scholarly journals Enlightenment and Erudition: Writing Cultural History at the Académie des inscriptions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anton M. Matytsin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
Research Institute

This article explores continuities between the antiquarian erudition of humanist historians and Enlightenment philosophical histories, showing that supposedly revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historiography emerged from an older scholarly tradition. It focuses on the research of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, a learned society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France that went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting King Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and a cradle of the Enlightenment. The article examines the emergence of what might be called “cultural history” or “the history of culture” (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it). It analyzes how the academicians studied pagan beliefs and speculated about the functions of ancient myths and cults, thus transforming the views about the origin of religion and its role in society. The article also discusses how the academicians made sense of customs and daily practices and how they understood the causes of the progress and decline of civilizations.

LIVING THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: JAMES WATT, MATTHEW BOULTON, AND THEIR SONS

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER M. JONES
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
The West ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
History Of ◽  
James Watt ◽  
Discrete Family

This article is a contribution to the cultural history of English Enlightenment. It examines the formation of a discrete ‘family’ of philosophes in the West Midlands who maintained close links with their counterparts on the continent. Birmingham's role as a magnet for ‘industrial tourists’ in the second half of the eighteenth century helped to propagate the influence of this local intelligentsia who were mostly members of the Lunar Society. None the less, it is argued that the activities of the Society correspond more closely to an Enlightenment than to a proto-industrial pattern of inquiry. The events of 1789 in France disrupted this philosophic ‘family’. Their impact is explored through the medium of a real family; that of James Watt, the engineer, who came to Birmingham to manufacture the steam engine in partnership with Matthew Boulton. The vicissitudes of the Watt family, and of other prominent members of the Lunar Society, are unravelled to illustrate the dilemmas faced by men raised in the values of the Enlightenment when confronted with the reality – and the proximity – of a far-reaching political revolution.

The Twentieth Century and the Enlightenment as Historical Problem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
European Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the historical problem of how to gain an understanding of the fundamental traits that were original to the Enlightenment. More specifically, it considers how the Enlightenment arose over the intellectual, political, and social life of eighteenth-century élites, so as to produce a cultural revolution that transformed European society. Franco Venturi interpreted the Enlightenment as the “history of a movement,” a movement of a political nature that was created by self-conscious intellectual minorities. The chapter considers Venturi's proposal to go back to a view of the Enlightenment as a movement and as a fundamental chapter in the new history of intellectuals. In particular, it discusses Venturi's project for a political history of the Enlightenment, his denunciation of scholars engaged in the social history of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of a new cultural history in the 1980s.

‹ Rococo › : du jargon à la catégorie de style

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Louis Xv ◽  
Objective Existence

Abstract Today there is a consensus on the definition of the term ‘rococo’: it designates a style both particular and homogeneous, artistically related to the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. But we must not forget that in its primitive formulations, the rococo has no objective existence. As a witty, sneering, and impertinent word, it can adapt itself to the most varied discourses and needs, far beyond references to the eighteenth century. Its malleability guarantees its sparkling success in different languages, but also its highly contradictory uses. By tracing the genealogy of the word ‘rococo’, this article will show that the association of the term with the century of Louis XV is a form of historical discrimination that still prevails widely in the history of the art of the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals Ricerche sul teatro classico spagnolo in Italia e oltralpe (secoli XVI-XVIII)

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Italian History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
European Theatre ◽  
Theatrical Companies

At the height of its development and up to the eighteenth century, the Spanish classical theatre significantly contributed to the formation of the modern European theatre. Theatre texts and theatrical companies were in fact circulating outside the Iberian peninsula and the Spanish experience of theatre triggered literary debates and reflections that played a central role to the cultural history of Europe, from Neoclassicism to the beginnings of Romanticism. It is a complex phenomenon crossing linguistically and culturally diversified territories, and which therefore needs an inter- and multidisciplinary approach. We tried to respond to this need by involving scholars and researchers in the fields of Hispanic, French, Italian, history of entertainment and musicology for the drafting of this volume.

A ‘milky mass’ and ‘uniform material’: white marble in eighteenth-century French discourses on sculpture and geology

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-225
Author(s):  
Marthe Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Grain Size ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
White Marble ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Network

Knowledge of the materiality of stone during the Enlightenment expanded following the exploration of mineralogical structure, to alter ideas about taxonomy and challenge the role of rocks in the history of the earth. Close studies of the material of marble sculpture generated expertise on grain size, surface varieties and stone deposits. This mode of reception became intertwined with contemporary controversies about the age of the earth. This article focuses on both French sculpture and geological discourses of the eighteenth century to reveal an international and interdisciplinary network centring on protagonists such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Étienne-Maurice Falconet; through these figures, debates can be connected concerning both geology and art theory. Within these contexts, the article discusses the translation processes between these artistic and geological interests.

Projecting the Enlightenment

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

This chapter retraces Alasdair MacIntyre's own construal of the Enlightenment Project's trajectory in order to show how his interpretation of an intellectual tradition depends above all on his assessment of its impact. It argues that MacIntyre's Enlightenment Project is largely unreconstructed, unredeemed, and undiminished in its failure, even after substantial embellishment. His three principal works comprise an extraordinary indictment of the theoretical and practical legacy of eighteenth-century philosophy. His account projects the Enlightenment's implications and influence as they stem from its aims. He holds it to blame for some of the most sinister aspects of a morally vacuous civilization, cursed by the malediction of unlicenced Reason. His intellectual history of the period forms one of the mainsprings of his own philosophy.

Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Cultural Science ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

Enlightenment, Scottish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
William Robertson

This term refers to the intellectual movement in Scotland in roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. As a movement it included many theorists – the best known of whom are David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – who maintained both institutional and personal links with each other. It was not narrowly philosophical, although in the Common Sense School it did develop its own distinctive body of argument. Its most characteristic feature was the development of a wide-ranging social theory that included pioneering ‘sociological’ works by Adam Ferguson and John Millar, socio-cultural history by Henry Home (Lord Kames) and William Robertson as well as Hume’s Essays (1777) and Smith’s classic ‘economics’ text The Wealth of Nations (1776). All these works shared a commitment to ‘scientific’ causal explanation and sought, from the premise of the uniformity of human nature, to establish a history of social institutions in which the notion of a mode of subsistence played a key organising role. Typically of the Enlightenment as a whole this explanatory endeavour was not divorced from explicit evaluation. Though not uncritical of their own commercial society, the Scots were in no doubt as to the superiority of their own age compared to what had gone before.

Kese and Tellak: Cultural Framings of Body Treatments in the ‘Turkish Bath’

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 462-469
Author(s):  
Kornelia Hahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Present State ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Steam Bath ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specific Culture

Using water for body treatments has an especially long tradition in many cultures and, is deeply intertwined with Roman and Ottoman culture. However, it is clear that today it is not possible to attribute bathing – not even a specific type of bathing, such as the hammam steam bath – to one particular culture (ignoring the obvious problems associated with trying to delineate clearly between such blurred constructs as a specific culture or as a discrete entity). Thus, the ‘Turkish bath’ is a widely used term introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century or applied to various different manifestations. The term reflects the European perception of Turkish bathing culture, primarily connected with bathing within a hammam complex or – as the Turkish term goes – a hammami. Bathing in the hammam-style is rather a Roman cultural practice, an element adapted and integrated in Ottoman culture and readapted thereafter into modern Western culture. It is often believed that these practices are rooted in the cultural history of the present state of Turkey (although ancient ‘Turkish bath’ architecture famously exists in Greece or Albania, too1). Furthermore, the geographical or architectural nexus between mosques and hammams and, also, the temporal order of Islamic culture (in which visiting a hammam before various ritual occasions is required) have often suggested seeing the Turkish bath as a religious custom.

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