This book shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have forever changed our scientific, religious, and artistic image of natural violence. From time immemorial, thunder and lightning were seen as a wrathful Deity’s instruments of punishment. But then, in 1752, came Benjamin Franklin’s paradigm-shifting invention of the lightning rod, and the way we view God and nature was changed forever. In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, our scientific, religious, and artistic conceptions of one of nature’s most violent phenomena were transformed. Thunderstorms began to be experienced less as a threat and more as a source of fascinating delight, and God became less of an angry demiurge and more of a benevolent father. At the same time, university-trained scholars, inquiring amateurs, and sharp-witted showmen embarked on experiments with the multifarious potential of electricity in medicine and elsewhere. With the storm no longer a spectacle to be feared, poets, painters, and composers started to treat it as a subject in its own right. Never before was the beauty of thunder and lightning so frequently and fulsomely represented in Western culture as during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. "The transition from a premodern fear of nature to Romanticism’s love affair with the natural sublime has been explored from many angles. But in this absorbing and erudite book, Jan Wim Buisman reveals that lightning and electricity were central to this transformation. From the premodern practice of bell-ringing to ward off lightning, to the Enlightenment’s playful use of static electricity to generate an “electric kiss,” Buisman charts the evolution of Europeans’ relationship to one of nature’s fundamental forces. He shows how scientific advances such as the lightning rod actually made the Romantic fascination with nature possible. This electrifying book is essential reading for anyone interested in nature, religion, and intellectual history." —Peter J. Thuesen, author of Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather Introduction: Lightning after Franklin 1. A New Invention 2. The Introduction of the Lightning Rod in the Netherlands 3. Eighteenth-Century Physical Theories on Thunderstorms 4. Official Religion 5. Marginal and Marginalised Religious Reactions 6. Intermezzo: Electrical Nature? The Animated Nature of Theosophy 7. Thunderstorms and Electricity in Poetry, Music, and Painting 8. By Way of Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Illustration credits, Index of Names