Representing the Unexpected, the Fleeting and the Formless

The weather in the architecture: Soane, Turner and the ‘Big Smoke’

Reviewed by: Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 by Alexander Lock Christopher Strangeman Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810. By Alexander Lock. [Studies in Modern British Religious History, Volume 34.] (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. 2016. Pp. x, 270. £60.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-132-0.) Alexander Lock's Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment is a study of one particular English Catholic—Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745–1810)—and how he can be seen as an example of the intersections of the Enlightenment and English Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lock, the Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library, makes interesting contributions in this work to two important areas of recent historiography—the construction and manifestation of English Catholicism at a time during which the penal laws were still in place and of a distinct English national identity. It is an attractive book with a wonderful bibliography. In some ways, it serves as a complementary study to Gabriel Glickman's The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (2009); while Glickman covered the period of the perceived Jacobite threat, Lock focuses on the later eighteenth century when English Catholics were slowly making inroads into elite social and political circles. The book is divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1 and 2) deals with Gascoigne's years abroad, through which he received a liberal education and took Grand Tours during which he met with different European heads of state. This is the most interesting and powerful section of the book, and Lock places his argument—about how the Enlightenment influenced English Catholic thought and behavior—within the work of earlier scholars, such as J. C. H. Aveling, Joseph Chinnici, and the aforementioned Glickman. However, while Lock [End Page 357] makes sure to explain what he means by liberal, he does not fully explain what he means by Enlightenment; it seems as though he equates the two—liberal and Enlightenment—which is problematic considering the demonstrated diversities of the Enlightenment. Lock also argues that Gascoigne's experiences with fellow English travelers on the Grand Tour highlight how equating an English identity with anti-Catholicism can be very misleading. This is good stuff and is an important contribution to English national identity studies, simultaneously being framed within and challenging earlier studies by scholars such as J. C. D. Clark, Linda Colley, and Colin Haydon. In the book's second section (chapter 3), Lock moves on to explaining how Gascoigne settled in England and abjured his faith publicly in order to gain a seat as an MP. According to Lock, this was the deal that Gascoigne was willing to make—becoming Anglican to make other things possible, though remaining at heart and in sympathies Catholic. This is a convincing portrait of Gascoigne. But, it begs the question: how representative was Gascoigne as an English Catholic? Locke's answer to this question is not fully convincing as he argues throughout that Gascoigne was an exceptional figure, given his upbringing and foreign education and his subsequent political, economic, and social position, but then contending that any answer to "typicality" is elusive. Nevertheless, scholars with an interest in how well biographies—or "life histories"—can serve to deepen a broader historical narrative will find Lock's argument in his introduction thought-provoking. In the last section (chapters 4 and 5), Lock provides an analysis of Gascoigne as a successful manager of his estate, whose ideas regarding estate management were shaped by the liberal education that he had received. This section should prove of interest to economic historians as Lock presents Gascoigne in contrast to the leading view of Anglican gentry who left direct management of their estates to others; in contrast, Gascoigne was forced to be different because of penal law obstacles and restrictions. Ultimately, Lock's work is a welcome addition to studies on English Catholic history and English national identity. The book's great strength is in depicting how the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was an important time...

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

Primarily a work of interdisciplinary history, Andrew S. Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment takes readers through a mosaic of ideas and epistemologies about the perceived qualities, potential, and taxonomic place of black Africans throughout the course of the eighteenth century. Amorphous to the point of chaos, European conceptualizations of nonwhite individuals recruited a staggering array of data from fields as diverse as anatomy, natural history, theology, politics, economics, literature, and art. Although Curran openly admits that “tracking a specific genealogy within Africanist thought is a daunting task” (7), he crystallizes his narrative around the consideration of anatomy, which, he argues, penetrated into nearly every realm of Africanist imagination throughout the eighteenth century. At the center of the resultant “protean construct” (15) emerges the “textualized African” (ibid.), a profoundly complicated unit of European ethnography dependent not only on anatomical representations of Africans themselves, but also on the re-presentations of Africanist discourses during the Enlightenment era.Curran's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw from a wide variety of genres and sources, focusing predominantly on printed material. Of paramount importance is a cluster of influential texts originating in the “high culture” of the Francophone scientific world: Buffon's Histoire naturelle, the corporate effort of the Encyclopédie, Dapper's Description de l'Afrique, academic prize essays, and the writings of the Société des amis des noirs among others. Alongside these fairly well-known sources emerge a host of now little-known, yet contemporaneously momentous, anatomical treatises: Le Cat's Traité de la couleur de la peau humaine (1765) is one such example, as is Meckel's “Recherches anatomiques, sur la nature de l'épiderme, et du réseau, qu'on appellee Malpighien” (1755). Curran draws extensively from travel writing, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and epitomes throughout the work both for support of his particular arguments as well as for general contextual purposes. Visual evidence in the form of ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic engravings enters into his discussion at times, although these elements tend to be ambient and illustrative rather than adopted as discrete elements of an art-historical approach. This reader found Curran's research to be neither encyclopedic nor myopic, but rather a quite judiciously balanced selection from a seemingly endless well of potential sources.In analyzing this broad base of historical material, Curran adopts a sophisticated framework drawing not only from critical race theory—Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness comes to mind—but also from material history and the history of science. Uncommon for works dealing with the history of race, the overarching methodology of the work can best be described as a “readers' history” approach, seeking to “[replicate] the reading practices of an imagined eighteenth-century reader” (18) by starting “where most Enlightenment-era people presumably did: with travelers' accounts and compilations” (ibid.). Subsequent chapters deviate slightly from a strictly reader-based history, as for instance in chapter 3's engaging discussion of the theatrical showing of the 1744 albino. Yet the work's overall focus is very much on the French reading public of the eighteenth century.That said, the first of Curran's many conclusions is perhaps the most obvious: Africanist discourse during the eighteenth century was far from static, and indeed seems to undermine any notion of a cogent, centralized Enlightenment perspective on race (27). More ambitiously, however, Curran draws a broader contrast between the racial thought of the pre-Enlightenment era, when “the concept of blackness came into relief against a synthesis of biblical exegeses and vague physical explanations dating from antiquity” (223) and that of Enlightenment broadly considered. Throughout the eighteenth century, Curran argues, the concept of blackness had been “dissected, handled, measured, weighed, and used as a demonstrable wedge between human categories…. Blackness had become a thing, defined less by its inverse relationship to light than by its supposed materiality” (223–24). In this observation lies one of the book's central theses, namely that anatomical materiality increasingly became the fulcrum by which moral, intellectual, or political statements about black Africans were mobilized. Anatomy ultimately usurped other spheres of Africanist discourses as the perspective on race and its concomitant issues. Although distinctly reminiscent of Voegelin's 1933 work on the internalization of blackness in the eighteenth century, Curran's investigation reaches similar conclusions from quite different starting points. Broadly stated, his analysis centers on four themes emergent from the work's constituent chapters: textuality, sameness, difference, and natural history.Chapter 1, “Paper Trails: Writing the African, 1450–1750,” traces accounts of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans from the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries, demonstrating persuasively Curran's initial premise that these largely travel- or pseudo-travel-based narratives “continued to play a critical role in the overall understanding of Africa during the eighteenth century” (31). Curran addresses a large number of texts with varying degrees of depth. Ca' da Mosto, Leo Africanus, Duarte Lopes, Edward Tyson, Olfert Dapper, Jacques Savary, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Cavazzi, Abbé Prévost, and ultimately Rousseau enter into his argument throughout the course of the chapter. Although his primary goal is to establish the textual backdrop against which later racial theories emerged, Curran ensconces within his narrative many of the key ideas that emerge later in his work. Most important among these is the recurrent tension between the Plinian legacy of Africa as the source of perpetual strangeness contrasted with the “desire for a more rational view of Africa” (43) evinced by a large number of early-modern authors.Chapter 2, “Sameness and Science, 1730–1750,” largely focuses on and contextualizes Buffon's account of black Africans in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle. A central paradox that Curran identifies is the fact that as notions of the black African diversified and became more complex (such as in the consideration of caffres, albinos, and blafards,) Buffon approaches a more fundamental sameness between humanity worldwide. Of great importance in this regard is Buffon's espousal of monogenesis, the theory of human origins that posits a single shared ancestor among what we would now term “racial groups.” Of equal importance is the fact that Buffon's text implicitly “[conjures] up a particular group of sensible and sensitive people” (116), an “ideal audience” constituted by an “enlightened readership able to recognize the pitfalls of ethnographic knowledge production and transmission” (ibid.) Such a readership, Curran implies, did not exist in earlier periods. One important corollary of this “sensitive” readership was the introduction of decidedly moral valences to the question of race: the concept of blackness, more than in earlier periods, came to include the “three overlapping realms” (118) of “the moral, the intellectual, and the physical” (ibid.)Chapter 3, “The Problem of Difference: Philosophes and the Processing of African ‘Ethnography,’ 1750-1775,” traces the unforeseen and brutal consequences of Buffon's “degeneration-based ethnography” (116) by shifting the analysis to the “increasingly authoritative and naturalized understanding of the nègre” (118) as essentially inferior to its white counterpart. Whereas diversity engendered a concept of perceived sameness in Buffon, writers such as Voltaire and Formey interpreted diversity as evidence of just that: fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the white and black races. Such destructive perspectives generally drew upon polygenicist ideologies, which ascribe different ancestors to different racial groups. Curran introduces a series of sensitive observations, but one that particularly stands out is that by the end of the 1770s there seems to have evolved a distinct understanding of blackness as a material phenomenon, the interpretation of which projected a definite moral stance in the viewer. On the one hand, this opened up (and, at least in part, emerged from) the “zoological” perspective of proslavery politics; however, the newly moralized perspective on race also allowed for better and more concrete articulations of antislavery positions.Chapter 4, “The Natural History of Slavery, 1770–1802,” coalesces Curran's interpretations of racial thought around the most poignant of issues during the era: that of black chattel slavery. As throughout the work, Curran notes that racial theorists “rarely operated in lockstep with proslavery discourse” (169), thus—with varying degrees of forthrightness—arguing against the common scholarly tradition of analyzing natural history simply as a “subplot within the larger and all-powerful history of slavery” (168). Rather, Curran demonstrates that natural history was wielded by different authors to much different moral ends. Blumbenbach's comparative study of human anatomy, for instance, “served,” in the hands of antislavery thinkers, “to refute the possibility of essential differences between human groups” (173); the very same work equipped pro-slavery thinkers with “the notion that the physical features of the African and other races were measurable [and] constituted the basis for real categories” (ibid.) However authors decided to utilize natural history in their discussions on slavery, the primacy of natural history as an interpretative lens through which to position oneself seems to have become solidified by the early nineteenth century. Curran concludes by meditating on Enlightenment thinkers' “general blindness to the biopolitics of representation” (221), arguing that the “distressing paradox” of Enlightenment slavery was not “the inevitable outcome of an intentional European hegemony per se” (220), but rather that it emerged from the complicated relationship between disciplinary compartmentalization and the rising importance of natural history.Evaluated from the standpoint of the critical philosophy of race, The Anatomy of Blackness serves as a valuable sourcebook for a period of racial thought that remains obscure and woefully understudied. Readers inclined toward system building and broad generalizations will find themselves challenged with the disparity of ideas in contemporaneous eighteenth-century thinkers: the fact of the matter is that eighteenth-century perspectives on race were hugely variegated, not just in their methodology and structure, but also in their moral and political aims. Curran's approach, while “far from morally neutral” (223), carefully traces the contours of eighteenth-century racial thought, especially the rising ascendancy of anatomy and natural history. At times this gives the work a certain feeling of hesitancy toward analyzing the overt power structures incumbent on the objectification and materialization of the black body; but that might also be Curran's point. The black African of Curran's work is profoundly textual, representational, and, in a sense, hypothetical to begin with. The enactment of these racial theories on the ground would be a different and much more jarring story. This reader would recommend Curran's work as a challenging and rich starting point for scholars seeking to understand the complex intersections of imagination, science, and politics in the fabrication of racial thought during the eighteenth century.

Preface Julie Park Click for larger view Figure 1 The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772. © Jonathan Lamb. All rights reserved. [End Page vi] Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Our men are the stoutest and the best, because strip them naked from the waist upwards, and give them no weapons at all but their Hands and Heels, and turn them into a room, or stage, and lock them in with the like number of other men of any nation, man for man, and they shall beat the best men you shall find in the world. —Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman In an article that appeared previously in this journal, Maximilian Novak addressed the question, "Why didn't the eighteenth century produce a War and Peace?" To answer the question is to account for why the "age of Johnson" or "the age of Enlightenment" was unable to produce a "serious and balanced depiction of the conditions [End Page vii] of war and peace in fiction."1 Novak arrives at his answers through a survey of eighteenth-century novels, from Defoe and Fielding to Smollett, as well as essays by Johnson, and poetry by Dryden and Dennis that treat war. If eighteenth-century authors embraced the challenges of verisimilitude in scenes of domestic life, or of producing universal moral truths, they could not meet the same mimetic challenges in direct confrontations with war, and with peace as a necessary adjunct of war. All attempts to do so would either be imbalanced—Defoe was "excellent on war ... but poor on peace"—or disarmed by the ironic and grotesque effects that David McNeil has delineated in the novels of Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne.2 Such aesthetic resistance perhaps resulted from the spatial locations of war throughout eighteenth-century Britain, which Novak offers as a second hypothesis in answering his original question. With the exceptions of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, most British military activity took place elsewhere, outside Britain, "abroad—in America and India, on the Continent, and at sea."3 Moreover, eighteenth-century warfare was marked by its style of containment and regulation—its "limited warfare"—effected by the establishment of a standing army. Wars were won or lost more through tactics and strategy than through battle and combat.4 Eighteenth-century writers of fiction, then, averted their eyes from war, or transfigured it through the framework of irony, because the face of war was itself displaced, geographically and commercially. Either war took place elsewhere, or resurfaced domestically as the imported commodities that issued from, and in turn supported Britain's naval supremacy and success in colonial warfare.5 Thus a paradoxical yet all too convenient equation characterized the passages of war in eighteenth-century Britain: at the same time the technologies of war became sleeker and more effective, the conditions of war moved further away from the spaces of daily life and into the vague reaches of distant lands. The inhabitants of eighteenth-century Britain did not have to confront the living faces of violence and suffering on their own ground, if they chose not to do so.6 Some eighteenth-century artifacts, if not novels, succeed in embodying the charismatic and willfully deceiving (as well as self-deceiving) fabric of war on domestic ground. The "ancient" fortress of Wimpole [End Page viii] Hall, Cambridgeshire, for instance, designed by Sanderson Miller in 1751 and built in 1772, appears, as most follies do, to reflect a romanticizing eighteenth-century view of Gothic ruins, and the acquisitive desire to reconstruct them (see figure 1). However, the very framing of the "ancient" fortalice as a "folly" or "fake" also works to reinforce the dual meanings of "fabric" as both "an edifice" and "a contrivance." On the one hand, the medieval fortalice resurfaces in eighteenth-century domestic architecture as a...

History followed the developmental logic of Kant's vision, he argued that his present 'age of enlightenment' would lead to 'an enlightened age', and Romanticism as the next period would realize rather than rejection. The technology of Enlightenment is writing; the tools are the forms that writing assumed in the eighteenth century; the procedures are the characteristic ways those forms mixed. Throughout the eighteenth century, writers maintained a Baconian caution regarding the use of system. The historicizing of Romanticism thus has been, and is, part of the process of historicizing literature, and thus a way of providing a touchstone for all of the volumes of the New Cambridge History. The period played a substantial role in drawing the other lines that have made Romanticism into a recognizable whole: generations, gender and genre. The purpose of embedding system into other forms was to allow its principles to travel into new areas of inquiry.

I. Introduction: Catholic Enlightenment and Popular Catholicism One of greatest paradoxes of modern Catholic history is that a seemingly moribund Old Regime Church gave way to a broad-based popular Catholic revival in nineteenth century. How can this reinvigoration be accounted for? Miracles, of course, are always a possibility, but historians are required to look for more prosaic explanations. The Catholic revival has received a fair share of scholarly attention. As a multi-faceted phenomenon, scholars have focused on questions ranging from diocesan organization and clerical training, to in-depth studies on religious experience of common people. For all this interest in nineteenth-century Catholicism at local and popular level, however, it remains to be explained how Old Regime Church could accommodate its traditional distrust-when not outright repression-of popular religious practices, enabling popular Catholicism in fact to become one of key aspects of Church's political and social power. For all emphasis on nineteenth-century developments, then, it remains to be shown how Roman Catholicism in eighteenth century underwent a fundamental revision in its approach to popular religion. While it is certain that social, economic, and institutional factors had an important role in shaping of popular Catholicism, can it also be said that there were intellectual roots as well? The remainder of this article addresses this question by describing intellectual context of eighteenth-century revolution in Catholic moral theology that enabled institutional Church to align itself with practices of popular Catholicism. This essay also hopes to demonstrate that intellectual components of popular Catholicism must be understood on their own terms, and not merely reduced to social or political factors. I propose to demonstrate that new moral system outlined below overcame certain intellectual barriers that would otherwise have stood in way of Church's enthusiastic embrace of popular religious practices and attitudes.1 The central question of this essay, therefore, is how aristocratic-minded Church of Counter-Reformation adapted to social transformations of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to become, in words of Louis Châtellier, the religion of poor.2 Rather than seeing this new identity as a late reaction to changes of revolutionary era, I will suggest how its roots extend back into early eighteenth century, specifically to disputes over laxism, probabilism, and rigorism. Social historians like Châtellier have shown how, around eighteenth century, missionaries in Europe shifted their efforts away from trying to force peasants to completely abandon their so-called superstitious beliefs. Instead, missionaries embraced what they now accepted as genuine piety, and sought instead only to strengthen connections between popular piety and institutional Catholic Church. In my view, this shift in pastoral practice should be seen in concert with revolution in moral theology that-while not abandoning concept of original sin-downplayed strongly negative Augustinian condemnation of human nature and embraced a generally more optimistic view of human moral capability. The figure of Neapolitan moral theologian and founder of popular Redemptorist Congregation Alphonsus Maria di Liguori (1696-1787) stands at center of this transformation. Liguori not only authored one of most widely circulated tracts on Marian devotion-the queen of superstition to Enlightenment Christians and rational skeptics alike-the Glories of Mary. He also succeeded in elaborating a system of moral theology which postulated that in cases of doubt about existence of a moral law, human liberty was anterior to law.3 More clearly than others, Liguori overcame negative Augustinian view of human nature that had led Jansenists to follow their rigorist tendencies in moral theology. …

The Eighteenth Century in Indian History Robert Travers Seema Alavi , ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). Pp. 261. Rs 495. Indrani Chatterjee , ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Pp. 302. $60.00. Rajat Datta , Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Pp. 376. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones , ed., A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). Pp. xi, 412. Rs 695. P. J. Marshall , ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Pp. vi, 456. Rs 650. Prasannan Parthasarathi , The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pp. xii, 165, $70.00 (hardback). $56.00 (E-book). Norbert Peabody , Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp. xiii, 190, $60.00. Muzaffar Alam , The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Pp. 200. $25.00 (paperback). In a famous review essay first published in 1940, the Dutch scholar J. C. van Leur challenged the relevance of the eighteenth century in Asian history. The eighteenth century, he wrote, was a "category for the periodization of time borrowed from western European and North American history," which evoked "the world of baroque and old fashioned classicism," on the one hand, and the "new bourgeois civilization," on the other. Reacting against a tendency by Dutch historians to portray eighteenth-century Indonesia through the records of the Dutch East India Company as a distant outpost of the European "age of enlightenment," van Leur urged that Asian history in the eighteenth century was still autonomous and vital. "That century did not know any superior Occident, nor any self-isolating Orient no longer progressing with it," he wrote. "It knew a mighty East, a rich [End Page 492] fabric of a strong, broad weave with a more fragile Western warp thread inserted into it at broad intervals" (van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society [Dortrect, 1983], 269, 289). J. C. van Leur may have been surprised by the resilience of the eighteenth century as a category in Indian (more often now styled South Asian) history. In truth, van Leur's strong aversion to the idea of an eighteenth century in Asia, which grew mainly out of his expertise in Indonesian history, always seemed odd from a South Asian perspective. The eighteenth century has long appeared as an obvious historical turning point in India, marked by the dramatic collapse of the Mughal empire at its start, and the equally dramatic expansion of the British empire at its end. Thus, van Leur's assertion that in eighteenth-century India "the establishment of local, even regional power by France and England did not disturb the power of the Mogol Empire more than fleetingly" was somewhat quixotic (van Leur, 273). Nonetheless, recent writing on eighteenth-century India has often gone with the grain of van Leur's determination to attend to the autonomous dynamics of Asian history, questioning the view that European expansion was necessarily the decisive motor of historical change. Even though the power of the Mughal emperors declined, new regional powers emerged, powers that could be fitted into van Leur's sense of the "rich fabric" of Asian history. If van Leur's notion of an "unbroken history in the state of Asian civilization" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century now seems excessively monolithic and static, his conception of early modern Asian history as something more than the history of European expansion was ahead of its time. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, revisionist work about the eighteenth century formed one of the poles around which South Asian history revolved. This work was dominated by social and economic history, strongly inflected by Marxist and "Annaliste" perspectives, which sought to uncover the deep structural transformations of Indian society from the dead weight of the political history of empires. Writers on the eighteenth century tended to focus on processes of regional state...

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

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ASECS at 50:Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand Adam Schoene (bio) and Pierre Saint-Amand Pierre Saint-Amand is Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. He received a B.A. from the Université de Montréal, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in French from Johns Hopkins University. After completing his Ph.D., he spent a year at Yale, several at Stanford University, and the next three decades at Brown University, where he was Francis Wayland Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Studies, before returning to Yale in 2016. He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Iowa, and on the faculty of the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. Saint-Amand has research interests in the literature of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. He is author of Diderot: Le Labyrinthe de la relation (1984); Séduire ou la passion des Lumières (1987) (The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 1994); Les lois de l'hostilité: La politique à l'âge des Lumières (1992) (The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment, 1996); and Paresse des Lumières (2014) (The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, 2011). He has edited two eighteenth-century erotic novels, Thérèse philosophe (2000) and Confession d'une jeune fille (2005). Saint-Amand's work has appeared widely in journals such as Critique, Diderot Studies, Dix-huitième siècle, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Studies, L'Esprit Créateur, MLN, Modern Language Studies, Romanic Review, Stanford French Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, and Yale French Studies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Year, [End Page 563] and was inducted Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the government of France. He has served on the editorial board of Stanford French Review and on committees of the Modern Language Association and ASECS. Adam Schoene: You began your academic pathway as a youth in Haiti, journeyed to Canada to study at the Université de Montréal, then moved to the United States for graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. What were some of the formative moments for you in this international scholarly trajectory, and how did these experiences lead you to eighteenth-century studies? Pierre Saint-Amand: This international trajectory you just recalled confirmed my interest in the study of the eighteenth century. It was in Montreal that I was first exposed to the period via professors who later became my mentors (I think especially of Christie McDonald). When I started studying literature there, I was first interested in the modern period. But I quickly settled in the eighteenth century with a strong desire to become a true specialist. I immersed myself thoroughly in the books of the period, reading largely across genres and domains, literary and philosophical texts. I am grateful for the education I received in Montreal. It was an exciting milieu that prepared me well for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins. I studied in all the periods: early and modern, and benefited from the teaching of a charismatic and contagious philosopher, Pierre Granel, an ebullient specialist of Greek tragedy and of Sophocles, more specifically. The transition to the United States was therefore easy, because I did not really change academic culture; the passage to Hopkins only prolonged and developed what I had started to learn in Canada. I also owe a lot to my professors at Johns Hopkins: René Girard, Michel Serres, Louis Marin. Their seminars became a means to buttress my knowledge of theory. In many ways, the teaching at Hopkins cleared the passage between theory and literature for me, allowing greater focus in what I thought was an original way to approach the Enlightenment, at the time. After being dominated by deconstruction, Hopkins was changing and gesturing toward different models of French theory, I would say alternative paradigms. They included a dissident form of...

The European Enlightenment differed from country to country and was often shaped by local conditions and grievances. In France, the French Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. The French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was a great intellectual movement started by advanced bourgeois thinkers in France before the revolution to inspire people to free their minds from the confinement of religious theology and feudal dictatorship. Politically, most of these philosophes concerned with two issues: how to understand and improve government and how to create a society based on reason, logic and merit. The objects of criticism ranged from the established church, judicial practice, freedom of speech, art, literature and manners in general, the role of the King, and economic reform. The French Enlightenment achieved a complete negation of the feudal autocracy and fundamentally denied the existence of theocracy, monarchy and privilege. The French Enlightenment thinkers used their pens as weapons to expose the hypocrisy of religious theology, unveil the mysteries of tyranny, and accuse the evils of social inequality. The French Enlightenment also promoted the modernization of Christianity. As a result of religious tolerance, non-believers were no longer discriminated and persecuted, and people of pagan faiths in various countries began to enjoy universal human rights. The principle of disestablishment was finally established as a constitutional principle. Although it pit modern society against religious faith, which brought negative influence, the French Enlightenment had the significance as a milestone. It broke up religious regulation and feudal tyranny, reconstructed the ontological order and the legitimacy of the social and political orders, and formulated a cultural and political program of modernity.

Reviewed by: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron Elizabeth Kraft Sarah Eron. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. xiii + 250. $85. Ms. Eron challenges conventional wisdom regarding eighteenth-century enthusiasm, linking it to a new kind of inspiration created by Augustan writers in response to modernity: a "practice" characterized by secularization and self-authorization rather than "a historical event," she defines enthusiasm broadly as an "ethos." Concentrating on the literary trope of invoking the muses, Ms. Eron finds in the works of Shaftesbury, Pope, Fielding, and Barbauld evidence of "worlding" the texts by rhetorically locating them within the public sphere. These writers employed invocation in order to "appeal to the social other" in the creation of communities of judgment and social exchange. Enthusiasm, as Ms. Eron acknowledges, was the source of much anxiety for eighteenth-century cultural commentators, but she finds that such anxiety produced reformation rather than rejection: "What had hitherto been seen as a religious and metaphysical phenomenon was in the early eighteenth century appropriated by poets and novelists as a means of figuring poetic inspiration." Augustan writers treated enthusiasm as an aesthetic rather than a theological concern and thereby tempered, governed, and transformed disruptive energies in the creation of a vital public sphere. Ms. Eron pursues her argument in five chapters devoted to three Augustan writers (Shaftesbury, Pope, and Fielding) and one late-eighteenth-century / Romantic writer (Barbauld). The heart of Ms. Eron's study, and the strength of her work, resides in her fine readings of Shaftesbury and Pope. The three chapters devoted to these writers (one to Shaftesbury and two, appropriately, to Pope) firmly establish the process and point of the "worlding" of literary discourse. Shaftesbury's treatment of enthusiasm and sympathetic identification in The Moralists and A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm speaks to the general template of Augustan inspiration in that it highlights the "conversational aspects of the public sphere" in its reformulation of the classical invocation to the muse. While the works take opposing stances toward the addressing of the other (The Moralists featuring an interlocutor who tempers enthusiasm with judgment and A Letter relegating that role to the audience of the author's imagination), the emphasis in both is on the "social nature of inspiration" and the "redefinition of enthusiasm" as an aesthetic experience followed (and tempered) by judicious critical mediation. For Shaftesbury, this two-part process is the antidote to blind enthusiasm (which he associates with idolatry); the public sphere of dialogic examination thus becomes the site of "unveiling" in Shaftesbury's terms, or "worlding," to employ Ms. Eron's term. In Ms. Eron's discussion of Shaftesbury (which is also germane to Pope and Fielding) she emphasizes his notion that "[s]atire, or humor, . . . [is] a cure for enthusiastic [End Page 80] disorders." Shaftesbury's address to Lord Somers (his human muse) in A Letter asserts the force and power of imagination and creation while at the same time exhibiting awareness of audience and exchange. In the Letter itself, Shaftesbury imitates "the very thing . . . [he] satirically critiques." In this manner, the way of later Augustan writers, as well, Shaftesbury encourages skepticism, self-awareness, and judgment in his reader as well as himself, forming community by creating his own muse in "the best kind of critical audience." Ms. Eron's treatment of Pope's use of invocation spans two chapters, the first devoted to the muse of The Rape of the Lock and the second primarily to Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and The Dunciad. For her, the Rape is a satire on enthusiasm, which, especially in its mock-epic substitution of sylphs for gods, reveals that in the modern world "[d]ivine inspiration no longer serves." It is the poet himself who has the power to move through his "rhetoric and agency." He depends on the reader's ability to judge and critique—unlike Belinda whose enthusiastic excesses and solipsistic desires stand in satiric support of the need for a sociability based on "meaningful language and critical responsiveness." The muses of Essay on Criticism (Walsh), Essay on Man (Bolingbroke), and The Dunciad (Swift) are invoked by Ms. Eron to further her...

ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN WORLD The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, were a time of great intellectual ferment in Western Europe. Philosophers challenged ideas based on tradition and faith, and they urged their colleagues to show skepticism about long-term religious dogma and the concept of absolute monarchy. Its early practitioners included the philosophers Baruch Spinoza and John Locke in the late seventeenth century, followed by Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment was accompanied by a Scientific Revolution, including a physicist, Isaac Newton, a geologist, James Hutton, and a mathematician, Leonhard Euler. Eventually, the Age of Enlightenment spread to the American colonies, led by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were scientists as well as political leaders. The American Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are direct products of the Age of Enlightenment as Americans sought to establish an ideal democracy in the New World. For Immanuel Kant, in an essay in 1784, enlightenment marked the liberation of human consciousness from a state of ignorance to a state of reason. These views swept across Europe, and, among other results, led to a scientific treatment of disease. As described elsewhere ( Population Explosion and Increased Earthquake Risk to Megacities ), Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution were accompanied by an improvement of medical care and health, which itself led to people living longer and to an increase in population that continues today. THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE At 9:30 a.m. on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the views of Enlightenment philosophers were subjected to a major crisis. As described by Fonseca (2004), Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, a maritime superpower with colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America, was destroyed in a few minutes by a massive earthquake (Figure 13.1). The earthquake was felt in many parts of Western Europe and North Africa (Figure 13.2). Western society was shocked that one of the most beautiful and prosperous cities in Europe could suffer such a fate. About 40,000 people, one-fifth of Lisbon's population, lost their lives, and another 10,000 died in Morocco to the south. A subsequent report gave the losses in Lisbon as nearly 100,000.

ENLIGHTENMENT, ROMANTICISM, MODERNISM Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment. By Matthew Riley. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. [ix, 188 p. ISBN 0-7546-3267-9. $94.95.] Index, bibliography, music examples. The phenomenon of listening during the eighteenth century could be of considerable interest to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in part because we see audiences in decline in our time, and we may actually be able to learn something from the Enlightenment. We need not necessarily link our interest in this topic to the present, since the eighteenth century in its own right generates sufficient interest. During that century the relationship between composers and listeners changed significantly, in part because of changing cultural and social conditions, and by the end of the century audiences emerged that bore a resemblance to those of today. As various types of public concerts became more common, audiences needed to be engaged by the music written for them for their interest to be sustained, and composers responded to this, not by pandering to the taste of the lowest common denominator, but by writing music that could both engage the intellect through a process of intelligibility and also appeal to the senses with richness of tone, melody, harmony and tonality, in short with beauty that could ravish the listener. For both composers and listeners the eighteenth century proved to be an exciting time to be alive. There are various ways in which one could get at this subject, and much fine scholarship exists to show the variety. This includes examination of the audience itself, especially the concert organizations to be found in different countries, looking not only at the management and programs but also the social makeup of the audience. Another way is to explore the relationships that composers had with the public, from people who purchased music and performed solo works or chamber music, to the large audiences and the relationships composers had with them through attending concerts, management, and individual concert-goers. The sources of information on these matters can provide fascinating reading, available in concert documents, letters, and even literary works that include music making, such as some of the noveb by Jane Austen and Goethe. Opinions on this subject can also be found in the plethora of treatises from the eighteenth century, and Matthew Riley in his Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment, chooses to focus exclusively on these, especially by Meier, Sulzer, and Forkel, and also some of the theoretical writing of Rousseau, appearing for example in the Dictionnaire de musique or the Encyclopedie. The choice of sources together with the resulting focus gives the book a very different slant than one would suspect from the title, directing it much more towards aesthetics as a branch of philosophy than actual audiences or listeners, or the way that composers engaged them. This is not to say that these issues do not emerge in the aesthetic discussions that form the body of the book; the writers in question have much to say about such matters, but seldom in relation to the practical concerns of composers or the inclinations of audiences and listeners. In developing their views on music these writers of course had to talk about listeners as well, since music does not exist in a vacuum bereft of an audience, but their views generally emerge from the peculiar conceptions of music they espouse, of which the audience response is a necessary component. The choice of the sources creates some interesting issues for Riley, although he has little interest in addressing them. One concerns the audience for whom this type of writing is intended. Some of these writers may have believed they could actually educate listeners, helping to transform the liebhaber (amateur) into the Kenner (connoisseur), but more often their real audience was other aestheticians with whom they may have had fundamental disagreements. …