What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to
more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the
furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of
Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which
their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts
in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these
geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’
Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too
familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller
scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without
some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the
lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage
for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real
business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual
historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more
attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital
components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine
geography of knowledge in the making.
