Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette(1780–1849)

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette is documented in Fuller’s journals (1836). One work is named, all in Journal December 1836, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in
Journals
Documented
1836

Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • Dated
  • 1837Work not namedDemonstrated

    “reading to him mostly from De Wette and Herder”

    Mem-4 Margaret Fuller by Julia Ward Howe · winter of teaching, 1836-37

    Engagement type is Translated, which automatically qualifies for the Demonstrated tier since translating requires the source text in hand.

In Fuller’s words

“Reading Dr Wette. We got almost half through the Anthropology. Propensities of Man _ Reason _ Love _ Free Will _ _ Dr C. talked much more tonight which was really a comfort. He is interested in the book though he does not find there what he expected and we shall go on with it.”
Vorlesungen über die Religion [Lectures on Religion] · Journal December 1836 · 1836

When Fuller engaged with Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist1record
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)2records
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Wette in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.

1836—

Journal December 1836

p21
analyzed · readManuscript page
“Reading Dr Wette. We got almost half through the Anthropology. Propensities of Man _ Reason _ Love _ Free Will _ _ Dr C. talked much more tonight which was really a comfort.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Journal December 1836." Houghton Library, Harvard University; MS Am 1086; Box 3.

Inferred Fuller names 'Dr Wette' and 'the Anthropology' explicitly — this is de Wette's Über Religion und Theologie [On Religion and Theology] or more likely his Vorlesungen über die Religion, ihr Wesen, ihre Erscheinungsformen und ihren Einfluss auf das Leben (1827), which was sometimes referred to in American Unitarian circles as his 'Anthropology.' Fuller records they 'got almost half through the Anthropology.'.

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Passages surviving only in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke.

1822—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p17
analyzed · read
“I was interested in De Wette's Theodor, and that learned and (on dit) profound man seemed to me so to fail, that I did not finish the book”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.

1852—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p231
read
“their chief reading being in De Wette and Herder”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.

Inferred Margaret Fuller's engagement with the biblical criticism of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette is noted, with "their chief reading being in De Wette and Herder." Given Fuller's translation of German theological works for Dr.