Grace, Talent, and Merit

This book focuses on "poor students", young men in eighteenth-century Germany who owed their studies to charity, who formed a substantial minority within the theology faculties, and who entered careers in the clergy, the academic schools, and the universities. Professor La Vopa shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience central to the lives of many celebrated intellectuals as well as many of the elite.