their turn, invite critical suspicion and engagement. This is a disciplinary concern of some consequence for those of us who study religion, though apparently Jacob as a professor of history is ignorant of that long-running historiography. . . .

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