Addresses the romantic reception of mystic Jakob Bohme.

Interest in German Romanticism has been revitalized in recent years by new post-structural, interdisciplinary, and intertextual perspectives. However until now this renewed interest has not led to a re-examination of Jakob Bohme's formative influence on Jena Romanticism. In Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Bohme Paola Mayer radically revises previous views, arguing that the relationship between Bohme and the Jena Romantics should be understood as appropriation rather than influence. This reversal of perspective leads to the recognition that Romanticism's interaction with Bohme was not passive but polemical, selective, and predatory. Not only was there not an influence, there was not even a Bohme, since his name and aspects of the writings were adapted to promote ideas wholly unrelated to any historical person or body of thought that might have been Bohme.