Michael Printy

Michael Printy is Librarian for Western European Humanities and Head of the Humanities Group at the Yale Library, where he is responsible for collection development and research support in French, German, Italian, European history, and philosophy. He holds a PhD in history from UC Berkeley, a BA in history from Yale, and an MLIS from Simmons College. He has held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His interests include European intellectual and religious history, German history, the Enlightenment, and the history of information. 

He is the author of Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge, 2009), which explores the ways in which eighteenth-century Germans reconceived the relationship between religion, society, and the state. It argues that German confessional identities were recast in the eighteenth century, and that the Enlightenment was the agent of this transformation. He is the coeditor A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Brill, 2010), as well as more recent articles on the Protestant Enlightenment. He is currently working on a book entitled “Enlightenment’s Reformation: Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1750–1830.” This book will show how the meaning of the Reformation was recast in the public sphere during the eighteenth century, first by a set of religious thinkers intent on revitalizing Christianity to meet the challenges of the day, and subsequently by a cohort of intellectuals seeking to establish public support for Kantian philosophy. The result was a rich if unstable idea linking Protestantism and modern freedom that would dominate German intellectual culture until the First World War.

He is also a senior editor on the thematic module “Knowledge and Education” for the German History Intersections website, a translated primary source project sponsored by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. The project aims to situate Germans and Germany within larger transnational contexts, using digital media to bring together diverse historical sources.