"In bringing a complex Latin text from probably the most important enlightened Catholic into English, the doyen of the field has done scholars and students of early modernity an immense benefit. Lehner’s beautiful translation of Muratori’s difficult Latin prose reveals the inner core of the great Italian enlightener’s worldview: a confident trust in the goodness of God’s gift of reason and a consequent insistence that while faith is of absolute value, that faith must be reasonable."
~Shaun Blanchard, University of Notre Dame, Australia
"In this English translation and critical edition of Muratori’s On the Moderation of Reason in Religious Matters, Ulrich Lehner gives modern readers access to one of the most significant manifestos of the Catholic Enlightenment. Muratori’s discussion of the reasonableness of Copernican astronomy and its compatibility with scripture highlights efforts to delineate the place of Catholic truth, authority, and belief in an eighteenth-century world."
~Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University
"In his introduction to the first translation into English of Ludovico Muratori’s masterpiece, Ulrich Lehner writes that ‘Muratori was arguably the most important proponent of the Catholic Enlightenment.’ Lehner is the principal authority on the Catholic Enlightenment, and few would dare to argue the point against him. Lehner has made available to the English-speaking world a profound, distinctive, and hitherto unrecognized voice in the centuries-long debate on the respective roles of faith and reason. Muratori’s On the Moderation of Reason in Religious Matters is going to revolutionize the teaching of the Enlightenment. Catholics will discover a voice that anticipated many of the stances of Catholic social teaching in the twentieth century. This is a book that should be read by any serious student of +the Catholic intellectual tradition."
~James Hankins, Harvard University
"With this work, Lehner recalls the centrality of the thought of Lodovico Antonio Muratori in the 18th-century renewal. The translation of a text like On the Moderation of Reason in Religious Matters makes available to a wider audience a crucial passage in the path of opening theology to the reason’s needs. A book still relevant and representative of Muratori’s intellectual quest in the framework of Catholic reformism."
~Matteo Al Kalak, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
"With his masterful translation, Ulrich Lehner offers the English-speaking public a key text of the Catholic Enlightenment. Ludovico Antonio Muratori was not only an impressive polymath, he was also at the center of a transnational network of Catholic scholars, lay and ecclesiastic, who engaged in new and productive ways with modern philosophy and with the new science. Far from looking backward, Muratori’s ‘moderation of reason’ was key to an ambitious intellectual project of modernization that strove to keep together the fragments of a world that was about to shatter. This book is a fundamental addition to the growing literature that is situating the Catholic Enlightenment firmly within the genealogy of our modernity."
~Massimo Mazzotti, University of California, Berkeley