The birthplace of Victor Frankenstein’s ‘daemon’, the small city of Ingolstadt in southeastern Germany was deliberately chosen as the starting point to the end of Victor’s life. The small Bavarian city had a strong identity as a Catholic stronghold against Protestantism, as well as the secret society known as the “Illuminees” or Illuminati. As a critic of Enlightenment thought as well as an individual who “openly scorned…Catholicism”, Ingolstadt and its university were a perfect combination for Mary Shelley to portray as the birthplace of the man-made daemon.^[1]

While Shelley never explicitly declares her belief in a titular religion, the author is described as having “stubbornly clung to a belief in God”.^[2] A witness to religious instability as well as a passive participant in British abuse of Catholicism, Shelley’s demonization of Ingolstadt’s reputation as a Catholic stronghold and eventual bulwark of intellectual reasoning comes as no surprise in context of the author’s life.^[3] While the story of Frankenstein is set outside of the United Kingdom, the novel’s context within the Shelley’s homeland is also significant: the writing and first publication of Frankenstein comes eighteen years before the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 which removed legal barriers facing Catholics within the British Isles. A member of a majority Anglican and Protestant country, Shelley’s contempt for Catholicism is discernable in the deliberate choice of Ingolstadt for the birth of a “monster to haunt mankind”.^[4]

Located in the central part of the Bavarian state of Germany, Ingolstadt was known “a bastion against Protestantism” for the centuries following the Protestant Reformation.^[5] The area, known contemporarily and historically for its counter-reformation orthodoxy, quite noticeably attracted the disdain of Mary Shelley. During Shelley’s time, however, the city was inhabited by Napoleon Bonaparte for much of her early life and until shortly after the publication of Frankenstein. While Ingolstadt’s contemporary existence is important, Shelley is heavily influenced in her novel by the city university’s ties to Catholicism. The university, which eventually moved to Landshut in 1800 and later Munich, was an amplifier for Catholic power as well as an intellectual powerhouse during its peak. 

The Bavarian university that Victor attends in Frankenstein is the same that exists within the city of Ingolstadt. Much like in Shelley’s novel, the University of Ingolstadt “possessed a medical school of stature”.^[6] It is in the medical field of anatomy that Shelley once again utilizes religious differences: there were deviations between how Protestant universities and Catholic universities engaged in scientific endeavors concerning anatomy.^[7] This is best conveyed by Shelley utilizing Gothic literature’s canon of Catholicism and “its links to the bleeding [and/] or mutilated body…”^[8]As Victor mutilates dead bodies in order to create his creature, Shelley is providing an allusion to earlier depictions of Catholicism and the inherent evilness she sees in it. For Shelley, “Catholicism was the very source of subjugation…” that Victor tries to build upon in her novel by creating a new life in the creature.^[9]

Those at the University of Ingolstadt such as Adam Landau describe medicine as “been given by God to our just parents,”.^[10] The Catholic belief in miracles is also prevalent in both contemporary Catholic medicine as well as Frankenstein. Shelley’s act of integrating a miracle between the creator and the created ‘daemon’ in her novel can be seen as a mocking parallel. The creature’s body becomes a site of rebuff of religion. When Victor creates a the ‘daemon’ through the mutilated body, the Geneva native acts as God.^[11]

While Shelley utilized Ingolstadt’s reputation as Catholic stronghold to critique the religion she felt distaste for, the English woman also utilized the city’s more contemporary reputation as the home of the reason-based society known as the “Illuminees” or the Illuminati. As Professor Stephen Kern from Northern Illinois University states, “The novel dramatizes the clash between eighteenth-century enlightenment [reasoning] and nineteenth-century romanticism”.^[12]The clash described by Kern is best depicted by the formation of the secret society created by University of Ingolstadt professor Johann Adam Weishaupt in 1796.^[13] While Ingolstadt’s secret society did little other than attract dissenters and future conspiracy theorists, the very existence of the Illuminees was to create a reason-based society.^[14]  The secret society that developed in the university was aligned to the French Jacobins.^[15]

Although the daughter of radical English thinker who depended heavily upon Enlightenment thinkers and human reason, Shelley targets “the enlightenment idolatry of reason…by attacking the idea that man was a predictable and rationally controllable machine”.^[16] Between the pure reason utilized by her father, William Godwin, as well as the contemporary political happenings early in Shelley’s life, the author utilized the German city’s connection to pure reason and uncontrollable revolution to echo (French) Conservative critiques.^[17]

It is due to pure human reasoning and free will that allows for Victor’s creature to be unleashed on humanity. While also a critique of Catholicism in the depiction of the creation and the creator, the journey to the monster’s creation owes itself to pure reason and will. As Yale’s Jeremy Kessler writes, “The more powerful applied reason became, the more creative…Dr. Frankenstein marks the moment when the work of reason threatened itself with success”.^[18] While Frankenstein was debating on how he should create the creature, the Genevan’s pure absolutist pursuit of reason destroyed him and nearly society. 

---

^[1] Schiefelbein ,Michael. “”The Lessons of True Religion”: Mary Shelley’s Tribute to Catholicism in “Valperga”.” Religion & Literature, vol 30, no. 2 (1998): 59.

^[2] Schiefelbein, Michael  “The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival”. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Pres): 2001, 74.

^[3] “Roman Catholic.” Romantic Circles. Romantic Circles. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://romantic-circles.org/editions/frankenstein/V1notes/catholic.html?width=400&height=300. 

^[4] Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus: The Original 1818 Text. Edited by Kathleen Dorothy Scherf and David Lorne Macdonald. 3rd ed. Broadview Press, 2012. 

^[5] Helm, Jürgen. “Protestant and Catholic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century? The Case of Ingolstadt Anatomy.” Medical History 45, no. 1 (2001): 83-96. doi:10.1017/S0025727300067405.

^[6]  Curran, Stuart, ed. “‘Societies – Illuminati’ .” Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. UPenn. Accessed November 22, 2021. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Contexts/illumin.html. 

^[7] Helm, Jürgen. “Protestant and Catholic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century? The Case of Ingolstadt Anatomy.” Medical History 45, no. 1 (2001): 83-96. doi:10.1017/S0025727300067405.

^[8] Greenway “Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. By Marie Mulvey-Roberts”

^[9] The Lessons of True Religion: Mary Shelley’s tribute to Catholicism in Valperga Schiefelbein

^[10] Helm, Jürgen. “Protestant and Catholic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century? The Case of Ingolstadt Anatomy.” Medical History 45, no. 1 (2001): 83-96. doi:10.1017/S0025727300067405.

^[11] Peters, Ted. “Playing God with Frankenstein, Theology and Science”. Vol 16, no. 2, 2018, 145-150, 

^[12] Kern, Stephen. “Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Origins. Ohio State University , March 2018. https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/march-2018-mary-shelleys-frankenstein. 

^[13] Hernandez, Isabel. “Meet the Man Who Started the Illuminati.” History. National Geographic, May 3, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/profile-adam-weishaupt-illuminati-secret-society. 

^[14] Vickory, Matthew. “The Birthplace of the Illuminati.” BBC Travel. BBC, November 28, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20171127-the-birthplace-of-the-illuminati. 

^[15] Michael Taylor. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 3 (2014): 293–312. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24690289.

^[16] Kern, Stephen. “Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” Origins. Ohio State University , March 2018. https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/march-2018-mary-shelleys-frankenstein. 

^[17] Sterrenburg, Lee.”Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein”. In The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Berkley, Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1979), 143-171.

^[18] Kessler, Jeremy. “Creating Frankenstein.” The New Atlantis, September 26, 2020. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/creating-frankenstein.