| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Hans G. Kippenberg. Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 264. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

Hans G. Kippenberg has accomplished what few religion scholars have yet to do: namely, write an intelligent and accessible case for the study of comparative religion. To be sure, Kippenberg's competition is not stiff. The academic study of religion has never lined up well with either the humanities or social sciences. As such, religion scholars with humanistic sympathies participate meaningfully in such fields as religious history, ethics, and the study of ancient languages and culture. At the other end of the spectrum are those who contend that the discipline is a science that possesses methods and subjects as rigorous as other branches of learning. Kippenberg falls in the latter category. His book is a historical treatment of the rise of comparative religion, also called the history of religions. Such approaches tend toward abstraction and jargon, since they generally look beyond the specifics of actual religions to generalize about religion as a thing in itself. Yet this book avoids such pitfalls, if only because the author examines the leading proponents of comparative religion and locates them in the particular circumstances of an industrializing Western Europe between 1850 and 1930. Ironically, Kippenberg winds up showing how humanistic was the impulse to study world religions scientifically. . . .

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