Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin(1743–1803)Inferred

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin is documented in Fuller’s letters, books, and manuscripts (1844–1845). One work is named, most often in Letter to Sarah Hodges, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.

Engagement
ExcerptedQuotedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters · Books · Manuscripts
Documented
1844–1845
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 Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • undatedWork not namedDemonstrated

    “The ministry of man implies, that he must be filled from the divine fountains which are being engendered through all eternity..." [footnoted '* St. Martin.']”

    Woman in the Nineteenth Century · "written some thirty years ago"

    Lengthy verbatim quotation from Saint-Martin spanning a very long line range, a substantial reproduced passage.

In Fuller’s words

“You then, ministers of the Word, do you think that it has no reproach to make you. Have you never neutralized the efficacy of the Word by reducing the administration of it to figurative institutions, to discourses, and an exterior pomp”
Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit [Man: His True Nature and Ministry] · Mostly Extracts

When Fuller engaged with Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York2records
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

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

Saint-Martin in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1844—

Letter to Sarah Hodges

p228
read
“When you want a change try St Martin.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Inferred Fuller's recommendation implies familiarity with his mystical writings, though she does not name a specific work.

Fuller recommends Saint-Martin (Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1743–1803, a French mystic philosopher influenced by Jacob Böhme, per Hudspeth's notes) as a spiritual alternative to Fénelon.

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

extended passage
excerpted · quoted · read
“The ministry of man implies, that he must be filled from the divine fountains which are being engendered through all eternity, so that, at the name of his master, he may be able to cast all his enemies into the abyss; that he may deliver all parts of nature from the barriers that imprison them; that may purge the terrestrial atmosphere from the poisons that infect it; that he may preserve the bodies of men from the corrupt influences that surround, and the maladies that afflict them; still more, that he may keep their souls pure from the malignant insinuations which pollute, and the gloomy images that obscure them; that he may restore its serenity to the Word, which false words of men fill with mourning and sadness; that he may satisfy the desires of the angels, who await from him the development of the marvels of nature; that, in fine, his world may be filled with God, as eternity is.”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

Fuller quotes at length from the work she identifies in a footnote as '* St. Martin.' This is Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), the French theosophist known as 'le philosophe inconnu' (the unknown philosopher). Fuller identifies the passage as written 'by an earnest mind of a foreign land, written some thirty years ago' — consistent with a work published c. 1802

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Mostly Extracts

pp32–35
excerpted · quoted · readManuscript page
“You then, ministers of the Word, do you think that it has no reproach to make you.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Mostly Extracts." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (89); Box 5 (89).

Inferred Headed 'From St Martin.' The passage addresses Christian ministers on the Word, divine ministry, and 'second birth' — themes central to Saint-Martin's Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit (1802).