Benjamin Herder

Benjamin Herder was born 31 July 1818. He died 10 November 1888. Ran Verlag Herder from 1856 until 1888. He was the brother of Karl Raphael Herder and the son of Bartholomäus Herder

Benjamin took charge of the publishing department until his brother's retirement in 1856, when he undertook the sole management. Equipped with a thorough, scholarly education, trained in the book business by his father and under Gauthier de Laguionie in Paris, Benjamin had had his views further broadened early in life by travels through Germany, Austria, France, England, and Italy.

Of a character earnest and religious, he was strongly impressed by the Cologne troubles of 1837, and, as in the case of so many of his contemporaries, they gave a direction to his life, and in 1839, at the age of 21, he established a goal of helping to liberate and revive the Catholic Church in Germany. First of all he gradually abandoned fine-art publications in favour of book-publishing, being thus enabled to devote the full measure of his energies to the service of religious learning. Herein he displayed such activity in the encouragement of particular branches of erudition that the history of his theological publications, for instance, would comprise a considerable fragment of the history of modern theological literature, and the catechetical branch thereof would constitute one of the most important divisions of the history of catechetics. After theology Herder applied himself with the greatest zest to pedagogies, to the lives and learning of the saints as well as to other edifying biographies; also after a long and cautious delay to the publication of sermons. He next took up works dealing with the religious and political problems of the day, with questions of ecclesiastical policy and social controversies and issues. Finally, passing beyond the limits which previously Catholic literature had seldom ventured to transcend, he began the publication of works on the general sciences–history and philosophy, the natural sciences, geography, and ethnology, including the publication of atlases, school textbooks, music, art and its literature, the history of literature, and belles-lettres. His governing purpose throughout was to avoid wasting his energies on particular publications, but to build up the various branches gradually and systematically by the publication of more comprehensive "collections" and "libraries" and by the issue of scientific periodicals.

The Kirchenlexikon (Church Lexicon) was the great centre of his fifty years' activity as a publisher. It was the first comprehensive attempt to treat everything that had any connexion with theology encyclopedically in one work, and also the first attempt to unite all the Catholic savants of Germany, in the production of one great work. Herder had nursed this project since 1840. When its appearance was made possible and its issue was begun in 1847 under the direction of Benedict Welte, exegete of Tübingen, and Heinrich Joseph Wetzer, Orientalist of Freiburg. After sixteen years of struggling and striving on the part of Herder, all obstacles were overcome, and the work was brought to completion in 1856, thanks chiefly to the support of Hefele.

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