This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and
early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all
over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of
secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical religious social and
cultural backgrounds and in these contexts analyze freethinkers' organizations projects
networks and contributions to forming a secular worldview in particular the promotion of
concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this
secularist agenda the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties
freethinkers were faced with namely the tensions between a national self-image and the
transnational direction the movement has taken the regional base of many projects and their
transregional horizon freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission
and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups.
Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous
enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global
developments.
