Richard Gordon presents a working paper on "The Greeks, religion and nature in German neo-humanist discourse from Romanticism to Reichsgründung"

This paper is part of a larger study devoted to the representations of ancient Greek religion in German neo-humanist scholarship, 1750-1914. The sub-topic here is that of Nature. Rather than focusing on the physicalist interpretation of the Greek gods, which is a major theme in the literature, I seek to locate shifts in the conceptions of nature in German scholarship on Greek religion from the later eighteenth century to c.1870 against the background of the modernisation of the German university system(s), the debate over Fr. Creuzer in th 1810-20s, the rise of pseudo-historicism, the failure of 1848 and emergent industrialisation.