Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter outlines the relationship between Johann Georg Hamann and Jacobi, demonstrating its significance for their respective reception within the history of ideas. Despite Jacobi and Hamann’s affinity in friendship, there were significant differences in the very foundation of their post-enlightenment thought.

Chapter 6 starts with the understanding of the advent of the Nights as “a major event for all European literature,” a point that Borges and others argue passionately. In order to see the impact of this event we need to differentiate the Romantic craze of William Beckford in his Vathek, Episodes, and “Long Story,” his translators, and also his admirers from others. Beckford was phenomenal in working across at least three cultures along with Arabic: French, English, and Jamaican. His infatuation and reproduction of the Nights is unique, but we have to place it in context of a raging discussion run by many, but especially Schlegel, of the grotesque and Arabesque. His writing and personal penchant to challenge everything presents him as a filiate who belongs to a specific genealogy in the Nights. His approach is different for instance from the Brontës whose writings bear the marks of a contained infatuation. They are the bridge for twentieth-century shifts in reading and response. A “murky sensualism” which Maxime Rodinson associates with “the Western bourgeoisie” prepares for the dialectic of rapprochement, engagement, and detachment that present the twentieth century and after as more experimental but also no less involved in substantiating the Nights in architecture, painting, enactment of medieval travels, and the practice of parody and pastiche in a postmodernist anxiety and search for distinction.

This chapter starts from the extraordinary historical circumstance that Schleiermacher and Schlegel, a theologian and classical scholar and philosopher, who both had a huge influence on the development of their disciplines and the institution of the university, shared lodgings as students. It explores their relationship, and the importance of it for their subsequent careers, and expands from this toconsider how the seminary, as dominant theological educational institution, was overtaken in the university by the seminar – to explore how both educational forums show similar negotiations of the dynamic between personal, affective relationships and methodological rigour. It thus raises questions about how the public and the private, emotion and objectivity became values of scholarship between philology and theology in the university