Sacred Translations: Humanism, Philology and Germany’s Religious Enlightenment is the title of the dissertation of Townsend Fellow Jonathan Sheehan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Sheehan argues that the sudden appearance of new German Biblical translations at the beginning of the eighteenth century were precipitated by new techniques of manuscript philology and new Pietist critiques of religious orthodoxy; but that ostensibly secular humanist textual critics transformed their theological antecedents and in the process transformed philology and the nature of historical evidence. Finally, the new controversial Bible translations helped to define late eighteenth-century German linguistic, cultural and political identity.