| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. Ed. by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999. xvi, 639 pp. $75.00, ISBN 0-934909-76-8.)

This valuable compilation features twenty essays by scholars of antebellum New England, including historians of culture, religion, literature, art, and music. The essays began as papers presented at a conference held at the Massachusetts Historical Society in May 1997. The title echoes Theodore Parker's controversial ordination sermon, A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841), which distinguishes between the transient forms of religion and the permanent necessity of thereligious sentiment. Thus the title evokes the sense of the permanent necessity of Transcendentalism in American intellectual history, but it also evokes the sense of transience both in our historical understanding and, possibly, in the place of Transcendentalism in antebellum America. If Transcendentalism begins with the primacy of the individual self and the immanence of God, how can we understand it as a social movement with historical influence? 1

The collection proposes several answers to that question. In seven sections, the essays connect Transcendentalism to a variety of discursive contexts: Transcendentalism and the historians, Transcendentalism and the New England religious tradition, Transcendentalism and the cosmopolitan discourse, Transcendentalism and society, Transcendentalism and American reform, Transcendentalism's cultural legacy, and Transcendentalism and the critics. . . .

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