Enlightenment Writers Research Articles

Enlightenment Rhetoric Reconsidered: Hume’s Discursive Transcendence in “Of Eloquence”

ABSTRACT The phrase “Enlightenment rhetoric” typically denotes discourses bent on rejecting classical oratorical styles in favor of purportedly scientific ones. Likewise, scholars often associate Enlightenment rhetorical styles with the scientific epistemologies that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconsiders Enlightenment rhetoric by analyzing David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Eloquence.” More specifically, the article argues that the Scottish Enlightenment context necessitated a rhetoric that compensated for the discursive limitations of new scientific worldviews. In so doing, the article argues that Hume verbalizes the transcendent dimension of classical eloquence in ways commensurate with the emphasis on perspicuity emerging in English culture, a rhetorical maneuver that the author calls discursive transcendence. Hume’s “Of Eloquence” thus serves as a case study demonstrating how an Enlightenment writer advanced a rhetoric that both rejects and pulls from prior rhetorical traditions, constituting a new understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric.

Воспитательная функция искусства в английской журналистике и литературе первой половины XVIII века

The aim of the study is to identify the features of the idea about the educational function of art as one of the leading ideals of the Enlightenment in the English periodicals and literary works of the early XVIII century. The paper defines the role of art in the iconic works of enlightenment writers, identifies the techniques of describing the educational function of art used by publicists. The scientific novelty of the study lies in actualising the role of educational ideology in a comprehensive analysis of the lexemes and techniques used to interpret the ideal of the educational function of art in the periodicals of R. Steele, J. Addison and the literary works by H. Fielding, D. Defoe carried out for the first time. As a result, it has been proved that publicists of the Enlightenment employed such techniques as creating the images of the characters embodying the best qualities of a person; using humour and satire; turning to social commentary and philosophical reflection.

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

The republicanisation of empire between Universal Peace and war in the early United States

ABSTRACT Enlightenment writers have proposed projects to secure long-lasting peace within the belligerent environment of the European political landscape since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Madison and Rousseau, both declared critics of the Perpetual Peace project of the Abbé de St.-Pierre, were united in their opinion on the primacy of popular sovereignty within states to fulfil the goal of universal peace on the international level. Whereas the American constitution was built on a ‘peace pact’ to secure the union’s survival, the French republican experiment was confronted with hostility from their European neighbours at the very outset. French minister Genêt’s plans for French intervention on the American continent, following the Girondins’ belligerent strategy against European monarchies, however, threatened to involve the early American Republic in universal war rather than peace. The so-called ‘Empire of Liberty’ that Thomas Jefferson, as well as Genêt, proclaimed for the future United States was based on a melding of unionist with republican principles, as it had been in the thinking of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, one of the fiercest opponents of the Anglo-Scottish incorporated union of 1707. This article aims to examine this connection as well as its enabling of a reconciliation between republicanism and the striving for empire as it took place on the American continent in the nineteenth century.

Детство в антропологической теории А. Н. Радищева

The article studies the diversity of ideas on the role of childhood in human fate in the work On man, his death and immortality (1792-1796) by A. N. Radishchev. The author pays particular attention to the main features of the moral ideal of a human being which, from the point of view of the Enlightenment writer, should be achieved through upbringing. In connection with this set of issues, A. N. Radishchev’s methodological foundations for considering the phenomenon of a human being from his chosen perspective are consistently studied; the characteristics of the laws of personality development specified by the thinker, external and ‘internal’ factors affecting its establishment are analyzed; motivations and evaluation criteria of diverse human activity in nature and society are also looked into; the writer’s contribution to the formation of developmental psychology and the reasons of a child’s individual characteristics mentioned by him are being comprehended. The treatise On man, his death and immortality is the most significant element not only in the development of the ideological, philosophical, ethical, but also aesthetic opinions of A. N. Radishchev as well. This predominantly concerns the issue of how the treatise affects the development of the childhood topic in the Russian literature. From this perspective the present article is an attempt to consider the writer’s attitude to childhood not on the level of separate quotes which occasionally appear in literary criticism, but in its correlation with the system of his philosophical ideas of man. The article also outlines the prospects of research of A. N. Radishchev’s work from the point of view of his influence on the development of the childhood image in the Russian literature.

La Critique du préjugé au prisme de l’herméneutique (1680–1780). Sous la direction de Muriel Brot et Claire Fauvergue

In the Introduction, editors Muriel Brot and Claire Fauvergue state the aim of their volume: to nuance, by drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s re-evaluation of prejudice as the necessary ground of thought and experience, the prevailing assumption that Enlightenment is single-mindedly antagonistic to prejudices. Demonstrating the complexity of approaches to prejudice in Enlightenment writing, the collection seeks to show that post-war criticism of ‘le préjugé contre le préjugé’ by Gadamer and Theodor W. Adorno (discussed in Paolo Quintili’s closing article) might in fact be congruent with much eighteenth-century thought. At the heart of the volume is the claim that Enlightenment thinkers indeed sought to free themselves as far as possible from the distortions of prejudice to understand phenomena, but not by rejecting situated points of view in favour of an all-conquering universal reason: rather, by the inhabitation of multiple perspectives. The volume thus applies the ‘prisme de l’hermeneutique’ to the light of Enlightenment. In the opening articles, Jean-Christophe Abramovici and Céline Spector trace Bayle’s and Montesquieu’s ambivalence towards certain prejudices, while Stéphanie Géhanne Gavoty asks exactly what contemporaries understood by the phrase ‘préjugé légitime’, frequently encountered in apologist and anti-philosophe writing. Christophe Martin reintegrates the imagination into the critique of prejudice, arguing that philosophers from Descartes and Cyrano de Bergerac to Rousseau, via Fontenelle, Montesquieu, and Diderot, used critique not to banish the fabulous from the world, but rather to speculate on what might be possible against the prejudice of the vraisemblable. This careful volume is not an introductory work, but Martin’s article would be invaluable to students keen to get a handle on the ambiguities of critique as it operates across a spread of genres (fundamental to our teaching of the Enlightenment). The volume then focuses in on a couple of key thinkers, treating Diderot and his collaborators in five articles, and Holbach in two. All are informative and stimulating within their narrower purview, with Fauvergue and Brot’s own pieces offering the most expansive takes on Diderot’s deployment of prismatic perspectives. Both argue that Diderot’s ‘universal’ constituted an opening out to the other, not a refusal of difference: as Brot writes, citing Gadamer, ‘comprendre revient à comprendre autrement’ (p. 171; original emphases). The penultimate article, by Luigi Delia, deserves particular mention for advancing the thesis of the volume through a less familiar case study: the Swiss Christian encyclopaedia project Code de l’humanité. Delia argues that the contributors to this revisionist encyclopaedia also evoked multiple perspectives, but that they took revelation as their unifying viewpoint, rather than the bird’s-eye view of the philosopher/historian. Reading the article ‘Homme’, Delia suggests that the contributors’ prejudice against materialism was not an unreflecting bias, but rather, per Gadamer’s definition, a fixed point of departure from which to reason. Their arguments against materialism actually incorporate some of Holbach’s optimistic assertions as unmarked citations, an incorporation which should be understood as an example of Gadamer’s ‘médiation et […] fusion d’horizons’ (p. 228). This unexpected encounter reminds us of the continued humanist orientation of many Enlightenment writers, who aimed ‘moins à séparer les individus sur la base de leurs croyances et de leurs préjugés, qu’à enseigner aux hommes à être humains, c’est-à-dire, […] “bienveillants et bienfaisants”’ (p. 228).

Проблемы истории адыгской литературы, критики и просветительства в исследованиях академика А. Х. Хакуашева

The article highlights the problems of the Adyghe literary process, the scientific resolution of which was carried out in the works of a prominent scientist and teacher Andrei Khanashkhovich Hakuashev (1929-2022), who made a significant contribution to the formation of the Adyghe (Circassian) International Academy of Sciences, being the academician-secretary of its historical and philological department. Among the multifaceted activities of the scientist, the article focuses on the issues of restoring the biography and creativity of the Adyghe enlightenment writers of the XIX century, literary criticism, creativity, classics of Kabardian literature by A. A. Shogentsukov, extensive journalism, as well as work on the creation of curricula, textbooks and teaching aids for schools and universities. The facts of A. H. Hakuashev's biography, which influenced his research and teaching activities, are also touched upon. The evaluation and merits of the scientist in the formation of the Adyghe literature and personnel training were also noted.

Improving Experiences: Eighteenth-Century European Encounters with Arabs

ABSTRACT This article shows how some early-modern British travellers found in the idea of travelling among and writing about Arabs an opportunity to reflect on a changing society at home. In Enlightenment Britain, many philosophers and writers thought of economic achievements as the roadmap to civility, humanity and progress. Many conservative moralists and clergymen of the period, however, protested this ideology and associated excessive materialism with moral decline, but they were not the dominant force in society. British travel writings about Arabs during the period confirmed and unsettled this dominant discourse. In these accounts, the images of primitive and polite Arabs appeared as screens upon which British anxieties about improvement were projected. This paper concludes with the contention that British travel writers appeared more concerned about their own society than about those about whom they wrote.

The Enlightenment's Linguistic Dimension, or, How We Came to be Socially Constructed

While a traditional source of controversy, the modern critical interplay between humanism and the Enlightenment can be used to excavate the way we have come to think of ourselves as posthuman even within a historicist field. This essay posits conceptualizing the Enlightenment to allow for ambivalence and messy boundaries, without requiring an artificial separation between Enlightenment and postmodern or poststructuralist thinking. Its primary method uses a close reading of Miltonic and other poetical texts—and the innovative writers who read him, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Eliza Haywood—to show how Enlightenment thinking helped to prize open a linguistic dimension of humanistic thought well in advance of the twentieth century. For writers like the latter three, wary as they were of patriarchal structures, there comes the gradual realization that "woman" is not a referent but a mutable sign, and that humanity itself is not so self-evident to Enlightenment writers as a more traditionally foreclosed version of literary history would have us accept.

The Early Enlightenment roots of Keynes’ probability concept

AbstractIn the brief preface to A Treatise on Probability, Keynes states, ‘It may be perceived that I have been greatly influenced by W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, that is, by Cambridge, which, with great debts to the writers of Continental Europe, yet continues in direct succession the English tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, of Mill and Sidgwick’ (J. M. Keynes, 1921, p. v). The authors who have recently stressed the relevance of Keynes ideas on probability have paid special attention to the influence of the former, but not to that of the latter. This article intends to show that the Treatise on Probability is deeply rooted in the history of probabilistic thinking, particularly in the Early Enlightenment (roughly between 1650 and 1750), before mathematicians claimed ownership over the subject. We find that important aspects of Keynes’ notions were already present in Locke and other Early Enlightenment writers, albeit with some note-worthy differences.

NICOLAE IORGA ON THE DEVELOPMENT STAGES OF ROMANIAN NATIONALISM

Known for his research on the elements of national unity which rose and developed in the minds of all Romanians and which eventually led to the establishment of Greater Romania, the great historian Nicolae Iorga identifies the stages through which the national sentiment of Romanians on both sides of the Carpathians had evolved from the Middle Ages to the modern era. After having researched the published works of Romanian humanists and Enlightenment writers in the archives and libraries of Romania, Bucovina and Transylvania, Nicolae Iorga identified the following stages of Romanian nationalist manifestations: primitive nationalism (9th to l0th century), enduring nationalism - the foundation of modern nationalism (17th century), definitive nationalism (18th century), and modern nationalism (the 1848/1849 generation). While Transylvanian nationalism was petitionary in nature, the nationalism that manifested south and east of the Carpathians was labelled as political, as it was accompanied by concrete own achievements. "Romanian nationalism" is seen as cultural and democratic, based on the traditional hospitality of the Romanian peasants and the sentiment of unity. These are the features of the Romanian national sentiment defined by Nicolae Iorga in 1922, which were used as a foundation for the Nationalist Democratic Party, the party he established in 1910 and whose leader he was until 1938.

Whatever Happened to Voltaire?

The eighteenth century French Enlightenment writers—Voltaire and Montesquieu especially—were cited in American textbooks as the thinkers who most influenced the founding generation of America until at least the 1970s. They still are, throughout much of the world. And rightly so, as studies of colonial periodicals and pamphlets have largely shown. When and why did they disappear from our high school textbooks? When Voltaire is mentioned at all, it is only as the author of Candide. This essay focuses on Voltaire as a sort of “missing link” in our understanding of American history and government. It includes discussions of his other works, considered far more consequential in his own day, and of his ubiquitous use of critical thinking. The case of Voltaire closely parallels the more recent efforts to erase Thomas Jefferson from U.S. schoolbooks: the author of the first bill for religious freedom and its leading champion in America.

Between Barbarism and Progress: Enlightenment Historical Writings on a Major Conflict in Russian History

The dichotomy of barbarism and progress has long been a focal point for the discussions about Russia’s past and present. The discourse on Russian barbarism had been known in Europe since at least 16th century, but Enlightenment thinkers gave it a new shape by juxtaposing the ancient conception of barbarism with the rather modern idea of progress. In this article, Enlightenment historical writings are examined; the focus is on the question of how Russian history was studied in order to find signs of barbarism and the different guises of progress. The primary sources for the article are mainly Russian historical writings; however, relations and interactions between Russian and European intellectuals, as well as intellectual exchange and influence, are also noted. As there were no word “civilization” in 18th-century Russian, enlightenment was deemed by Russian thinkers as the antipode to barbarism. It is concluded that most Enlightenment writers saw Christianization as a step forward from barbarism in Russian history. Parallels between Russia and Scandinavia as they were drawn by August Schlözer are also analyzed. The article shows how the idea of conflict between barbarism and progress altered the understanding of Russian history in the Enlightenment.

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Matthew T. Shifflett Antitheatricality and the Body Public. By Lisa A. Freeman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Cloth $59.95, Paper $29.95. 376 pages. In the heady days of the 1990s culture wars, my college mentors presented the history of antitheatrical thought as a grand historical struggle, as if there were an unbroken line from Plato/Ion to Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown. Central to this narrative was The Antitheatrical Prejudice, a 1981 book by Jonas Barish that took a philological approach to the matter, locating a fundamental "ontological queasiness" (Barish 3) in mimetic practices. Barish's book became the point of departure for the next generation's exploration of historical conflicts between performers and what Barish called the "unmistakably crackpot streak" of "hard-shelled, mole-eyed fanatics" (Barish 2). Lisa A. Freeman's Antitheatricality and the Body Public reins in some of the essentialist excesses that Barish's approach has inspired and points the way toward an even more urgent homology between the Jeremy Colliers and the Jerry Falwells: that their denunciation of dramatic representation is aimed at the legitimacy of sovereign authority itself. Antitheatricality and the Body Public uses well-known instances of anti-theatrical fervor in Anglo-American history as occasions for richly detailed analyses of what Barish dismissively called "local considerations" (Barish 4). Throughout, Freeman harnesses not just the strategies of theatre and performance studies, but also a deep fluency in the historiographical tools of cultural, intellectual, and legal histories. While each chapter offers a well-researched, persuasively-argued case, the cumulative force of the chapters illustrates a "repertoire" of antitheatrical rhetoric, replacing Barish's "ontological malaise" with an instrumental (and [End Page 174] performance-inflected) citationality. To read Freeman's book solely as a corrective to Barish would be to miss the book's more significant contribution: the articulation of a "body public" as a term that expands upon queer theorist Michael Warner's formulation of a "public" as an entirely discursive phenomenon. Warner's Publics and Counterpublics offered a crucial model for understanding the ways a "public" could be constituted and mediated through the participation of its constituents. However, Warner used theatrical audience only as a metaphor for how a public operates, as a totality witnessing itself in a shared visible space. Freeman shows the crucial role that "concrete, visible, and embodied forms" play in the dynamic by which discursive publics were articulated and challenged. Freeman's first chapter, on William Prynne, is a significant contribution on its own, and at eighty-five pages, it comprises nearly a third of the book. Freeman offers a close reading of Prynne's mammoth Histrio-Mastix, an obsessively thorough antitheatricalist tract from 1633. Freeman's reading goes beyond prior treatments by looking past an anachronistic binary between print and performance, showing instead how print worked performatively within Jacobean society and was understood as such. Freeman offers a careful, yet innovative, evaluation of the documents surrounding Prynne's Star Chamber trial for sedition. By comparing previously undiscovered manuscript sources, Freeman shows how the trial itself and the competing transcripts of the trial worked performatively to "create" the constituencies they purported to represent. The next three chapters reframe well-known controversies of the long eighteenth century as conflicts stemming from the divergence of public policies and practices from religious doctrine. Chapter 2 reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View… as a rebuke to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which replaced the Catholic James II with his Protestant cousin, William of Orange. In this reading, Freeman convincingly shows that Collier was notorious at the time for his Jacobite provocations, and that his antitheatrical views were an extension of that position. Moreover, the eventual absorption of Collier's critique by the public sphere transformed regressive provocation into forward-thinking debate, as William Congreve highlighted the stage's capacity as a social corrective. The third chapter situates John Home's Douglas and the debates it inspired among the rivalries between secularist Scottish enlightenment writers (with their general optimism about the human capacity for reason) and the more pessimistic view of human depravity found in Presbyterian orthodoxy. Freeman shows how a growing...

Viajante do passado / turista de hoje: do encontro do outro à descoberta de si próprio

O facto turístico é um facto social total – com dimensões económicas, culturais, sociais, políticas – complexo e antigo. Começou, assim poderíamos dizer, quando o indivíduo se afastou da sua aldeia, da sua cidade, para dormir, pelo menos uma noite, num lugar que não lhe era familiar. Esta definição não faz, no entanto, a diferença entre o viajante especialista – explorador, aventureiro, missionário e filósofo dos séculos das Luzes, etnólogo, arqueólogo, escritor e pintor do século XIX – e o viajante lúdico, o turista do século XX. Este artigo trata das motivações de quem se desloca: encontro do outro, busca por si mesmo, procura de uma identidade. Através de citações literárias, procura-se conhecer como se viajava ao longo do tempo, a evolução do perfil do viajante e o que tenderia a se tornar no início do século XXI.

Nieprzyjaciele zdrowia, czyli kilka uwag o etosie pracy lekarzy w czasach oświecenia

Enemies of health. Afew comments about the work ethic of physicians in the Age of EnlightenmentThe purpose of this article is to present the portrayal of medics in the literature of Polish Enlightenment. The profession of the medical doctor did not receive acceptance of the society in the 18th century. Medics gained the bad reputation earlier, and writers of Enlightenment continued to incline to beliefs that had arisen in previous centuries. By patients, doctors were viewed as ene­mies of health. The appearance of the barber-surgeon in the house of the sick was considered a har­binger ofdeath. Writers claimed that medicines served by medics might only ruin patients’ health. According to them, the result of the treatment relies solely on acoincidence, not medical skills of the caregiver. In literature, doctors were often accused of ignorance. Writers were ridiculing the prac­tice of using sophisticated, incomprehensible terms while possessing no practical skill and being inefficient. In the 18th century Europe, there were many impostors with no knowledge, who claimed to be medical authorities. Writers condemned those doctors who were enticing their rich clients into believing that they are sick while refusing to help the poor.

Accidental gods: figures of contingency in the enlightenment fable

ABSTRACTDrawing on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century discussions of fable as myth and apologue, this essay examines the way the form of the fable elicits interpretive practices that enable the reader to recognise the contingency of the mythical figures and fictive forms Enlightenment writers used to make the world intelligible.

Untangling the Complexities of Radical Enlightenment

Untangling the Complexities of Radical Enlightenment John D. Eigenauer (bio) Steffen Ducheyne, editor Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment New York: routledge, 2017 xii + 318 pages; isbn: 9781472451682 in the world of enlightenment studies, one of the most exciting and controversial fields of inquiry has been that of the Radical Enlightenment. The term Radical Enlightenment gained significant scholarly attention with the 1981 publication of Margaret Jacob's The Radical Enlightenment—Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. After that, the field exploded with the publication of four massive volumes on the topic by Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), Democratic Enlightenment (2011), and Revolutionary Ideas (2014). The theory behind this term roughly divides Enlightenment thinkers into two categories: radical and mainstream (or moderate). According to Israel, radical Enlightenment writers follow a line of thinking that parallels Spinoza's: a materialistic metaphysics, atheism, and antimonarchical politics. This theory has been contested for two reasons. First, not all scholars agree that extreme political views follow from radical metaphysics (such as substance monism) and, second, some think that Enlightenment thinkers cannot be so easily divided into these camps. Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment is offered as an attempt to evaluate this tension. The book brings together an international group of scholars who both address the concept of Radical Enlightenment and attempt to sort out difficult issues presented by various stances toward the concept. It begins with several essays that orient the reader to the debate. Naturally enough, Israel opens the volume with an explanation of the complexities and nuances of understanding Radical Enlightenment within the context of intellectual history, social history, politics, and culture. He does [End Page 153] this not only to provide an introduction but also to demonstrate that the concept of Radical Enlightenment emerges from the use of what he calls the "controversialist strategy"—the discovery of tensions among members of society or societies on many levels that reveal underlying ideological allegiances. Absolutely key to his essay is the effort to dissuade readers from thinking that the Radical Enlightenment is a purely intellectual movement best studied by historians of ideas and best explained in terms of intellectual history—a common accusation against his work. In this sense, his essay is a defense of the idea of Radical Enlightenment as a structural concept that helps us understand the tremendous complexity of the evolution of human freedom in all its forms: emancipation, the rule of law, citizenship, equality, the pursuit of happiness, the right to education, the right to pursue truth, and the formation of republics that separate church and state. Margaret Jacob disagrees that this is Israel's focus. Her essay insists that Israel has missed the point about Radical Enlightenment by relying too heavily on abstruse writings centering on Spinoza's philosophy at the expense of social discourse and the role of British writers such as John Toland and Isaac Newton. Harvey Chisick's essay does a nice job of accurately describing the tension between Israel's and Jacob's views through a deft presentation of the political and philosophical ideas of Baron d'Holbach, suggesting that Israel inappropriately ties metaphysical monism to political radicalism. His presentation reveals that it is not so much that Israel discounts the complexity of Radical Enlightenment as that he insists too strongly that materialism implies radical politics. And by demonstrating that thinkers such as d'Holbach and Voltaire could differ markedly in their metaphysics while agreeing on a goal of widespread social justice, Chisick reinforces the blurry nature of the lines between radical and moderate Enlightenment thinkers. In terms of truly presenting the essence of the debate, Chisick's essay is quite important. The second third of the book discusses the "Origins and Fate of the Radical Enlightenment." Because of the primacy of Spinoza in Israel's understanding of the origins of the Radical Enlightenment, the first three essays in this section deal in different ways with Spinoza. The first is a complex and subtle essay on Spinoza's materialism (and ensuing radicalism) in which Nancy Levene offers an orientation to competing interpretations of Spinoza's monism. This essay is an orientation in the sense that it describes these interpretations; however, her explanations will probably be clear...

E. Claire Cage. Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815.

Celibacy (the state of being unmarried) was a concern of many French economists and social commentators before and during the Revolution. Many of them believed that celibacy was becoming more and more common, partly (some argued) because increasing numbers of men avoided marriage since, in the absence of divorce, it ended only when one of the spouses died. Celibacy, they argued, was a drag on population growth (and thus harmful to the economy and the power of the state) and detrimental to morality: unmarried men were sexually active, and they not only corrupted the women they slept with but added to the growing numbers of illegitimate children. In Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815, E. Claire Cage focuses on one aspect of the celibacy issue: the celibacy of priests. Although many priests of the early church married, the practice was questioned and attacked from the fourth century on, and eventually forbidden in the Western church in the twelfth. By the eighteenth century, it was an almost unquestioned doctrine that priests should not marry. Even so, there were some priestly and even more secular voices in favor of priestly marriage. The physical and emotional benefits of marriage were extolled, and Enlightenment writers such as Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, condemned celibacy as “unnatural.” Others argued that married priests would be a model to their parishioners.

An Eighteenth-Century Account of Sati: John Zephaniah Holwell's ‘Religious Tenets of the Gentoos’ and ‘Voluntary Sacrifice’ (1767)

ABSTRACTWriting in the period 1765–79, John Zephaniah Holwell, temporary governor of Bengal, was one of the first British writers to attempt a scholarly engagement with Hinduism. Despite being an important source for several Enlightenment writers, his work has been misrepresented by current scholarship. In particular, his account of ‘voluntary sacrifice’, or sati, has been misunderstood as an example of eighteenth-century rationalism. This article will correct this by situating the account in a much fuller appreciation of Holwell's ‘project’, which can be broadly understood as an attempt to reconcile his own heterodox Christianity with what he termed ‘Gentoo’ doctrines. It will show how Holwell's insistence on the essential truth of ‘metempsychosis’ reveals an account of sati that is far more invested in presenting a particular reading of Indian religious principles than has hitherto been appreciated. This analysis challenges certain assumptions in the historiography of eighteenth-century European encounters with India, with a particular emphasis on intellectual culture.