Enlightened Absolutism Research Articles

Antonio de Capmany y la ciudad de Barcelona: el valor de lo empírico en la senda del progreso

In his time, Antonio de Capmany (1742-1813) was the most prominent intellectual in the service of the interests of Barcelona, in a willingness to articulate the energy of that city with the efforts of enlightened despotism to relaunch Spain as a continental and colonial power. Extensive knowledge and assimilation of European culture of the Enlightenment allowed him to associate the historical experience of the Catalan capital with modern values. It was not a simple varnish, since the defense of Barcelona as the focus of progress was constructed from documented empirical data and sensory impressions, according to the principles preached by the great British philosophers against speculative rationalism and its incessant occurrences.

Da Ponte in New York, Mozart in New York

One might be surprised to learn that relatively few of Lorenzo da Ponte's letters have been preserved. In one of these, written in New York in 1824 to an unknown recipient, Da Ponte names what he considered to be five of his most important and successful libretti: La cosa rata, L'arbore di Diana, La capricciosa corretta, Le nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni. Cosi fan tutte is not mentioned, nor does he name the composers of the stated titles--Martin y Soler and W. A. Mozart (Zagonel 1995:228ff.). When I quote this letter today in order to describe Da Ponte's self-regard, I am always asked the same two questions: Who is Martin y Soler? And why does Da Ponte's letter come from New York? I answer that Martin y Soler was born in Spain, and in the mid-1780s he was, next to Mozart and Salieri, the most successful opera composer in Vienna. Then I am asked whether Da Ponte did not also write libretti for Salieri, or why Da Ponte did not include any libretto for Salieri among his most important and successful. Indeed, he did write libretti for Salieri, and I do not know why he did not mention these. Finally, whereas Da Ponte lived in Vienna for ten years and in London for twelve, he spent thirty-three years in the United States. In fact, he lived one year longer in the US than in Italy, where he was born. It is not just the fact that Da Ponte spent so much time in New York that surprises even educated music lovers and listeners today--it is also that, contrary to popular belief, Da Ponte did not devote himself to making Mozart, his friend and artistic partner, famous in North America. (1) In fact, the sources show us an entirely different picture. Lorenzo da Ponte Allow me to summarize the most important biographical facts in an overview: Lorenzo da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano in 1749 in the ghetto of Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto), near Venice. (2) After his family was baptized in 1763, he called himself Lorenzo da Ponte. He studied theology, became a Catholic priest, and taught in a theological seminary. In 1779 he was anonymously accused of leading a lifestyle unfit for a priest. He fled the region and in his absence was sentenced to prison. In 1781 he settled in Vienna. In this city of enlightened absolutism, no one was interested in why he continued to use the title Abbe. In 1783, Emperor Joseph II appointed Da Ponte to the position of court theater poet. It was in these years that Da Ponte famously collaborated with Mozart on Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cosi fan tutte (1790). After several theater scandals--jealousies, intrigue, love affairs, and prima donna behavior (see Nettl 1953 and 1966)--the police banished Da Ponte from Vienna. Despite petitioning Emperor Leopold II, he was ultimately banished to Trieste (though his debts and travel expenses were paid by the imperial court). In Trieste, Da Ponte continued to fight for his rehabilitation, but when it was granted he decided not to return to Vienna. Da Ponte married Nancy Grahl in 1792 in Trieste. He and his wife travelled via Prague to London, where they settled and began to raise a family. In time, two daughters and a son were born. Da Ponte worked for the Italian opera in the King's Theatre as a poet, translator, and editor, and he also worked as a bookseller. In 1800 he declared his bookseller's business bankrupt and was arrested. His Italian relatives came to his rescue: his brother Paolo came to London and opened a printing business and bookshop, which the brothers ran under Lorenzo's name. Eventually Da Ponte was again overwhelmed by unpaid debts and London became very uncomfortable for him. In 1804 his wife and their children travelled to the US, where his wife's mother and other family members lived. On April 7, 1805, Da Ponte himself followed on the freighter Columbia. After a crossing lasting fifty-seven days, he set foot on American soil in Philadelphia. He reunited with his family in New York and opened a grocery shop, but, after only three months, he fled. …

Yepyfanii Slavynetskyi's views on state

The article is devoted to the analysis of representations of the state which were part of the philosophical concept of the famous Ukrainian church leader, educator, philologist Yepyfanii Slavynetskyi. It was found that the historical and cultural context in which these views were formed, included deep familiarity with European philosophy, the theory of the state developed by the Orthodox intellectuals of Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, the political struggle for the incipience of early modern Ukrainian nation in the second half of the XVII century. Noted significant influence of the philosophy of E. Slavynetskyi on the religious, cultural and educational processes in Muscovy in era of Patriarch Nikon's reforms. The presence of the Patriarch own notions of state authority actively influence on the formation of the E. Slavinetsky's concept too. It is noted that E. Slavynetskyi's statesmanship theory was based on the developed by the Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals of the end of XVI - first half XVII theory of the ideal state, which in the second half of the XVII century actively evolved due to the political union of the The Cossack Hetmanate and Moscow. Accordingly, E. Slavynetskyi recognized people's right to political activity and state power, the church was considered as a leader of social progress, obligement of the lord to care for the public good. It was found that the concept of E. Slavynetskyi's state have many elements of European theories of enlightened absolutism. Yes, he acknowledges that the foundation of the state is public good and providing the best way for implementation this good - monarchy, insisted on the absolute power of the monarch. The relationship between the church and secular authorities philosopher solves unambiguously in favor of a secular, acknowledging the king's right to decide all important issues of church life.It is noted that the main reason for the evolution of such ideas was given the fact of The Cossack Hetmanate's political union with Russia as the civilizational mission to improve the capacity of the Orthodox culture and building a just state. This theory has become its logical conclusion later in the XVIII century in F. Prokopovich's philosophical views and political activities.

Napoleonic Mode: The 1802 Edition of La Fontaine's Fables

What, if any use did Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) have for Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95), and for the Fables in particular? Such issues come to light in the 1802 Didot edition of La Fontaine's most noted work, which was designed and engraved by artists who worked closely with Napoleon. The text of the edition is itself rather unremarkable, as there are very few notations or emendations. By contrast, the engravings, when viewed alongside their specific fables, provide a valuable glimpse into French political culture during Bonaparte's rise to power. This study examines several fables against the backdrop of ‘Le Loup et l'Agneau' (Book I, Fable 10), delving into why these specific poems were illustrated and analysing them in terms of discourse on power relations as defined in political, familial, and sometimes sexual, contexts. For the most part, the discourse on authority communicated in the illustrated fables portrays a kind of enlightened despotism that advocates centralized authority, but one that protects those who do not wield influence and affirms their right to express grievances. While the edition does not show the disintegration of such a presumably thoughtful and ordered approach to governing, history unfortunately reveals that as Bonaparte's Consulate transitioned into Empire, the reason of the strongest became not just the dominant, but the exclusive, mode of governance.

Rationalism, Science, and Freedom of Speech: Voltaire.

The 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began to regard observation as a primary means of gaining knowledge. Crucial to this were the discoveries of Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704). Isaac Newton was previously mentioned in this series (1). Locke maintained that the only source of our knowledge was our senses, and that there was no innate knowledge that a human possessed. This view implied that knowledge had its limits because things that were unavailable to sensory perception would be unknowable. Locke also addressed the process of scientific induction, acknowledging that inductive knowledge may yield errors; therefore, knowledge at any point was not unchangeable and might need to be corrected in the future. He extrapolated some of his epistemological comments to thinking of politics and government. His lasting contribution was the view that, because there was no absolute knowledge, political tolerance was essential (2, 3). France at that time was ruled by Louis XV, after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Elsewhere in Europe this was the time of the so-called enlightened despots: Frederick II in Prussia …

Esclarecimento e absolutismo. As aporias do direito natural de Christian Thomasius

The paper aims at presenting the tension between two constituent elements of the political philosophy of German Aufklarung which are presented in an author who is crucial to the period, namely Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). This tension can be formulated as follow: on the one hand the claim to, without the assistance of the theology, ground the law and the political community on the mere authority of human reason not through the revealed law, but instead through a natural law accessible to every rational being, that is, a secular natural law based on the rational nature of every man; and on the other hand the unrestricted submission to the enlightened sovereign, whose authority is absolute and analogous to God’s, that is, a political form of domination traditionally known as enlightened absolutism. This aporia or even contradiction arises in Thomasius, but in a way or another permeates all political theory of German Aufklarung , as for instance in Wolff and above all Kant. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21836892/fil33a18

Krieg und Frieden im 18. Jahrhundert: Kulturgeschichtliche Studien ed. by Stefanie Stockhorst

Stefanie Stockhorst, ed., Krieg und Frieden im 18. Jahrhundert: Kulturgeschichtliche Studien. Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2015. 679 pp. + 10 illustrations.This volume collects the proceedings of the 2012 conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur die Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts, which took place in Potsdam during the festivities celebrating the tricentennial of the birth of Friedrich II. Hence, it is not at all surprising that among the essays presented here are several noteworthy attempts to fill in the gaps in the research concerning the enlightened despot of Sanssouci. The essays that accompany these expositions of the philosopher-king's battles on the page and the world stage are in some ways like the era they analyze. There are long lulls punctuated by bursts of scholarly erudition, seemingly tangential forays that come to naught, and an overall editorial strategy that might appear tailored to elicit a productive outcome but instead fails to marshal the chapters cogently.The editorial strategy results in the volume being divided into four thematically organized sections containing a wide array of chapters. Stockhorst introduces the research presented in the volume with a chiasmic structure-how do people make war, and how does war make people-which ultimately provides very little enlightenment (26). There are several essays that do proffer genuinely new contributions to a field that has suffered from no lack of scholarly attention over the past few years. Holger Boning's chapter, for example, expands on his previous work on the popular Enlightenment through an analysis of how the common soldier's experience was reflected in texts written to encourage commoners to fight. Andrea Schmidt-Rosler's contribution shares the results of a statistical study undertaken at the Universitat Augsburg that analyzed the language of eighteenth-century peace treaties. She cleverly summarizes the study's conclusion with the observation that there was a linguistic shift from the Latin pax to the French paix (430). In addition, the chapter by Angela Straus argues for a reconsideration of the Patriotische Briefe by the field preacher Adolph Dietrich Ortmann, a text that has been tainted by its appropriation by the Nazis (563).Essays by Christoph Willmitzer and Stephanie Dreyfurst deal with battlefield reporting, and a significant number of texts add a transnational dimension, including Sabine Volk-Birke's essay on the English Jacobite uprising of 1745, Harald Heppner's discussion of Austrian borders, Andreas Onnerfors's account of the Anjala conspiracy in Sweden, and Hannah Spahn's consideration of the early American Republic's notion of its own relation to war and peace. Irmgard Egger's chapter calls attention to the German soldiers who fought for the British in the American colonies. Other essays examine war financing (Iwan-Michelangelo D'Aprile), battlefield medicine (Robert Leventhal), sonic spaces in the eighteenth century (Marian Fussel, Manfred Heidler, and Laurenz Lutteken), and children's literature (Sebastian Schmideler and Steffi Bahro). The essays by Marc Andre Bernier and Stefan W. Rommelt deal with Enlightenment authors' choice of figures from antiquity as interlocutors and the two-hundredth anniversary of the Peace of Augsburg in 1755 respectively. …

To lead without governing in the knowledge society: The enlightened despotism in European techno-corporative discourse

Over the last few decades, the process of governing in the European Union (EU) has come to mean a whole series of activities conducted by social, political, and administrative actors, which guide, direct, control, and administrate society. The relationship between these actors in the governmental process is not hierarchical, but polycentric and mutually dependent. Therefore, the techno-corporatism alliance is formed by an epistemic community along with the industrial and financial lobbies. It organizes society around its own projection of a differential unit, thereby affirming its position of leadership and power – a differential unit which, in an ideologically broader definition, expresses itself and inevitably takes place throughout and within this language. First, this implies thinking of the techno-corporative discourse not in its apparent ethereal nature, but as a social practice of the legitimation of a mediated political direction that has intervened in the conception, construction, and approval of public policies over these last few decades. Even though this discourse contributes to the delineation of a certain social form, this does not suggest that it cannot contrast with it, or even exceed it because this form itself is contradictory. Second, the longitudinal analysis (2000–2010) of the techno-corporative discourse allows us to relate and articulate different discourses (critical, subordinated, and dissident discourses) which have affected the programs and projects of the European governance in the direction of society, thereby constructing a hegemonic vision in order to obtain general consent.

Introduzione alla Russiade di Carlo Denina

Many epic poems and plays were composed both in Russia and abroad between the 18th and early 19th centuries to honour the Czar Peter I, who early on had become one of the models of enlightened absolutism for the European Enlightenment. In fact, it was during this same period that John Perry wrote The State of Russia under the Present Czar and Voltaire penned the famous Histoire de l’Empire de Russie sous Pierre-le-Grand, which set the founder of Saint Petersburg «dans le rang des plus grands législateurs». In 1796, an unfinished epic poem by Carlo Denina entitled La Russiade was published in Berlin, praising Peter I, the city he founded in 1703 and the Russian empire. The final edition of the work is dated 1810 and as per tradition contains twelve cantos. Since it was written in prose, Denina boasted that he was «the first author of an epic poem in Italian prose», thus tying the work to the newly created tradition of the prose poem. The story is set between 1709, the year of Peter I’s victory over the Swedish, and 1721, when the Treaty of Nystad marked Russia’s ascent toward becoming a major European power. During a solemn assembly in St. Petersburg Peter is named emperor, while at the same time the city founded by him grows and prospers. Denina also manages to insert passages praising Napoleon and the Czar Alexander I. Though written in prose, the Russiade adopts many conventions of the epic genre and contains various passages in verse, some of which even rhyme.

Catherine II and Zh. F. Marmontel's Novel "Belisarius": "The General Welfare" Conception in the Consolidation of Imperial Space

The relevance of the research problem is caused by necessity of studying of mechanisms of communication of the Supreme power and the Russian citizens of the second half of the XVIII century, promoting a consolidation of the Russian society. The purpose of this article is to show with what ideas of enlightened absolutism reflected in Marmontel's novel “Belisarius

Зарождение государственного среднего женского образования в Российской империи и Венгрии

During the time of enlightened absolutism, the development of education became a state duty. The philosophers of the Enlightenment began to deal with the question of the education of elite women and that played an important role in the nation-building process. Educational reforms initiated by Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa established state educational systems in Russia and in Hungary. The first state-financed higher education institute for women in Europe was opened in Russia. Similar schools in Hungary only appeared a century later. This article compares Russian and Hungarian boarding-schools for noble maidens, focusing on the beginning of these elite institutes and the secondary-level education ensured by them. This essay is dedicated to the memory of L.N. Semenova.

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫХ ВЗГЛЯДОВ Г. Р. ДЕРЖАВИНА И ИХ ОТРАЖЕНИЕ НА ЕГО ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ В ПЕРИОД ПРОСВЕЩЕННОГО АБСОЛЮТИЗМА ЕКАТЕРИНЫ II

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫХ ВЗГЛЯДОВ Г. Р. ДЕРЖАВИНА И ИХ ОТРАЖЕНИЕ НА ЕГО ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ В ПЕРИОД ПРОСВЕЩЕННОГО АБСОЛЮТИЗМА ЕКАТЕРИНЫ II

When an academician becomes professor: the case of Joseph-Louis Lagrange

With the French Revolution, the role of the mathematician gradually evolved from proteges of princes to official professor. Lagrange provides a remarkable illustration of this fundamental change. Until 1792, this famous but discreet scientist had a European career, first in Turin and then to Berlin and finally Paris, ignoring national boundaries and rivalries between powers but always subject to the system of enlightened despotism. His life was that of a court mathematician, working in the narrow confines of academic institutions. The French Revolution completely changed his career and relaunched his work. He actively participated in the creation of the metric system and taught analysis in new educational institutions established by the Convention: the Ecole Normale and the Ecole Polytechnique. This is where he explained his theory of analytical functions, where differential and integral calculus were reduced to the study of the expansion of functions.

La expulsión de los jesuitas de Portugal en la “era pombalina”

The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759 as a consequence of Regalian policy of enlightened despotism, which had been wholeheartedly accepted by Marquis of Pombal, prime-minister under the King Joseph I. Accusations of inciting the Guarani people to rise up against “The Treaty of the borders”, on the one hand, and of conspiring in the assassination attempt against King Joseph I, on the other, supported the decision to force the Jesuits into exile. However, neither allegation has been ever proven, rather they were the result of Pombal’s campaign against Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s order. The ultimate outcome of the expulsion of the Jesuits was the diminished influence of Catholic Church, thus encourating the introduction of new Enlightenment ideas in Portugal.

Wann muss der Herrscher schweigen? Zur Behandlung königlicher Machtsprüche in der Preußischen Rechtsreform

The present paper shall provide an analysis of the discourse regarding Machtspruche (‘dictums’) in the elaboration of the codification of the Prussian private law – the “Allgemeines Landrecht fur die Preusischen Staaten” – towards the end of the 18 th century. A Machtspruch consisted of an authoritative decision by the monarch through which he could intervene in on-going judicial proceedings in civil law matters either by giving a ruling himself or by instructing the court to come to a certain decision. In Prussia the question arose of whether Machtspruche should be forbidden by law. The paper will reflect the positions of King Frederick II., King Frederick William II., high-ranking Prussian civil servants, and legal reformists in this discourse. It will show that the discourse concerning this question is in a way a continuation of the dichotomy between power on the one hand and law on the other, that was typical of Enlightened Absolutism.

Dzieje fryderycjańskich Prus w XVIII w., czyli o wyższości absolutyzmu nad szlachecką wolnością

The History of Frederician Prussia in the Eighteenth Century, or on the Supremacy of Absolutism over Gentry Liberty The copious and detailed book: Prusy w okresie monarchii absolutnej (1701–1806) , ed. Bogdan Wachowiak, Poznan 2010 (series: Historia Prus. Narodziny – mocarstwowośc – obumieranie , vol. 2) is the work of five authors. Almost half of the text was written by Zygmunt Szultka (i.e. chapters on economic, social and systemic relations), and the author of one-quarter of the publication is Andrzej Kamienski, who discussed Prussian foreign policy in 1701–1786 and the development of architecture. Dariusz Łukasiewicz focused on widely comprehended culture and the conditions of daily life, while Grzegorz Kucharczyk considered foreign policy, symptoms of the domestic crisis during the reign of Frederick William II and Frederick William III, and the eighteenth-century publication movement. The book’s characteristic feature is the extremely thorough use of the existing literature on the subject, predominantly German but also English-language, French and Polish. Upon numerous occasions, the authors (in particular Z. Szultka) conducted additional archival surveys; hence the book is not so much a synthesis as a compendium of knowledge about the Prussian state. The overall impression is excellent, the publication is written lucidly (this holds true even for chapters about the economy) and provides a plethora of interesting information, with the authors remaining distinctly objective but without shying from personal opinions. The presented study inclines towards a comparison of the fate and the social, economic and administrative systems of eighteenth-century Prussia and the Commonwealth. The readers draw the obvious conclusion about the supremacy of the absolutist system (especially so-called enlightened absolutism) over the ideology of the golden liberty of the gentry prevalent in the Commonwealth and the suitable functioning of the state. Furthermore, they may arrive at the correct conviction about better living conditions in the orderly Prussian state (albeit under the constant control of the bureaucracy) than in the ostensibly free Commonwealth. In Polish historiography already the so-called Cracow school (second half of the nineteenth century) argued that the absence of strong royal authority resulted in the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Limits to Despotism: Idealizations of Chinese Governance and Legitimizations of Absolutist Europe

Abstract The term “oriental despotism” was used to describe all larger Asian empires in eighteenth century Europe. It was meaningful to use about the Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese empires. However, this did not mean that all Europeans writing on Asian empires implied that they were all tyrannies with no political qualities. The Chinese system of government received great interest among early modern political thinkers in Europe ever since it was described in the reports that Jesuit missionaries had sent back from China in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The descriptions of an ethical and political bond between emperor and administrators in China and of specific administrative organs in which age-old principles were managed made a great impression on many European readers of these reports. Although it did not remain an undisputed belief in Europe, many intellectuals held China to be a model of how the power of a sovereign could be limited or curbed within an absolutist system of government. This article investigates three cases of how the models of China were conceived by theorists reading Jesuit reports and how they subsequently strategically communicated this model to the courts of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. These three ambitious European monarchies have been regarded to give rise to a form of “enlightened absolutism” that formed a tradition different from those of England and France, the states whose administrative systems formed the most powerful models in this period. Rather than describing the early modern theories about China’s despotism as a narrative parallel, but unrelated to the development of policy programs of the respective states, this article documents how certain elements of the model of China were integrated in the political writings of Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine II of Russia. Thus, in addition to the history of political thought on China, the article adds a new perspective to how these monarchs argued for fiscal reforms and a centralization and professionalization of their administrations.

The rise of liberal constitutionalism in Italy: Pietro Verri and the French Revolution

In the 1780s and 1790s, Pietro Verri (1728–97) wrote a large number of autobiographical and political texts, which have only recently been collected and printed in two volumes of the Edizione Nazionale of Verri's works. These writings are examined in this essay as documents of a turn from enlightened absolutism to liberalism and democracy in Italy towards the end of the eighteenth century. Verri's acceptance of the principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by the French revolutionaries was made easier by his dissatisfaction with the authoritarian and bureaucratic nature of many of Joseph II's reforms. He also came to realize that the transition of sovereignty from the prince to the people was a necessary step in the way to the unification of the Italian peninsula, which became a political and not only a cultural goal in the same years. He was aware, however, of the difficulty of spreading these views among an ignorant, backward and priest-ridden populace and thought that their education was the most important task facing Italian literati. This explains why he firmly opposed the ultra-radical propaganda of Italian jacobins in the early stages of the French occupation of Lombardy.

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Italian Opera in Age of American Revolution. By Pierpaolo Polzonetti. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni - versity Press, 2011. [xix, 376 p. ISBN 9780521897082. $125.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Italian opera was one of dramatic genres that most directly responded to epoch-changing social, political, and cultural events in American Colonies during second half of eighteenth century. News from overseas flooded into European gazettes and newspapers, arousing as much enthusiasm as harsh criticism. They carried along ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, as well as new types of characters that found their way onto operatic stages: good-hearted Native, peaceful Quaker, emancipated woman. This had far-reaching effects on ways operas challenged established social structures and institutions, even when America was not directly evoked in subject of librettos. Given pervasive impact that American events had on European culture of time, it is surprising that music historians have paid such scant attention to ramifications for opera. Pierpaolo Polzonetti's monograph fills this lacuna and provides a welcome contribution to our understanding of genre. Through an impressive array of philosophical texts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and memoirs, all tied to close readings of musical sources, his study analyzes burgeoning influence of American subjects in eighteenth-century Italian opera and relationship to development of several different strands of thought in Enlighten - ment culture. The book covers several geographical areas inside and outside of Italy, and it focuses on a period of forty years: from 1750, when Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi's Il mondo della luna received its premiere in Venice, to 1790, year Lorenzo Da Ponte turned Giuseppe Palomba and Pietro Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa into a pasticcio for Vienna. The first of these, in fact, antedates earliest entry in Polzonetti's core repertory (p. 4), I napoletani in America (libretto by Francesco Cerlone, music by Niccolo Piccinni), by eighteen years. Il mondo della luna introduces profound impact of contemporary American events on Euro - pean culture at large. In Haydn's 1777 version of opera for relatively conservative court of Eszterhaza, Moon, a topsy-turvy counterpart of Earth, becomes a metaphor for America, serving court's attempt to align itself with enlightened reformism promoted in Vienna. The terminus post quem non of Polzonetti's work shows that European fascination with America as the land of hope and opportunity (p. 15) gradually came to an end when French Revolution violently shook political foundations of Europe. As censorship became stricter, characters like Vertunna, independent, gun-toting female protagonist of La quakera spiritosa, were looked upon with increasing discomfort, and subjects dealing with revolutionary topics were considered subversive. As Polzonetti argues (pp. 298-307), when Da Ponte made a pasticcio out of Palomba's libretto for Vienna, he toned down stereotypical features of main character and tempered gender role inversion that dominated original work. While Polzonetti's forty-year time-span coincides with golden age of opera buffa, his discussion of works on American subjects begins with an opera seria-Carl Heinrich Graun's Montezuma on a libretto by Frederick Great, King of Prussia (Berlin, 1755). Although Montezuma does not concern itself specifically with North America, it serves as an introduction to web of discourses that joined European interest in New World with growing cultural influence of Enlightenment. If opera seria provided a platform for ideological agenda of Frederick's enlightened absolutism in Prussia, opera buffa became principal vehicle for disseminating view of America as a place of political utopias in Italy. …

Josephinian reforms and enlightenment aspirations

Eighteenth-century historians no longer refer to the sovereign rulers of the epoch of ‘Enlightened Absolutism’ as Philosopher Kings and Revolutionary Emperors. But the relationship between the objectives and reforms undertaken by these rulers and the aspirations of those who felt attracted to the perspectives and principles of Enlightenment requires close investigation. This article considers the complex and constantly changing relationship between the objectives and reforms of Joseph II, and the advice offered by his Chancellor and Councillor of State Kaunitz, who was a resolute and consistent advocate of Enlightenment principles. Kaunitz’s influence was paramount at certain times and in certain areas of policy, but at other times and in other areas of policy he was ignored or dramatically set aside.