| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.3

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804. By Robert E. Schofield. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xv, 461p. Illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $55.)

This book is the second and final volume of Robert E. Schofield's forty-year effort to write a complete biography of Joseph Priestley, the English radical, chemist, dissenting clergyman, and philosopher. Schofield presents an intellectual biography, which seriously engages Priestley's science, theology, and metaphysics so that it is as much a book of Priestley's ideas as it is of his life. To this end, Schofield "consulted and described every published writing of Joseph Priestley and attempted to place every bit of it in its historical context" (p. xi), introducing the reader to the various political, philosophical, theological, and scientific controversies to which Priestley was a party. Schofield explicitly writes for "historians of science, chemists, and theologians as well as intellectual and cultural historians" (p. xiii), making the book rather demanding of its readers. Schofield's goal is to show that Priestley was "more than a lucky empiricist in science, more than a naïve political liberal, more than an exhaustive compiler of superficial evidence in militant support of Unitarianism" and to elevate him to his rightful place as "a leading luminary of the Enlightenment" (p. xii). Schofield succeeds brilliantly.

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