Enfilade

From Cambridge UP:

Daniel Brewer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 265 pages, hardback ISBN: 978-1107021488, $80 / paperback ISBN: 978-1107626140, $30.

The Enlightenment has long been seen as synonymous with the beginnings of modern Western intellectual and political culture. As a set of ideas and a social movement, this historical moment, the ‘age of reason’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, is marked by attempts to place knowledge on new foundations.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment brings together essays by leading scholars representing disciplines ranging from philosophy, religion and literature, to art, medicine, anthropology and architecture, to analyse the French Enlightenment. Each essay presents a concise view of an important aspect of the French Enlightenment, discussing its defining characteristics, internal dynamics and historical transformations. The Companion discusses the most influential reinterpretations of the Enlightenment that have taken place during the last two decades, reinterpretations that both reflect and have contributed to important re-evaluations of received ideas about the Enlightenment and the early modern period more generally.

Daniel Brewer, Department of French and Italian, University of Minnesota, has published widely in the area of eighteenth-century French literature and culture. He is author of The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co-editor of L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies.

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C O N T E N T S

Chronology
1  Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Today?
2  Antoine Lilti, Private Lives, Public Space: A New Social History of the Enlightenment
3  Andrew Curran, Anthropology
4  Paul Cheney, Commerce
5  J. B. Shank, Science
6  Dan Edelstein, Political Thought
7  Julie Candler Hayes, Sex and Gender, Feeling and Thinking: Imagining Women as Intellectuals
8  Charly Coleman, Religion
9  Jennifer Milam, Art and Aesthetic Theory: Claiming Enlightenment as Viewers and Critics
10  Thomas DiPiero, Enlightenment Literature
11  Stéphane Van Damme, Philosophe/Philosopher
12  Downing A. Thomas, Music
13  Anthony Vidler, Architecture and the Enlightenment
14  Anne Vila, Medicine and the Body in the French Enlightenment
15  Charles W. J. Withers, Space, Geography, and the Global French Enlightenment
Further Reading