Enfilade

From Oxford UP:

Andrew Janiak, The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0197757987, £23 / $30.

Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749) broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous: she was read and debated from Russia to Prussia, from Switzerland to England, from up north in Sweden to down south in Italy. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. While the men in her milieu like Voltaire and Kant sought disciples to promote their ideas, Du Châtelet promoted intellectual autonomy. She counselled her readers to read the classics, but never to become a follower of another’s ideas. Her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker, rather than a disciple of some supposedly ‘great man’ like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. And that made her dangerous.

After all, if young women took Du Châtelet’s advice to heart, if they insisted on thinking for themselves, they might demand a proper education—the exclusion of women from the colleges and academies of Europe might finally end. And if young women thought for themselves, rather than listening to the ideas of the men around them, that might rupture the gender-based social order itself. Because of the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories. After she achieved immense fame in the middle of the eighteenth century, her ideas were later suppressed, or attributed to the men around her. For generations afterwards, she was forgotten. Now we can hear her voice anew when we need her more than ever. Her lessons of intellectual independence and her rejection of hero worship remain ever relevant today.

Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University. For the last decade, he has co-led—with Liz Milewicz—Project Vox, a digital project that seeks to recover the lost voices of women who contributed to modern science and philosophy. Janiak is the author or editor of five previous books and numerous articles concerning the relationship between science and philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

c o n t e n t s

1  The Rise and Fall of Émilie Du Châtelet
2  What Was the Scientific Revolution?
3  Du Châtelet’s Vision of Science and Philosophy
4  The Enlightenment’s Most Famous Woman
5  The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman, Or The Making of Modern Philosophy
6  Du Châtelet’s Enlightenment: Philosophy for Freethinkers

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Yale UP:

Richard Bassett, Maria Theresa Empress: The Making of the Austrian Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 520 pages, ISBN: 978-0300243987, $38.

A major new biography of Maria Theresa, the formidable Habsburg Empress

Maria Theresa was the single most powerful woman in eighteenth-century Europe. At the age of just twenty-three she succeeded to the Habsburg domains only to find them contested by almost every power in Europe. Over the next forty years, she became a fierce leader and opponent, as well as a devoted wife and mother to sixteen children. In this engrossing biography, Richard Bassett traces Maria Theresa’s life and complex legacy. Drawing on hitherto unpublished sources, Bassett reveals her keen sense of moderation and tolerance, innovative ideas on free trade and finance, and studied reluctance to resort to policies of territorial expansion. Yet Maria Theresa’s modernisation policies were not entirely progressive. Antisemitism and an enduring suspicion of Protestantism greatly affected the lives of her subjects. This is a gripping study of one of the world’s most influential leaders, revealing how Maria Theresa confounded gendered expectations and left a lasting mark on Europe.

Richard Bassett is the author of several books, most notably For God and Kaiser, the first history of the Habsburg army to be published in English. An authority on Central Europe where he has worked for 45 years, he is a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge and a visiting professor at the Central Europe University of Budapest.

From Reaktion Books with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Christopher Baker, Creator of Nightmares: Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1789149302, £30 / $45.

A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter.

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which created a new form of terrifying gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus the new era of competitive exhibitions and intense criticism. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome and ultimately London, where he secured long-lasting fame, the artist is revealed as an astute publicity seeker and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a ‘mad’ mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.

Christopher Baker is Editor of The Burlington Magazine and an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously a Director at the National Galleries of Scotland and has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European art.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Origins in Zurich
2  A European Man of Letters
3  The Impact of Rome
4  The Nightmare
5  The Vagaries of Fame
6  Creative Friendships
7  Legacies

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index