Enlightenment Historians Research Articles

CHALLENGES FACING RESEARCH ON THE HISTORY OF FORMERLY UNIFIED HISTORICAL TERRITORIES IN THE LIGHT OF ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY: A CASE FROM THE CORNER OF THE HABSBURG HEREDITARY TERRITORIES

This article aims to treat some problems connected with research on the Enlightenment and focuses on the case of Enlightenment historiography in the area between the Alps and the upper Adriatic. The article compares two Enlightenment historians (Carlo Morelli and Anton Tomaž Linhart) from the neighbouring Habsburg heredity provinces (the Duchy of Carniola and the County of Gorizia) in the area between the Alps and the upper Adriatic. The two scholars are emblematic of the challenges that research on the Enlightenment historiography of the then historically unified territories is facing today, in a period when nation-centred interpretations of history still retain an important role.

Enlightenment and Modernity, Historians and Philosophers

Abstract Since the 1990s, historians of the Enlightenment have been notably keen to emphasise their subject’s contribution to modernity. In doing so, they have not shied away from ground usually occupied by philosophers, identifying Enlightenment’s modernity with a system of values and even with specific philosophical positions. This article asks how this has come about, and what have been its consequences. It does so by offering an account of Enlightenment historians’ relations with philosophy since the 1960s, when Franco Venturi repudiated Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical understanding of Enlightenment and urged historians to adopt a different approach. Before 1989, it will be argued, historical study of Enlightenment expanded rapidly but with little reference to philosophers, or interest in demonstrating the modernity of Enlightenment. It was the challenge of Postmodernism (however intellectually chaotic it seemed) in the 1980s, and still more Jürgen Habermas’s vigorous espousal of modernity, which gave historians their cue. Three dimensions of the ensuing association of Enlightenment with modernity are identified: Enlightenment and the public sphere; Radical Enlightenment and one-substance metaphysics; and Enlightenment as cosmopolitan and global. In conclusion, it is argued that while this enthusiasm for modernity appears to be on the wane, the episode has underlined the impossibility of separating historical and philosophical study of Enlightenment.

Protestantism and liberty: Catharine Macaulay’s politics of religion as a response to David Hume

ABSTRACTCatharine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I (1763–1783) was intended by its author and received by its audience as, in part, a response to David Hume’s History of England. Macaulay’s writing has been read as a Whig counter to Hume’s Tory interpretation of England’s seventeenth-century history; more recent work has explored whether Macaulay or Hume has a better claim to be considered an “enlightenment historian”. This article will suggest that Macaulay’s views on the role of England’s Protestant belief and practice in the development and maintenance of the nation’s liberties contained, in the earlier volumes of her History, some of her substantive and important refutations of Hume’s arguments, and, further, that Macaulay’s well-argued claim that Protestantism was instrumental in the formation of England’s national character and potential enjoyment of political liberties was received by her readers as a particularly valuable part of her historical argument. Her accounts of Roman Catholic violence against Protestant victims at the Siege of La Rochelle and in the Irish Massacre of 1641 became some of the most quoted parts of her historical writing.

Edward Gibbon's Autobiographies and the Historicist Critique of Enlightenment Historiography

This article examines the manner in which Edward Gibbon attempted to mold his public image for posterity, while writing and rewriting the various versions of his autobiography. It highlights Gibbon's attempts to anticipate the critical reading of his memoirs and fashion his public image, not least regarding his attitude toward religion. It also discusses, in this context, his views on the proper manner of writing history, and how they developed throughout his intellectual career, and specifically in relation to his great historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This assessment of Gibbon is then used to criticize the "historicist" critique of Enlightenment historiography, which has blamed Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians for being improperly subjective in discussing past eras. In contrast with this view, the modernity of Enlightenment historiography is emphasized.

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's History of Modern Europe (1789–1792)

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

Ottoman Despotism and Islamic Constitutionalism in Mehmed Ali’s Egypt*

This article examines an engagement with the European debate on the ‘despotic’ nature of the Ottoman Empire, by a writer from part of the Ottoman lands themselves. In 1842, Khalīfa ibn Maḥmūd, an Egyptian official of the state of Mehmed Ali, translated the Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson’s A View of the Progress of Society in Europe (1769). In an appendix to his translation, Khalifa takes issue with Robertson’s description of the Ottoman Empire as ‘despotic’. To refute this claim, he makes use especially of an 1825 work entitled Charte turque by the revolutionary soldier and political writer Alfio Grassi, making the argument that the Ottoman Empire is in fact a constitutional state. Khalifa’s text thus offers a rare example of the appropriation of a specific strand in European writing about ‘the Orient’, in the interests of Mehmed Ali’s Ottoman-Egyptian state and, within it, of Arabic-speaking officials like Khalifa and his mentor Rifāʾa al-Ṭahṭāwi. This thus provides an early example of ‘Islamic constitutionalist’ thinking, as well as directing attention to the specific priorities of Mehmed Ali’s regime and his rivalry with the Ottoman Sultan, in the years after his defeat at the hands of Ottoman and British forces in 1840.

A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY

ABSTRACTGlobal history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill‐reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world‐making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world‐historical process,” a cognitive framework that co‐emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process‐template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world‐historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present‐day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”

Tradycja rękopiśmienna przepowiedni elekcyjnej Jerzego Joachima Retyka. Analiza przekazów i edycja

The paper aims to organise the issues concerning the great variety of manuscripts jointly described as the “election prophecy,” supposedly made by Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), an astronomer, astrologer, and the student of Nicolaus Copernicus. The study contains a proposal of a model showing how the original Latin text of the “prophecy,” the autograph of which has not been preserved to this day and which had the form of a horoscope diagram with commentary by Rheticus, underwent contamination and interpolation, while at the same time serving as the basis for the creation of two vernacular traditions of the text – Polish and German. The analysis of the preserved copies consists of the description of the most reliable witness of the “prophecy” tradition – the copy made in the 18th century by Wrocław-based Enlightenment historian Samuel Beniamin Klose on the basis of the available documents of Andrzej Dudycz, which introduced the text into wider circulation – and of the discussion of other accounts which can be found in European libraries. The transformations undergone by the text of the prophecy between late 16th century and early 18th century are depicted in source materials annexed to the paper, containing the editions of several Latin and Polish versions of the text, as well as its German version.

Restorationist Counter‐Enlightenment: Thomas M'Crie on the Concept of Civil Liberty

Enlightenment notions for Counter‐Enlightenment purposes have not to date been used to provide a comprehensive context for Scottish religious history‐writing in the age of Counter‐Revolution and Restoration. The Evangelical historian and divine Thomas M'Crie's studies on Scottish Reformation history, Life of John Knox and Life of Andrew Melville, published in 1811 and 1819 respectively, exhibit an abundance of historiographical material for research. M'Crie was among the most renowned writers of his own time, but his historical works have been briefly passed over in recent secondary sources. The main purpose of this study is to rescue M'Crie's historical works on the Scottish Reformation past from near oblivion. This article argues that M'Crie produced an apology for the Scottish Reformation, adopting an aggressive style that attacked Scottish Enlightenment historians and thinkers such as William Robertson and David Hume, especially in the matter of their treatment of John Knox and Andrew Melville. M'Crie tried to restore his chosen past in order to influence the religious and political affairs of Scotland. In M'Crie's Counter‐Enlightenment historiography, the concept of civil liberty and Presbyterianism become interchangeable in a Restorationist religio‐political discourse. That is why M'Crie's enthusiasm for the Scottish Reformation constitutes the most representative example of the Presbyterian interpretation, which held its own against Enlightenment influence.

Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (review)

Reviewed by: Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers Mary Beth Wetli Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance. Edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. 504. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-1571134882. Lord Woodhouselee’s 1792 translation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) kept Samuel Taylor Coleridge reading with “chill and trembling” in the wee hours of the morning; suddenly, he “could read no more” and wrote immediately to Robert Southey, asking, “Who is this Schiller? This convulser of the heart?” (9). Coleridge, who himself translated Schiller’s Wallenstein in 1800, thus posed the framing question for the 2009 Long Beach Schiller Conference commemorating the 250th anniversary of Schiller’s birth. Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance is a collection of twenty-seven revised lectures presented at this conference, which together challenge the view that Schiller was an inveterate idealist at hopeless remove from the heterogeneous reality of his day. Instead, this collection showcases recent scholarship on Schiller’s interdisciplinary engagement in political and moral philosophy, historiography, aesthetics, and the natural sciences; its reflection on his literary production; and the recent Schillerian renaissance on the English-language stage. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in the structure of the volume, which is divided into five parts: Schiller’s drama and poetry, his aesthetics and philosophy, his historiography and politics, his reception, and current issues in Schiller studies. These essays confront many familiar conceptions of Schiller, including his alleged flight from political reality into an aesthetic ideal as his disillusionment with the violence of the French Revolution grew; the charge that his study of Kant and subsequent philosophical essays are the stuff of a mere epigone; that his œuvre is best divided into neat phases that emphasize rupture over continuity; that Schiller’s political thinking is both antimodern and naïve. Essays by Maria del Rosario Acosta López (“‘Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own’: From the Aesthetic to the Political in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters”) and Henrik Sponsel (“Was sagte dieser Schiller (damals)? Schillers Antworten auf seine Kritiker nach 1945”), for example, challenge the notion espoused by Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, and others that Schiller’s aesthetics, enabled by a naïve idealism, led inexorably to an aestheticization of politics. Instead, they argue that Schiller was well aware of the dangers that such an aestheticization presents and actively sought to thwart them. [End Page 179] These and other essays also reflect an increasing recognition of Schiller’s realism. Noting the emphasis placed on Schiller the idealist in the anniversary years of 2005/2009, Wolfgang Riedel reclaims Schiller’s realism (“Religion and Violence in Schiller’s Late Tragedies”). Without diminishing Schiller’s enthusiasm for the ideal, Riedel points to Schiller’s relationship to history and his secular portrayal of religion as evidence of his grounding in reason. This emphasis on Schiller’s realism is likewise evident in T. J. Reed’s rousing critique of critics of Schiller’s historiography (“So Who Was Naïve? Schiller as Enlightenment Historian and His Successors”); his compelling argument would be strengthened by incorporating more of the blossoming scholarship devoted to Schiller the historian in the past twelve years, however. Of the many reckonings with Schiller’s philosophical forerunners in aesthetics, two essays are particularly notable: Laura Anna Macor’s article “Die Moralphilosophie des jungen Schiller: Ein ‘Kantianer ante litteram’” and David Pugh’s “Aesthetic Humanism and Its Foes: The Perspective from Halle.” Macor disputes the primacy often accorded to Kant at the expense of Schiller’s own intellectual autonomy and challenges the partitioning of Schiller’s work into discrete phases. Rather, she argues, the moral philosophy that he articulates in his youthful works—essays, dramas, and prose—is consistent with those ideas he formulates after reading Kant and which are rooted in Schiller’s steady desire to create a pure morality independent of religion that can be transformed into action. David Pugh likewise argues that discussions of Schiller’s aesthetics should move beyond Kant to include Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten...

On the Margins: The Mediating Function of Footnotes in Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts-Bay

Permanently exiled from his beloved Massachusetts to spend the rest of his life as an alien in the English nation whose authority he had tried to uphold, Thomas Hutchinson, the historian and last civilian royal governor of Massachusetts, seems to embody the image of the Loyalists of the American Revolution as "losers." Paralyzed by his conservative ideology and his dual loyalties to America and Britain, Hutchinson has seemed for modern scholars to epitomize the tragic fate of the many Loyalists marginalized by their attachment to an outmoded imperial structure at a time when the modern nation-state appeared to be in the process of supplanting earlier imperial forms. Yet Hutchinson's work as a historian suggests that the Loyalist historians were more versatile and in tune with the prevailing intellectual currents of their time than the image of them as losers has assumed. Grappling with the same issues that engaged the leading Enlightenment historians of his time—namely, how to integrate their ideal of philosophical history with the classical tradition of exemplary history and their commitment to antiquarian scholarship—Hutchinson used the footnotes in his History of Massachusetts-Bay to bring together these different genres of historical writing. As he did so, Hutchinson expressed an impartial and cosmopolitan outlook that enabled him at once to transcend and to mediate between his colonial and imperial loyalties. Thus, the apparent colorlessness and incoherence of Hutchinson's history were actually the product of his effort to negotiate between both his colonial and imperial loyalties and conflicting definitions of history as a discipline.

Wallachian Settlers in the Baltic Sea Region. A Humanist Tale of Migration and Colonization, and its Implications for the Mental Maps of Early Modern

During the 1550s, humanists at the University of Wittenberg in Germany first suggested that Wallachians from present-day Romania had migrated to the Baltic Sea, settled in Livonia and became the ancestors of Estonians and Latvians. This colonization allegedly took place at some time in the 5th or 6th century AD. Although such a theory seems bizarre from a modern point of view, it was considered a perfectly reasonable hypothesis by contemporary scholars. For approximately 150 years, up to the early 18th century, the idea of a Wallachian colonization of Livonia retained its place in the historiography of the region, before it was refuted by the more sober-minded approach of enlightenment historians. The paper provides an overview of the scholarly theories on a kinship between Wallachians, Estonians and Latvians that were formulated between 1550 and 1700. Although these fanciful hypotheses are not supported by any discernible historical facts, they provide important insights on the position of Wallachia and Livonia in the symbolic geography and the mental maps of the early modern res publica litterarum.

Orality, Literacy, Popular Culture: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study

distinctive and groundbreaking in many respects, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) is typical of eighteenth-century lexicons in its definition of “oral” as “delivered by mouth; not written” and “orally” as “by mouth; without writing.” Nathan Bailey, who compiled his Dictionarium Britannicum in 1730 and John Ash, whose New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1775, draw the same attention to the physical production of sound by the body, and to the opposition of the oral to the literate arts: “delivered by the mouth or voice,” they assert, “not committed to writing.” The clarity and confidence of these definitions suggests that there was, from the early part of the eighteenth century, an awareness of a conceptual difference between spoken and written language. 1 Indeed, Nicholas Hudson (1996) has argued that extended and conscious differentiation of this kind arises for the first time in this period, as the work of the numerous lexicographers, grammarians, and conjectural historians who began to investigate the origins of languages, alphabetic script, and the development of modern civilizations drew new attention to the oral dimension of language. Prior to this, although it was acknowledged that the oral and literate differed as modes of transmission, accounts of linguistic structure and development were constructed primarily with reference to written modes. On the basis of this understanding, a series of narratives that seek to chart the contours of eighteenth-century attitudes towards these two communicative modes has been commonly accepted. The first posits that the work of enlightenment historians and antiquarians situates the relationship between oral and literate practices within a strongly progressivist account of the development of modern civilized society from primitive and barbarous origins. A series of related oppositions structures this account, cementing a connection between the character of a given culture and its primary mode of communication: orality and literacy, savagery and politeness, passion and reason, ignorance and knowledge, superstition and skepticism. The second narrative adds the coda that for a significant number of eighteenth-century thinkers, Jean Jacques Rousseau being the prime example, this trajectory was not one of progress but of decline, entailing the loss of an ideal state of natural genius, unfettered humanity, and pure

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII trained in classical history as well as ancient and modern Greek. The magnitude of his achievement in these two volumes is dazzling. In addition toproviding richlydetailed notes to support the reader's under standing of the often obscure his torical contexts of the poems, he also sets the bar for authenticity in translatingunusually high. Mendelsohn demythologizes the popular notion that Cavafy's characteristically plain lines? which are freeof similes and meta phors?are actually a kind of prose masquerading as lyric poetry. He emphasizes the complex, intricately woven texture of the poet's lan guage, which combines the classic forms of vocabulary and grammar known as "Katharevousa" with demotic Greek. Unlike previous translators of Cavafy, not only do Mendelsohn's translations convey the mingling of archaic and modern Greek in the original, but they also restore the rhythm and visual for mat ofCavafy's metrically inventive "tango" poems, inwhich each line contains two fragmented half-lines of threebeats divided by an expanse of white space. To these substan tial innovations, Mendelsohn adds a faithful adherence to the poet's pattern ofwriting lines thatare often enjambed or end-rhymed, compen sating forthe latter with slant rhyme or assonance. The remarkable results give us the closest English equiva lence todate of theelegant Cavafian diction, tone, and music. As a young man of letters writ ing during the 1880s and 1890s, Cavafy was more active as a scholar thana poet, although hewas already writing and publishing poems. Then at some time early in the twentieth century, as his fellow poet George Seferis commented, "something extraordinary happens." Cavafy's MMIIIIIII 11 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIII Mill Illlllllllllll passion for history, invigorated by reading the eighteenth-century Enlightenment historian Gibbons and the nineteenth-century Roman tic historian Paparrigopoulos, merged with the poet's homosex ual passion. A lover of secrets and mysteries, Cavafy began to fusehis focus on marginal figures forgotten in thecracks ofpost-Hellenic history with his own secret homoerotic life conducted inAlexandria's less repu tablequarters.Now Cavafy's poems took on their hauntingly nostalgic tone?the voice of an advice-giver who isworld-weary yetdeeply sym pathetic to human weakness. The principal players in these poems are not the vulnerable his toric figures themselves but time and memory. Although Cavafy's speakers rue the passing of time, theyexalt in theway itperfects and revivifies desire. The older speaker of the exquisitely translated unfin ished poem "It Must Have Been theSpirits" feels a surge of freedom recalling a night of sensual plea sure: "My soul was released; the poor thing,it's / always constrained by the weight of years." Another iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiii aging lover savors anew his origi nal euphoric intensity in the act of remembering and poeticizing it: "as I write, after so many years have passed!, / in my solitaryhouse, I am drunk again." Yet memory doesn't simply evoke the force of love? it clarifies present experience. The pagan speaker in "Mires:Alexandria in 340 a.D." mourns the loss of his companion inpassional pursuits yet suddenly realizes in the midst of his friend's Christian funeral rites that Mires was less an intimate than a strangerwho had followed an alien god; he flees "before their Christian ity/ could get hold of, could alter, the memory ofMires." Although accomplished trans lations of Cavafy's collected poems already exist?notably those of Rae Dalven and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard?Mendelsohn has given us the firstEnglish transla tions of thepoet's thirty unfinished poems, which he continually refined during his lifetimebut never con sidered ready forpublication. While the poems are gracefully rendered, the reason why the poet consid ered them incomplete seems clear: they are essentially narrative and descriptive and, with the exception of "ItMust Have Been the Spirits," they lack the spark of philosophic transformationthattypifies Cavafy's most memorable verse. Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey Marie Etienne.King of a Hundred Horsemen. Marilyn Hacker, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008. xvii + 203 pages. $25. isbn978-0-374 Marilyn Hacker received the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize, established by theNational Poetry Series in 2007, for her translation 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 i^^^H 701World Literature Today , of Roi des cent cavaliers, by Marie 1 Etienne, the...

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

ABSTRACTLeon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.

“Weltliteratur” – zuerst 1773 bei August Ludwig Schlözer

The term “Weltliteratur”, generally assumed to have been coined by Goethe in 1827, was actually used for the first time in 1773 by August Ludwig Schlözer. The German Enlightenment historian used the term in a dissertation on Icelandic literature and history, in an age when growing curiosity about the “margins” of Europe and beyond pointed towards a vision of “Weltgeschichte”, a history of universal human development. This early use of the term seems to have been forgotten, although the relevant passage was quoted already in 1920 by the Polish scholar Sigmund von Lempicki.

Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great: Candide , his Pothumous Mémoires, scarmendado , and les questions sur l'encyclopédie

TOWARDS the end of his Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand (1759-63), Voltaire indulges in the sort of spurious high-mindedness that later generations found distasteful in his work, and which undermined, in certain quarters, his reputation as a moralist. Relating Peter the Great's alleged role in the death by torture of his heir the Tsarevitch Alexis (1690-1718), the Enlightenment historian reminds the reader that in modern times the standards of universal criticism--in other words, the requirement to take into account all printed and manuscript sources, as well as personal testimony--make it more difficult than hitherto to impugn unfairly the reputation of historical figures. Il suffisait, he writes, d'une ligne dans Tacite ou dans Suetone, et meme dans les auteurs des legendes, pour rendre un prince odieux au monde, et pour perpetuer son opprobre de en siecle (857-858). What Voltaire is in effect saying is that historians of the past routinely used biased and carefully selected data to formulate unbalanced and unfair judgments and that, by contrast, the modern historian should recognize the duty to be both impartial and truthful. Voltaire characteristically ignored this worthy ideal when, at the same time as he was writing the history of Peter the Great, he penned his Memoires pour servir a la vie de M. de Voltaire ecrits par lui-meme. These include a description of Frederick the Great which is partial, biased, and malicious, especially in relating the King's alleged homosexuality. How is it, we might ask, that could Voltaire act in a way wholly unfaithful to his own principles? Voltaire's Memoires only appeared after his death. There is nevertheless considerable evidence to suggest that he intended the manuscript for publication. A pirated edition was printed in 1784 under the title of La Vie privee du roi de Prusse. The book's scandalous revelations guaranteed that it was promptly banned by the authorities in France following a formal complaint by the Prussian Minister Goltz. The Memoires remained outside the Voltairean canon until Beaumarchais brought out the last (and seventieth) volume of the Kehl edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres in 1789, after the King of Prussia's death. Anticipating the outrage that publication of the Memoires in the Kehl edition would unleash, the marquis de Villette--who incidentally was married to Voltaire's adopted niece--claimed in 1788 that Voltaire wrote them after his return from Prussia and that he burnt the manuscript following his reconciliation with Frederick sometime in the mid to late 1750s. Villette adds, however, that before Voltaire destroyed the manuscript, two copies had been made without his knowledge. We now know that Voltaire wrote his Memoires in the late 1750s, and that, far from destroying the manuscript, he commissioned at least five copies of it himself. One of these copies is in the same hand as the La Valliere manuscript of Candide (Wade 141). Voltaire must have known--indeed he must have hoped--that his Memoires would be published after his death. But why? In a recent, annotated edition of the Memoires, Jacqueline Hellegouarc'h conjectures that Voltaire's purpose in composing this narrative was both personal and literary. On the personal side, Voltaire never forgave Frederick II for ordering his incarceration at Frankfurt and for holding him and his niece prisoner for five weeks in the late spring and early summer of 1753. Recent biographers agree that that incident had an effect on Voltaire as profound as the thrashing he had received some thirty years earlier from le chevalier de Rohan (Pomeau 737-748). Voltaire had this in common with the Bourbons: he never forgave and he never forgot. The malice evident in the Memoires has persuaded many that Voltaire's observations on Frederick the Great's sexual habits were not reliable. Carlyle, notably, dismissed Voltaire's assertions as a scandalous libel and most academic historians have followed suit (1:11-12). …

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ANATOLIA TODAY?”: ISLAMIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TURKISH REPUBLIC

myth form and deform intellectual trends as part of the intimately linked processes of nation building and Westernization in Turkey? What role did European and European-trained scholars play in integrating the Islamic past with a new Turkish and Anatolian state ideology and identity? One day in 1929, Mustafa Kemal, president of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have showed Afet, the oldest of his adopted daughters and a high school teacher, a book he was reading. It was a work by the French Enlightenment historian, Joseph de Guignes, the Histoire generale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs, et des autres Tatares occidentaux, published in five vol umes between 1756 and 1758. He pointed out a pas sage that stated that the Turks were a yellow race sharing a common origin with the Mongols in Mon golia. Afet reportedly responded, Bunu cah?ahm, Let's work on this.2 Both Mustafa Kemal and Afet were intimately involved in the national project of writing a history of the Turks, mainly, it seems, in order to educate Turkish high school students. (Education and cul ture were very much of one piece in the early years of the Turkish Republic. In 1935, the Ministry of Educa tion [Maarif Vekaleti] changed its name to the Minis try of Culture [Kiiltiir Bakanhgi] while continuing to translate its own name into French as Ministere de

“Singende Seele” or “unsingbar”? Forkel, Ambros, and the Forces behind the Ockeghem Reception during the Late 18th and 19th Centuries

ABSTRACT In 1868, Wilhelm Ambros lauded a number of compositions by Johannes Ockeghem, including the triple canon Prenez sur moy. Emphasizing the expressive qualities of this music, he suggested that its composer had breathed into it a “singing soul.” Some decades earlier, Johann Forkel also focused on Prenez sur moy, dismissing it, however, as “unsingable.” The present study examines the cultural and intellectual forces that gave rise to these strikingly contradictory assessments. Enlightenment historians are generally thought to have charted the flow of history according to a progressive paradigm. Late medieval music often fared poorly viewed from this perspective, drawing criticism for its failure to reflect the refinements of modern music. Initially, Forkel toed this line, but his comments about examples of 15th-century music in the Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik also reveal his capacity to strike a relativist pose regarding some of them, and even to offer unqualified praise. The changes in Forkel's position are traced to philosophical writings known to have been part of his library, and to his conviction that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was superior to that of his own time. Taking that stand surely must have raised questions in his mind about his earlier commitment to the progressive view of history. Forkel's openness to new historiographical approaches suggests that he, of all Enlightenment writers on music, might have found value in Ockeghem's music, all the more so because he was better informed about Ockeghem's preeminent stature in his own day than anyone else at the time, and owing to his awareness of a current German tradition that regarded Ockeghem as “the Bach of his day.” Yet Forkel's deprecation of Ockeghem's music is among the strongest in the literature. His negative stand can be traced to his admiration for a 16th-century tract on teaching music, the Compendium musices by Adrian Petit Coclico, who demonizes Ockeghem as an icon of the scholastic approach to music. Forkel's own commitment to a humanistic orientation in music pedagogy surely led him to view Coclico as a kindred spirit.

The Enlightenment Feminist Project of Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women (1810)

The nineteenth-century British historian Lucy Aikin's ambitious four-part poem Epistles on Women (1810) marks both her first important contribution to women's historiography and a compelling example of Enlightenment feminist historiography. To some extent, Aikin is building on the work of male Enlightenment historians who had evaluated the status of women in different times and places and correlated it to social progress. However, she not only restricts her focus exclusively to women, but also makes a concerted effort to resolve some of the tensions apparent in previous accounts of the relationship between women and social progress. Especially striking is her mediation of two distinct historical models of femininity, which I have called the republican and commercial models of femininity, the outlines of both of which we can trace in the work of male Enlightenment historians. By suggesting that through proper education women might combine the best aspects of each model, Aikin strategically advances the project of controversial feminists like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had taken inspiration from the republican model of femininity in their demands for improvements to female education.