Enlightenment Europe Research Articles

Making Sense of the Empire’s Others:Mikhail Chulkov’s Dictionary of Russian Superstitions and the European Enlightenment

This article is an analysis of Mikhail Chulkov’s Dictionary of Russian Superstitions, published in 1782. It places the dictionary in the historical and cultural context of Enlightenment Europe, from which the genre was drawn, and suggests that Chulkov’s use of the genre was part of his own efforts to fashion himself as a civilized, Enlightened man. The article considers the various practices and beliefs described in the dictionary and lays out the various categories of people those which “superstitious” practices and beliefs were ascribed. By comparing the various categories of people described in the dictionary, the article argues that Chulkov’s vision of the Others of the Russian Empire was characterized by a sympathy towards Orthodox Christians and a skepticism about the ability of non-Orthodox subjects of the empire to become civilized. It also considers how Chulkov’s treatment of women and Old Believers reveals his own anxieties about the persistence of superstition into an ostensibly Enlightened era of history.

D.H. Lawrence’s <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i> and the legal overreach in its ban: A study of the implications for law and literature

On the one hand, the Age of Enlightenment in Europe triggered off scientific discoveries and technological innovations. Science and Technology became yardsticks for progress in the world. This led to industrialization and the subsequent commodification and annihilation of emotion, spiritual and even sexual life of humankind; on the other hand, in the far East, Iran for example, there is radicalization of religious life and preference of religious life over emotional and sensual life. In Europe, the intellectual life became privileged over the emotional and intuitive life, human relations degenerated so much so that even families grew apart from themselves. Writers as D.H. Lawrence felt the need to draw our attention to the havoc being wreaked on human relations; while Rushdie felt outraged by deification of a man he considered sexually perverse. D.H. Lawrence achieves his aim through the text, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was adjudged by the law as pornographic and was, therefore, banned; while Salman Rushdie also achieves his through his The Satanic Verses, which was rather adjudged blasphemous and was also banned with Fatwa placed on the head of the writer. The objective of this paper was to examine aspects of the narrative as lawyers or judges would examine cases to see how Lady Chatterley’s Lover yielded to obscenity to warrant it being banned as well as to understand why the prosecutors failed and why the work was later unbanned. It examined also The Satanic Verses to also see how it yielded to blasphemy and to understand why it was not banned in Western Countries. It is hoped that this study would help in further understanding the relationship between Law and literature. The methodology deployed was textual data analysis; and it was concluded that the determining of justice in law involves interpretation just as interpretation is needed in the pursuit of meaning in the text; and that legal briefs as well as judgments are in themselves narratives just as literature is. Finally is it was concluded that law will eternally be deconstructive in the pursuit truth or fact just as literature the pursuit of meaning in literature will depend on the eternal deconstructive process.

Dzieje kultury europejskiej i polskiej XVIII wieku w ujęciu polskich uczonych w XX stuleciu. Wybrane zagadnienia

The article discusses the dispute over the chronology of the Enlightenment in Poland and the views of Józef Gierowski and Jacek Staszewski regarding the assessment of the Saxon times and the origins of the Polish Enlightenment. The problem of the reception of Western cultures (French, English, Italian and German) in the times of the Enlightenment in Poland was also treated more broadly. After presenting various understandings of culture in Polish historiography, the positions of Polish researchers on the assessment of the Enlightenment in Europe (Emanuel Rostworowski) and then the culture of the Saxon times and the Enlightenment in Poland (Józef Andrzej Gierowski, Janusz Maciejewski, Jacek Staszewski) were discussed. The achievements of Polish historiography in the field of research on the reception in Poland of the works of the most eminent authors of the French Enlightenment (these were primarily Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu), English (including Locke), Italian (Genovesi, Beccaria) and German (including Wolff, Gottsched) were shown in greater detail. The reception of this work would not have been possible without the appearance in Poland of an intellectual elite, often speaking French, who were able to evaluate and appreciate the innovative views of Western writers and philosophers.

Oświecenie w syntezach dziejów Rzeczypospolitej Józefa Andrzeja Gierowskiego (na tle ujęć Władysława Konopczyńskiego i Celiny Bobińskiej)

The Enlightenment occupied an important place in the oeuvre of Professor Józef Andrzej Gierowski. This piece presents his evolving views on the Enlightenment in three syntheses of the history of early modern Poland and the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth: two university textbooks first published in 1967 and 1978 respectively, and a book addressed to a wider, non‑academic readership first published in 2001, much of which was presented to Anglophone readers in 1996. J. A. Gierowski’s views are presented against the background of the sardonic references to “the enlightened age” and “enlightened Europe” in the synthesis published by his supervisor, Władysław Konopczyński in 1936, as well as the Marxist‑Leninist scheme of the Enlightenment forced on historiography and the humanities in postwar Poland, especially by Celina Bobińska. J. A. Gierowski’s view of “the ideology of the Enlightenment” gradually shifted from the primacy of rationalist and materialist thinking to the aim of the pursuit of happi-ness within human society. While still emphasising economic and social factors, including the role of the bourgeoisie in the Dutch Republic, England and France, he increasingly distanced himself from the model of the Enlightenment as the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, forced on him in the early stages of his academic career. After long reflection on the question of the reception and originality of the Enlightenment in the Commonwealth, he came to appreciate the contributions of Royal Prussian burghers, the Catholic clergy and the Polish‑Lithuanian nobility. He also jettisoned the postwar dogma that the beginning of the capitalist order in Poland should be dated to 1764.

Norwegian climatology, the Republic of Letters and the Nordic Enlightenment

ABSTRACT Although natural philosophers of Enlightenment Europe shared common ideals, like reliance on reason and natural philosophy, to promote what they deemed to be progress; there were national differences in attitude and disciplinary focus. This paper takes various eligibility criteria as a starting point from which to define a Nordic Enlightenment science; and situates endeavours in climate science within visions of useful science and international conventions for scientific practice. Two perspectives are explored: the make-up of the Nordic Enlightenment science; and the Nordic natural philosopher’s various platforms for work and knowledge transfer. While historians differ as to what constitutes Enlightenment thought and spirit, I establish the existence of a Nordic Enlightenment science by identifying and examining several of its indicators. The paper concludes with a more specific discussion of climate science in Norway in which I show how climate observations performed during the eighteenth century by a sample of Norway’s clergymen and civil servants bear testimony to an internationally-oriented science, through articles produced for science journals and conventions followed for data presentation and instrumentation. The findings corroborate existing knowledge of a progress-driven, Enlightenment science in Nordic countries; reveal differences between countries, and present Norway’s early-modern climate science in an international light.

Investigating the concept of the East in Orientalism Discourse

East is one of the great geographical areas of human life that is rich in culture and has been a reservoir of knowledge and rival at various times; As Europeans' acquaintance with its sciences has led to the formation of the Enlightenment in Europe, the West has reached a stage of scientific progress and to its sense of pride and self-esteem, ignoring the rich past of the East, and to embody the East, and to establish the East and the East. It was based on the above that the paper examined the concept of Orient in Oriental discourse and analyzed it in a descriptive-analytical way. So the key questions are how the West's view of the distant past has been about the East, and why have they turned to false images instead of the actual image of the East? What is the role of Orientalist discourse in presenting negative images of the East? And what contribution did this Orientalist discourse have in colonizing the East? As the findings of this study show, the West has been trying to make self-esteem self-sufficient and overlooking the transcendent features of the East. It was, therefore, the view that, with the expansion of Orientalism and the creation of binary oppositions, he made the East a lower position, defining the good and the East with ugly attributes, and provided a false image of the East so that it could control and control the East.

Astronomical Chronology, the Jesuit China Mission, and Enlightenment History.

This article examines the use of astronomical chronology in Jesuit and secular works of history between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It suggests that the highly visible adoption of astronomical records in historical scholarship in Enlightenment Europe by Nicolas Fréret and Voltaire was entangled with debates about Chinese chronology, translated by Jesuit missionaries. The article argues that the missionary Martino Martini's experience of the Manchu conquest of China was crucial in shaping his conception of history as a discipline. Political events that unfolded in seventeenth-century China had a marked effect on discussions about emergent world history in eighteenth-century Europe.

Leaving the Pyrenees: France and Frenchmen as Perceived by British Soldiers in 1813–1814

Under the command of Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, the future first Duke of Wellington, the British Army was one of the main participants of the military conflict on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808–1814. In the autumn of 1813, fighting on the side of the Spaniards and the Portuguese against the French Army, Wellington’s army ousted the enemy from the Spanish territories and launched an offensive on French lands. This article focuses on the reception of the image of France and the French in the diaries, letters, and memoirs of British soldiers and officers who participated in the war in France in 1813–1814. After leaving the Pyrenees, the British combatants believed they had returned to enlightened Europe from the “semi-civilized” Spain and Portugal. At the same time, the British image of the French combined elements of Gallophilia and Gallophobia that dominated in English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, British military narratives contained favourable characterisations of the locals whom King George III’s soldiers seemed to be freeing from Napoleon’s tyrannical rule. British officers noted such positive qualities of the French as politeness, gallantry, and friendliness. On the other hand, for the British military, the French Army became the personification of the “Other”. The texts of the English combatants described the soldiers of Soult’s army as cruel people capable of robbing and ruining their compatriots, and the French officers were perceived by the British military as self-interested careerists, ready to serve as a tool in the hands of Napoleon for the sake of promotion.

De svenska biblarna som aldrig blev av

It has often been assumed that the late eighteenth century in Sweden never produced much of interest on the exegetical or theological plane. This was the period in which the Bible, a hotly debated text in Enlightenment Europe, was famously never translated in any accepted version and the philological, academic and theological work that was done during the Gustavian era has been underappreciated in later historiography. Picking up on the notion of a ‘religious Enlightenment,’ this article analyzes three biblical translation projects, the official Bible commission of 1773, the private translations of Bishop Johan Adam Tingstadius and the private Jewish translation of Genesis 49 by David Josephsson and Marcus Maure. Through a comparison of the translation work of Genesis 49 in these three projects this article argues for the usefulness of Bible reception in understanding the late eighteenth-century world. Philology, new historical knowledge and altered epistemic perspectives meant that the Bible, as the most central of classical and religious texts, could no longer be translated in the old 1541 tradition and that any translation of it would show the perspectives and ideologies of the translators and their intended audience, Jewish or Christian.

What was 'Newtonianism' in Enlightenment Europe?

What was 'Newtonianism' in Enlightenment Europe?

HOW TO STUDY LITERARY CULTURE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT?

It has long been known which books were read most widely throughout enlightened Europe and to which intellectual authorities particular social groups referred. After the long history of research about the 18th century, modernity has also inherited various research habits consisting mainly of constant verification of the recognised hierarchy of authors, publications, and actors of intellectual life. However, the question remains: how to study this literary culture in given continent areas? Speaking of literary culture, we mean the prevailing patterns in the reception, evaluation, assimilation and imitation of literature, information and evaluation channels, local conditions that have a decisive influence on choices and opinions. The author proposes to speak about this matter based on the recently completed work on literary culture in French-speaking Switzerland in the 18th century. Despite its specificity and evident provincialism, this example provides material for a general, theoretical and methodological reflection: is it worth researching production from the second (and further) shelf? If so, how should this material be approached? What does it tell us about the evaluation procedures? The article presents and analyses these issues.

Translation as Representation: Western Imagination of China from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

This article explores how China has been imagined in Western literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, using a series of emblematic figures to examine practices of appropriation and troping. It seeks to reveal how the historical construction and representation of China is refashioned in our time, against the background of China’s rise to global power and a concomitant growing sense of doubt, fear and hostility in Europe and North America surrounding its ascendency. Two case studies are employed to elaborate on what this article considers to be exemplifications of Orientalism in Sino-Western cultural history: Daniel Defoe and Voltaire in Enlightenment Europe, and Western popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so this article addresses how China has incrementally come to be translated and represented as a principal Other for Euro-America, and how their perceptions of, and writings about, China today echo and reinforce its translations and representations produced by the Defoe-Voltaire axis: the binary schema of demonization and romanticization. It concludes that this mechanics at work in framing China for reception and consumption by the Anglophone readership provide effective means of translating and representing China as an ideologically menacing Other, thereby begetting self-perpetuating representations.

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment

Panspermia versus Abiogenesis: A Clash of Cultures

We are too often led to believe that strident denunciations of an unorthodox position in science are always based upon rational argument and irrefutable fact. This is clearly not so in many instances, one of which relates to panspermia and the dispersal of life throughout the universe. We are led to believe that from the beginning of the enlightenment in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries CE, science has moved forward with an abandonment of all forms of irrational prejudice. Whilst we are aware that socio-cultural factors control large areas of science, particularly in regard to allocation of public funds, we often forget to assess the consequent societal damage. This is true particularly in relation to the biggest questions of science such as the origin of life and the origin of the Universe. In the interests of science, it is important to recognise the role of such influences in the assessment of competing theories, particularly those relating to the origin of life.

COUNT MICHAŁ JAN BORCH AS PATRON AND COLLECTOR: ART BETWEEN ITALY AND THE INFLANTY VOIVODESHIP IN THE AGE OF PARTITION

This article reevaluates the lifelong artistic patronage and collectingpractices of Polish-Lithuanian Count Michał Jan Borch (1753–1810/11)against the historical background of Enlightenment Europe morebroadly and specifically the Age of Partition (c. 1750–1810). This articleexamines how despite persistent financial shortcomings and politicaldifficulties, Borch staked for himself a strategic position as patron andcollector, staging a renovation of the present by engaging with latebaroque, rococo, and neoclassical Italianate forms that inflected Italyand the antique not as fixed entities but as a malleable or notionalfragments that could be arbitrated, reassembled and transformedthrough the intermediating agency of persons and objects, and relatedto the past in form, style and language, thematizing the temporalpassage between venerable and modern in a way that reanimatedthe grandeur of the past in honor of Borch’s re-envisioning of hisrestored homeland. As a case study in period self-fashioning, thearticle is structured around four portraits of Borch and his familyexecuted at crucial inflection points in his life and career.

“There will be no shortage of books… or money to purchase them.” Education and the Reputation of the Library of the College of Artillery in Segovia as a Scientific and Publishing Centre

Charles III arrived in Spain from Naples accompanied by a multidisciplinary team of military advisers, including Count Gazzola from Piacenza, who had already drawn up his plans for the urgent military reforms required for the artillery. These included the institutionalisation of that branch of the army and the foundation of the college for artillery officers and industrial engineers to run the military factories being taken over by the State. The most eye-catching element of this undertaking is the formation of its magnificent Enlightenment scientific library. A study of this library reveals an exceptional collection, the origins of the first books brought to the institution, the way it was organised and the military and scientific topics addressed. But its fundamental contribution can be measured in terms of results: indeed, textbooks were created for the cadets, as well as research works on military, artillery and scientific topics written by teachers from the college, and translations of important European scientific books. Finally, as a contribution to demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of the Crown’s investment in education for war, we highlight the work of three captains, showing the versatility they achieved thanks to their education at the college and their reputation outside it, in the service of society, as guiding lights of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (SEAP – Economic Society of Friends of the Country) in Segovia. Without this magnificent library, the research, monographs and translations – ultimately the college’s own published works which brought it great academic credit in Enlightenment Europe – would not have been possible.

Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century by Benjamin E. Fisher (review)

Reviewed by: Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century by Benjamin E. Fisher Miriam Bodian Benjamin E. Fisher. Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2020. 330 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000234 This book elucidates how one aspect of the religious upheaval in early Enlightenment Europe—the humanist and Protestant inquiry into the text of the Bible—played out in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. It first asks a question that is not in itself new: What accounts for this Jewish community's cultivation of a strikingly bibliocentric Jewish culture? Amsterdam's People of the Book considers the conventional explanation—namely, that the preference for the biblical over the postbiblical had its origins in generations of Iberian Judaizing; converso Judaizers, for lack of access to postbiblical Jewish texts, relied on Christian sources, particularly the Old Testament. Fisher acknowledges that this ingrained reliance on the Bible predisposed the Amsterdam émigrés to cultivate a biblically oriented religious discourse and educational system. But he is primarily interested in another factor, one with roots in the Dutch environment: the need to respond to new challenges presented by Protestant biblical scholarship that led members of the rabbinic elite to devote special attention to Hebrew Scripture. In particular, Fisher examines the approach to biblical texts adopted by two outstanding rabbis in the Amsterdam community, Menasseh ben Israel and Saul Levi Morteira. He argues that it was not only certain heterodox members of the community (most famously Uriel da Costa and Benedict Spinoza) who asked questions about the authenticity of the biblical text. Heretics and "orthodox" alike in the Dutch Portuguese Jewish orbit shared doubts and anxieties about the Bible's textual integrity. He thus departs from the tendency of scholars to differentiate sharply between those who were satisfied with the Amsterdam community's "return" to rabbinic Judaism and those who were not. He also challenges the common assumption that there existed a strict confessional divide between [End Page 457] rabbinic scholars and Calvinist theologians in their thinking about Scripture. He examines how both camps produced scholars with a historicist interest in Scripture and an intense concern with biblical contradictions. Moreover, Fisher seeks to show that the gulf between radical philosophers and learned traditionalists was not as deep as we commonly assume. The far greater preoccupation of scholars with radical thinkers, he suggests, has led us to lose sight of a broader, more conservative undercurrent of uncertainty about the Bible. It is in this more general climate of European doubt about sacred texts that Fisher places Menasseh ben Israel's defense of the integrity of the Hebrew Bible in his massive Conciliador (whose success Menasseh himself doubted). One of the reasons for the bibliocentrism of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews, Fisher argues, was theological. A Protestant environment in which salvation was the goal reinforced the strong and lingering belief cultivated by these Jews in Iberia that the Hebrew Bible was the source of what one needed for "salvation." The Portuguese Jews' unusual focus on salvation, and their exceptional knowledge of the New Testament, were among the reasons that motivated Morteira to engage in a singularly granular critique of the Gospels. Fisher concludes that in his New Testament studies Morteira was influenced by the historicist biblical exegesis of Protestant scholars like Vossius, Scaliger, Grotius, and Selden; he speculates that Morteira may also have been inspired by the historicist perspective on the New Testament adopted by earlier rabbinic scholars (Profayt Duran and Shimon ben Zemaḥ Duran in particular) as well as by Leon de Modena. Fisher's analysis of the work of Saul Levi Morteira (a figure dealt with at greater length than any other in this book) addresses a serious lacuna in the history of Amsterdam's religious elite. Marc Saperstein, who has meticulously examined Morteira's sermons, did not similarly analyze the latter's Tratado da verdade da lei de Moisés (1659–1660), a demanding work that, as Fisher shows, is essential for fully understanding Morteira's intellectual trajectory. Although this lengthy treatise was published by H. P. Salomon...

Meertaligheid als strategie voor zelfontplooiing in de briefwisselingen van Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni en Isabelle de Charrière

In Enlightenment Europe multilingualism was an omnipresent fact. Even the correspondences of eighteenth-century writers gave clear evidence of – often strategically chosen – forms of multilingualism. Up until today, the question arises as to why early modern writers used (various forms of) multilingualism in their letters. This paper investigates, for the first time, the hypothesis that early modern writers used multilingualism in their letter writing as a strategy for intellectual and authorial self-fashioning. To that end, it explores the multilingual dimensions of two women writers’ correspondences. Studying the way in which Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792) and Isabelle de Charrière (1740- 1805) actively (re)shaped their intellectual authority and authorial identity by means of multilingualism will prove to provide an excellent stepping stone towards more (comparative) research on the forms and functions of multilingualism in the (life) writing of eighteenth-century male and female writers.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Anxiety in the Wesleyan Spirit: A Core Theological Theme?

AbstractEighteenth‐century writer and reformer John Wesley does not use ‘anxiety’ in its modern philosophical or psychological sense. However, Wesley carefully distinguishes between forms of religious fear and ‘nervous disorders’ throughout his published theological and medical works, indicating the felt quality of anxiety as a central theme. This is evinced in his published journals, sermons such as ‘The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption’ (1746), ‘The Wilderness State’ and ‘Heaviness through Manifold Temptations’ (both published in 1760), and less‐conspicuous works such as Primitive Physic (1747), ‘Thoughts on Nervous Disorders’ (1786), as well as his publication on electricity, The Desideratum: Or Electricity Made Plain and Useful (1759). Wesley’s treatment of ‘anxiety‐qualia’ as religious predicament and physical disorder is instructive in terms of placing Wesley vis‐à‐vis the backdrop of Enlightenment Europe and its scientific and philosophical interests, which has been the subject of recent historical and theological scholarship related to Wesley. Wesley was a preacher and revivalist to be certain, whose emphasis on perceptible inspiration and the assurance of faith cultivated a global Protestant denomination, but he was also a curious thinker with a fondness for science and faith, steeped in the intellectual developments of the North Atlantic, early‐modern world.