The Crystallization of Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identities: Theological Controversy and Catholic Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France

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...

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. …

This bibliography does not aim at comprehensiveness. It is conceived as a guide to future reading and research, beyond the works mentioned in the text. The topic of the Enlightenment has never been short of major general surveys. Besides those mentioned in the text, the reader might consult still valuable examples of an older style of interpretation well represented by the lively writing of Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (first published in French in 1935, English translation 1963), and his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (1946 and 1963). Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968) is valuable for its extended treatment of science in this period. Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1973) examines this period from a Marxist perspective. Radical reinterpretations of the Enlightenment are well represented by Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981). More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011) has been hotly debated. See also Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment’, Historical Journal , 52 (2009), 717–38; Antoine Lilti, ‘Comment ecrit-on l'histoire intellectuelle des Lumieres?’, Annales ESC 64 (2009), 171–206. See also Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds, What's Left of the Enlightenment? A Post-Modern Question (Stanford, CA, 2001); Daniel Gordon, ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001). Conflicts over the meaning of the Enlightenment may be further explored in E. Behr, ‘In Defence of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas’, German Studies Review , 2 (1988), 97–109, and in Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinow (New York, 1984). See also Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1992).

Reviewed by: Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism Harm Klueting Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism. By Michael Printy. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. viii, 246. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-521-47839-7.) Printy’s ambitious work, his University of California–Berkeley doctoral dissertation in history, is an interesting and very important contribution to the history of eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment in Germany. He distinguishes between “Catholic Enlightenment”—as a rejection of the moral pessimism and Augustinian rigorism in a more international context—and “Reform Catholicism”—as a concrete program in a more national context. However, these distinctions are troubling. Printy’s understanding of Catholic Enlightenment hides the apologetic side of Catholic Enlightenment against the anticlerical and antireligious tendencies of the Enlightenment. Such an understanding cannot make clear that Catholic Enlightenment was a struggle against superstition and baroque forms of Catholic piety to defend Catholicism against the enlightened who attacked religion. If Printy understands “educated bourgeois Catholics” as protagonists of Catholic Enlightenment, this is not only an anachronism of terms but also conceals that many important protagonists of Catholic Enlightenment were clerics or monks and exactly the opposite of “bourgeois Catholics.” His opinion that the reform program of those protagonists was the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and religious reform seems to be a little too simple because there was no direct continuity between fifteenth-or sixteenth-century Catholic Reform and the eighteenth century. Actually the reforms of eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment can be interpreted as a completion of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, but it is also true that there were many influences from the outside on Catholic Enlightenment in the German-speaking countries, especially from Jansenism and the Protestant German Enlightenment. The most important problem is Printy’s main thesis that the Enlightenment created German Catholicism. Actually, nineteenth-century German Catholicism and the German Catholicism of the first half of the twentieth century were much more ultramontane. The heritage of the Catholic Enlightenment was really not dead but only of secondary importance—partly important, for instance, with the Tübingen liberal wing of Catholic theology, [End Page 593] but mostly not more than an accessory. In Printy’s view, German Catholicism was “recast by its Enlightenment in a manner similar to the creation of a national German literary culture by a relatively restricted circle of writers and the reading public in the age of Goethe and Schiller” (p. 2). He quotes Friedrich Carl von Moser—not a Catholic but a Protestant with a background in Pietism—for “German National Spirit” (Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist, 1766) and writes that eighteenth-century German “educated Catholics” were trying to reform the Church because they “questioned not only what it meant to be Catholic, but also what it meant to be German, and in the process they created German Catholicism” (p. 21). This is a key misunderstanding. Printy speaks about German Catholic Enlightenment and takes the view of German Protestant Enlightenment. His perspective is that of Lessing’s Wolfenbüttel, Goethe’s, Schiller’s, or Herder’s Weimar, Schlözer’s Göttingen, or Nicolai’s Berlin, but not that of the Catholic centers in the abbeys, universities, and bishops’ curias in the west and the south of Germany. His paradigm is that of a “German” Enlightenment that did not exist. He does not see enough Catholicism from its inner life and not enough the relationship between eighteenth-century German Catholics and French or Italian Catholicism. He asserts a nation where was no nation in the same way as for Protestants. It is true that Hontheim (Febronius, 1763) wanted a German national church, but he understood “nation” in another way than the Weimar classicism. Harm Klueting University of Cologne, Germany, and University of Fribourg, Switzerland Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

The question of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) has risen sharply up the French political agenda over the last twenty-five years. Ways in which it is defined and applied are hotly contested and lie at the nerve centre of wide debates about the nature of the Republic, French national identity and indeed of France's colonial past. According to an IFOP opinion poll in November 2015, 87 per cent of French people agreed that was important to respect laïcité at school, 84 per cent of respondents said that it was part of France's identity while 81 per cent thought that it was under threat in France. That said, they did not agree on what laïcité meant. For 32 per cent it meant separating religion from politics, for 27 per cent it meant ensuring liberty of conscience, while 17 per cent said it meant reducing the influence of religion in society. Historians, sociologists and political scientists as well as journalists and activists join battle on the question, and a selection of their recent contributions, from different angles and with different methodologies, are reviewed here.

National Identities in France explores nationalism, national identities, and the various ways in which these concepts are accepted, adapted, discarded, or internally disputed across ideological divides. The popular assumption that automatically regards nationalism as a largely right-wing concern, occludes the many ways in which nationalism and national identities have contributed to social imagination and political or literary discourses across the right-left spectrum. The critical grounds on which such reflections are undertaken are rich and varied. The idea of invented traditions has long suggested how such a thing as the modernnation-state could vest itself in the creatively assembled robes of a dim and distant past. In plotting the ground on which nationalisms are located, previous studies have shown, among other things, the uses and limitations of the distinction of ethnic and civic nationalism. Studies on national development reveal the imitative process that brought about nation building in former colonies of the Western powers. Each chapter asks important questions concerning nationalism and national identities in relation to France. With nationalism, apparently stable distinctions collapse under the pressure of French national identity. The signs are that French national identities and nationalisms are in a constant state of reinvention and negotiation, of periodic crisis and constant rebirth. If political classes attempt to manipulate national identity for some larger project, they have no monopoly on the social imaginary. National mobilisation is a multiple and polysemic process, not a univocal and rigid ideology.

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

The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France* Robert Darnton Where does so much mad agitation come from? From a crowd of minor clerks and lawyers, from unknown writers, starving scribblers, who go about rabble-rousing in clubs and cafes. These are the hotbeds that have forged the weapons with which the masses are armed today. P. J. B. Gerbier, June 1789 The nation’s rewards must be meted out to those who are worthy of them; and after having repulsed despotism’s vile courtiers, we must look for merit dwelling in basements and in seventh-storey garrets. . . . True genius is almost always sans-culotte. Henri Gregoire, August 1793 This ESSAY IS INTENDED to examine the late Enlightenment as historians have recently studied the Revolution—from be­ low. The summit view of eighteenth-century intellectual history has been described so often and so well that it might be useful to strike out in a new direction, to try to get to the bottom of the En­ lightenment, and perhaps even to penetrate into its underworld. Digging downward in intellectual history calls for new methods and new materials, for grubbing in archives instead of contem­ plating philosophical treatises. As an example of the dirt that such digging can turn up, consider the following titles taken from a * This essay, which first appeared in Past and Present, 51 (May, 1971), 81-115, was the first chosen by ASECS for its annual award to the best scholarly article of the year in eighteenth-century studies. Prize-winning essays will be reprinted regularly in the Society’s Proceedings. Ed. 83 Racism in the Eighteenth Century manuscript catalogue that circulated secretly in France around 1780 and that were offered for sale under the heading "philosophical books’’:1 Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in a Nightgown*, The Woman of Pleasure; The Pastime of Antoinette (a reference to the Queen); Authentic Memoirs of Mme. la Comtesse Du Barry; Monastic News, or The Diverting Adventures of Brother Maurice; Medley by a Citizen of Geneva and Republican Advice dedicated to the Americans; Works of La Mettrie; System of Nature. Here is a definition of the "philosophical” by a publisher who made it his business to know what eighteenth-century Frenchmen wanted to read. If one measures it against the view of the philosophic move­ ment that has been passed on piously from textbook to textbook, one cannot avoid feeling uncomfortable: most of those titles are completely unfamiliar, and they suggest that a lot of trash somehow got mixed up in the eighteenth-century idea of "philosophy.” Per­ haps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century. One way to bring the Enlightenment down to earth is to see it from the viewpoint of eighteenth-century authors. After all, they were men of flesh and blood, who wanted to fill their bellies, house their families, and make their way in the world. Of course the study of authors does not solve all the problems connected with the study of ideas, but it does suggest the nature of their social context, and it can draw enough from conventional literary history for one to hazard a few hypotheses.2 A favourite hypothesis in histories of literature is the rise in the writer’s status throughout the eighteenth century. By the time of the High Enlightenment, during the last twenty-five years of the Old Regime, the prestige of French authors had risen to such an ex­ tent that a visiting Englishman described them exactly as Voltaire had described English men of letters during the early Enlighten­ ment: "Authors have a kind of nobility.”3 Voltaire’s own career testifies to the transformation of values among the upper orders of French society. The same milieux who had applauded the drubbing administered to him by Rohan’s toughs in 1726 cheered him like 84 The Low-Life of Literature in France a god during his triumphal tour of Paris in 1778. Voltaire himself used his apotheosis to advance the...

This chapter argues three related points. First, a plurality of intersecting Catholic Enlightenment movements co-existed in eighteenth century France. Secondly, this chapter shows that, for many reasons analyzed in what follows, the long 1750s, which began with the publication of the first volume of the Encyclopdie (1751) and ended with the expulsion of the Jesuits, led to the polarization of Catholic Enlightenments, followed by the undermining of Jesuit-inspired Catholic Enlightenment and of the epistemological syntheses of Locke, Descartes and Newton. Finally, from 17651789, as a result of the polarization of the 1750s, France witnessed four interlocking Catholic Enlightenment trends. Throughout, this chapter contends that Radical and Catholic Enlightenments evolved dialectically, at once creative of and created by the perceived opposition. The sway that Jesuits and their form of Catholic Enlightenment held over the Sorbonne was no organized conspiracy by the court, pro-Bull bishops, and philosophers. Keywords: Catholic Enlightenment; eighteenth century; Encyclopdie ; France

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob John D. Eigenauer Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Pp. 339, 13 b/w illus. $29.95 cloth. The great debate in Enlightenment studies in the past twenty-plus years has centered on the causes of secular modernity: What happened to move the world from the Middle Ages to our Secular Age? One dominant answer, propounded by Jonathan Israel across three massive volumes (Radical Enlightenment [2001], Enlightenment Contested [2006], and Democratic Enlightenment [2011]), is that our modern values arose from the world's wholesale acceptance of the materialist philosophy that undergirds Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) complex thought. A second answer is that our modern world was born of myriad factors ranging from global expansion (and the ensuing contact with unknown peoples) to increased literacy (making people more worldly and informed) to expanding economies (enhancing quality of life and freeing people from the cares of quotidian struggles). While Israel's thesis is enticing and powerfully argued, the majority of scholars see advances toward secularism as irreducible to the forces of philosophy; they therefore embrace a more complex system of causes. Margaret Jacob stands firmly in the latter camp. In her most recent work, The Secular Enlightenment, Jacob argues for a view of the Enlightenment that encompasses many factors that added impetus to increasing secularism across the long eighteenth century. These include "new spatial realities": politics, "the spread of money," imperialistic expansionism, "subversive literature," "travel literature," the expansion of cities, increased sociability, the growth of luxury goods, heightened literacy, and encounters with new peoples in faraway lands. Jacob's argument seems to be that new uses of and encounters with "space" (think of expanding cities and intercontinental exploration) opened up ways of seeing the world that contrasted with traditional views and invited increased secularism (9–24). Encounters with formerly unknown peoples outside Europe, for example, led people to speculate in travel literature (both real and fictional) about what it meant that some peoples had no conception of God—a possibility that denied a longstanding orthodox tradition that claimed that everyone possesses an innate idea of the divinity. Increased sociability in cities (in pubs, clubs, cafes, and masonic lodges, for example) created the possibility for expressions of "the outrageous, daring, and free" (20). And growing literacy made these dangerous ideas more widely available. However, even though these ideas certainly lend support to social history (over against a history that emphasizes ideas as primary motive forces), the account in the first chapter leaves a number of questions unanswered. While it is certainly true that encounters with non-European peoples invited many questions, we do not [End Page 443] learn what those questions were or how they were answered. As Andrew Curran notes in his essay on "Anthropology" in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (2014), these travelogues speculated on "human diversity, human origins, human comportment, human anatomy and (supposedly different types of) human minds" (30). How did secular attitudes emerge out of discussions of these topics? What answers were forwarded that moved the world towards increasing secularism? These are the type of questions that should be addressed in a discussion that theorizes that new conceptualizations of "space" promoted a more secular worldview in the long eighteenth century. There is no doubt that eighteenth century Europeans encountered conceptions and uses of "space" that forced them to rethink their worlds. But we do not learn in Jacob's chapter on space what those conceptions were or how they emerged. In fact, after a discussion on "space" in the first chapter—a discussion that ends with the assertion that "space had truly become emptied" (32)—the term virtually disappears from the book. Jacob announces in the second chapter another major theme in her view of the secular eighteenth century: time. Jacob sees time before 1680 as being understood in a decidedly non-modern way. Unfortunately, she does not explain what that experience was like or attempt to define the pre-Enlightenment concept of time. She makes references to changing ideas about the age of the earth, but does not explain how these new ideas relate to a more modern sense...

This paper examines one of France's first regional ethnographic museums in order to reveal the evolving dynamic of regional culture and its fluid relation to the central administration's efforts to circumscribe French national identity through the museum system. The most successful, most imitated, and best known museum designed to stimulate regional culture was undoubtedly Mistral’s Museon Arlaten. Here and especially in the Festo Vierginenco, Mistral encouraged Arlesiennes to reject modern clothing, and thus the hegemony of Parisian culture, and to do more than the museum ever could: to be the living embodiment of the regional spirit. The example of Mistral’s folkloric museum, its parading of a postulated Provencal heritage, the proliferation of local museums, and the refusal to display significant folklore in Parisian museums at the end of nineteenth century all expose the complexity of museum discourses in the creation and negotiation of regional and national identities in France. Keywords:Arlesienne; Festo Vierginenco; folklore; France; Mistral’s Museon Arlaten; museums; regional identity

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment

Reviewed by: Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History ed. by Ulrich Lehner Shaun Blanchard Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History, edited by Ulrich Lehner (London: Routledge, 2018), xi + 248 pp. Ulrich Lehner, one of the premiere historians of early modern Catholicism, brings together biographical essays of sixteen extraordinary women of the European Catholic Enlightenment. Over the last half-century, historians have amply demonstrated the existence and vitality of an eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment that fused the dogmatic and spiritual traditions of Roman Catholicism with the values and methodologies of the moderate and religious Enlightenments. It now falls to scholars to fill in a number of lacunae in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment. While some of the great female Catholic rulers of this era, such as the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780), have received a great deal of attention, the story of the Catholic Enlightenment is often narrated too exclusively as one of modernizing statesmen, reforming bishops, and scholarly male religious. An impressive group of scholars have gifted us with a new point of departure for the study of Catholic women and the Enlightenment. Lehner's introduction situates these contributions in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment and gender studies. While research on women and the Enlightenment has "dramatically increased" in the last two decades, "women who were to a varying degree committed to their Catholic faith and the trends of the Catholic Enlightenment have … not gained much attention" (1). This neglect is all the more surprising since many of these women were famous during their lifetimes and some left very strong literary marks well into the nineteenth century. While all sixteen of these short studies are of great value, I will expand upon several in what follows (while at least mentioning all). I have tried to select essays which give a good sense of the overall thrust of this project and of the vitality and diversity of women's contributions to the Catholic Enlightenment. These sixteen women are organized, roughly, into five geographical/linguistic regions: France, the Iberian peninsula, the Italian states, the German-speaking lands, and Britain. Carolina Armenteros highlights the playwright, pedagogical theorist, and educator of royal children Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830) as "the French Catholic Enlightenment's foremost woman representative" (8). In her best-known work, the educational manual Adelaide and Theodore, de Genlis offered an "exceedingly erudite educational method that was an exact opposite of Rousseau's" (13). A friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Alembert, de Genlis broke with the philosophes over her "unwavering [End Page 1045] habit of defending Christianity and attacking 'false philosophy'" (9). Because of this, while de Genlis had an enthusiastic public following, certain circles of enlightened French elites were less enthusiastic about her work. Nevertheless, de Genlis's scholarship on education was "secretly indebted" to Rousseau and she risked reducing religion to social utility and propagating a quasi-deism (13). De Genlis, famous in her day, should be remembered for "eclips[ing] previous educational methods" and contributing "influential pedagogical approaches" which endured well into the nineteenth century (13). Alicia C. Montoya and Therese Taylor also contribute essays (respectively) on French women: Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), also a pedagogue, and Adélaïde d'Orléans (1698–1743), the Abbess of Chelles. It should be noted that, in a study of 254 catalogues of private libraries sold by auction before 1800, the works of Leprince de Beaumont appeared second in frequency only to Voltaire (32). Moving south to the Iberian peninsula, Mónica Bolufer profiles the contributions of the Aragonese noblewoman Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), whose life and work opens "a window into the world of the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment" (50). Amar y Borbón, author of the 1786 Discourse in Defense of Women's Talent, approached enlightenment from a practical, proto-feminist, and religious perspective. As with other Spanish enlighteners, the influences on Amar y Borbón cannot be reduced to a "passive assimilation" of foreign (particularly French) influences, but were grounded in "solid autochthonous roots" (53). Amar y Borbón's views on rational devotion, social utility, and egalitarianism were rooted in Catholic and...

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...

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.