Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

Abstract: The history of the Enlightenment has always been a lofty affair-a tendency that will not be regretted by anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer, sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topography of eighteenth-century thought laid out neatly at his feet. But the time has come for a more down-to-earth look at the Enlightenment, because while intellectual historians have mapped out the view from the top, social historians have been burrowing deep into the substrata of eighteenth-century societies. And, as the distance between the two disciplines increases, the climates of opinion multiply and thicken and the Enlightenment occasionally disappears in clouds of vaporous generalizations. The need to locate it more precisely in a social context has produced some important new work in a genre that is coming to be called the "social history of ideas." Peter Gay, who has sponsored the term,' has attempted to satisfy the need with the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969). A half year after the appearance of Gay's book, another secondvolume work came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequel to a pioneering collection of essays on sociointellectual history produced by a group at the VIP Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. These two volume 2's make fascinating reading together, because they show two different historiographical traditions converging on the same problem. Gay descends from Cassirer, the VIP Section group from the "Annales" school and from Daniel Mornet's experiments with quantitative history. Curiously, the two traditions seem to ignore each other. In a bibliography that totals 261 pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of European history, Gay never mentions Livre et societ. He makes only a few, irreverent references to Mornet and does not seem to have assimilated much "Annales" history. The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appeared a year before Gay's first volume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer. In fact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated into French until 1966 and has not made much impression on French study of the Enlightenment since its original publication in German in 1932, a year before the appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18' siecle. So here is an opportunity to compare the methods and results of two attempts, expressing two separate historiographical currents, to solve one of the knottiest problems in early modern history: the problem of situating the Enlightenment within the actualities of eighteenth-century society.

Women, Gender and Enlightenment

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgements List of Contributors General Introduction PART I: WOMEN, MEN, ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL DISTINCTIONS AND PRESCRIPTIONS Introduction K.O'Brien Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory's Natural History of Femininity M.C.Moran Feminists versus Gallants: Sexual Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain B.Taylor "Ambiguous Beings": Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante A.Vila GENDER, RACE AND THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION Introduction J.Rendall Race, Women, and Progress in the Late Scottish Enlightenment S.Sebastiani No Woman is an Island: the Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology J.Mander Civilisation, Patriotism, and Enlightened Histories of Woman S.Tomaselli SEX AND SENSIBILITY Introduction D.Wahrman Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education V.Jones Tears and the Man P.Carter Reading Rousseau's Sexuality R.Howells GENDER AND THE REASONING MIND Introduction M.B.Peruga L'Ortografe des Dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime D.Goodman "To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise": Girls' Education in Enlightenment Britain M.Cohen Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century French Women J.Bloch WOMEN INTELLECTUALS IN THE ENLIGHTENED REPUBLIC OF LETTERS Introduction C.Hesse Women on the Verge of Science: Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy P.Findlen 'The noblest commerce of mankind': Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle E.Eger Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters C.C.Orr "Women that would plague me with rational conversation": Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790-1830 J.Rendall PART II: FEMINISM, ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION CHAMPIONING WOMEN: EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT FEMINISMS Introduction C.C.Orr Mary Astell and Enlightenment R.Perry The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-century Feminism and Modern Equality S.Stuurman "Neither Male nor Female": Rational Equality in the Early Spanish Enlightenment M.B.Peruga FEMINISM AND ENLIGHTENED RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES Introduction B.Taylor The Soul has No Sex: Feminism and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe S.Stuurman Religion, Feminism and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism P.Mack Bluestocking Fictions: Devotional Writings, Didactic Literature and the Imperative of Female Improvement N.Clarke "With Mrs Barbauld it is different": Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste D.White Mary Hays (1759-1843): An Enlightened Quest G.L.Walker WOMEN, LIBERTY AND THE NATION Introduction H.Guest Catharine Macaulay's Histories of England: A Female Perspective on the History of Liberty K.O'Brien Liberty, Equality and God: the Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay's Feminism S.Hutton Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire: Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Germaine de Stael C.Franklin WOMEN AND REVOLUTIONARY CITIZENSHIP: ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACIES? Introduction L.Hunt Women in 18th Century British Politics A.Clark Extending the "Right of Election": Men's Arguments for Women's Political Representation in Late Enlightenment Britain A.Chernock Filles Publiques or Public Women: the Actress as Citizen F.Gordon The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution S.Desan Benjamin Rush's Ferment: Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship in Revolutionary America S.Knott Women's Rights in the Era before Seneca Falls R.Zagarri CONCLUSIONS Women and Enlightenment: A Historiographical Conclusion J.Robertson Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies K.Soper Enlightenment Biographies Index

Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism

Abstract: Enlightenment's Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism

Abstract: The crowning cultural achievement of medieval India, Tantric Buddhism is known in the West primarily for the sexual practices of its adherents, who strive to transform erotic passion into spiritual ecstasy. Historians of religion have long held that the enlightenment thus attempted was for men only, and that women in the movement were at best marginal and subordinate and at worst degraded and exploited. Miranda Shaw argues to the contrary, presenting extensive new evidence of the outspoken and independent female founders of the Tantric movement and their creative role in shaping its distinctive vision of gender relations and sacred sexuality. Drawing on interviews and archival research conducted during two years of fieldwork in India and Nepal, including more than 40 works by women of the Pala period, the author reinterprets the history of Tantric Buddhism during its first four centuries. In her view, the Tantric theory of this period promotes an ideal of co-operative, mutually liberative relationships between women and men while encouraging a sense of reliance on women as a source of spiritual insight and power.