Powerful institutional pressures can impede scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American literatures from talking about religion. The essays that Mark Knight and Charles LaPorte collected for this special issue suggest to splendid effect that these intellectual communities are inclined to break that silence. But our fields’ alliance with the modern is a prime factor in the reticence that these authors must have had to challenge even in 2022.
Scholars who work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have, of course, very good reasons to claim jurisdiction over “middle modernity”—a useful term Theresa M. Kelley coined some twenty years ago.1 We have been reluctant to sit on the sidelines of our English departments while our colleagues the early modernists and the modernists share out between them the prestige that accrues to teachers of the modern. To claim the modern for ourselves—however counterintuitively that claim proves for those undergraduates who...
