"Revelation is a pillar of belief in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Historians regularly write that the Enlightenment dethroned it as the basis for knowledge of God and the world, replacing or at least supplementing it with reason. What Benes demonstrates is that in the late eighteenth century religious thinkers across the three main German confessions (Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism) rehabilitated the concept in important if untraditional ways. These thinkers were not entirely successful in reconciling reason, revelation, and history. A new generation of philosophers, including Feuerbach and Kierkegaard, attacked the concept again in the nineteenth century. But a secularized concept of revelation persisted and influenced numerous disciplines beyond theology, including history, linguistics, and natural philosophy (e.g. science). The dismantling of propositional revelation bestowed the privileges and agency once reserved for God onto human subjects, relegating religion to cultural practice, not divine truth. In addition to its comprehensive approach, Benes's manuscript stands-out for addressing not just the Protestant majority but also Catholic and Jewish thinking on revelation, highlighting both the common themes and the ways in which their intellectual trajectory differed."--