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

From Grove Atlantic (with a review by Alexis Coe for The New York Times available here).

Andrew Lawler, A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-0802164131, $30.

From the nationally bestselling author of The Secret Token, the largely untold story of rebellion in Virginia that will forever change our understanding of the American Revolution

As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by Lord Dunmore, who counted George Washington as his close friend. But the Scottish earl lacked troops, so when patriots imperiled the capital of Williamsburg, he threatened to free and arm enslaved Africans—two of every five Virginians—to fight for the Crown.

Virginia’s tobacco elite was reluctant to go to war with Britain but outraged at this threat to their human property. Dunmore fled the capital to build a stronghold in the colony’s largest city, the port of Norfolk. As enslaved people flocked to his camp, skirmishes broke out. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “It has raised our countrymen into a perfect frenzy.” With a patriot army marching on Norfolk, the royal governor freed those enslaved and sent them into battle against their former owners. In retribution, and with Jefferson’s encouragement, furious rebels burned Norfolk to the ground on January 1, 1776, blaming the crime on Dunmore. The port’s destruction and Dunmore’s emancipation prompted Virginia’s patriot leaders to urge the Continental Congress to split from Britain, breaking the deadlock among the colonies and leading to adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Days later, Dunmore and his Black allies withdrew from Virginia, but the legacy of their fight would lead, ultimately, to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Chronicling these stunning and widely overlooked events in full for the first time, A Perfect Frenzy offers a striking new perspective on the American Revolution that reorients our understanding of its causes, highlights the radically different motivations between patriots in the North and South, and reveals the seeds of the nation’s racial divide.

Andrew Lawler is the author of the national bestseller The Secret Token, about the lost colony of Roanoke, and the award-winning Under Jerusalem. As a journalist he has written more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles for, among many others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. He is a contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

From Routledge:

Sonia Coman, Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean, and Michael Yonan, eds., Art and Artifice in Visual Culture, Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2025), 210 pages, ISBN (hardback): 978-1032756783, $180 / ISBN (ebook): 978-1003478898, $50.

This edited volume explores the notion of ‘artifice’ in modern visual culture, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, in countries around the globe.

Artifice has been regarded as a primarily Western phenomenon, playing as it does a central role in European art theory since the Renaissance. This volume proposes that artifice is better understood as a transcultural artistic phenomenon and requires far broader conceptualization across international contexts. It acquaints readers with works of art, visual modes of communication, and concepts originating in France, Germany, the United States, Japan, and China, and includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, film, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) objects. Contributors demonstrate how practices of artifice function as both symbol and form, in parallel and divergent ways, in multiple cultural settings.

Sonia Coman, PhD is a Contributor and Consultant at Smarthistory and Director of Digital Engagement at Washington National Cathedral. Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean is a PhD candidate at Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. Michael Yonan, PhD is a Professor of Art History and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors

Introduction: Art and Artifice in a Transcultural Perspective — Sonia Coman, Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean, Michael Yonan

Part 1 | Artifice and Spectatorship
1  Fractured Perception: Drawings, Prints, and Verres Casses — J. Cabelle Ahn
2  Rococo Aesthetics and the Problem of Trompe l’Oeil — Michael Yonan
3  Degas’s ‘Histories’ and the Foreshadowing Artifice of Self-Candaulism — Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean

Part 2 | Haptic Illusions
4  Suggestive Surfaces: The Self-Referential Texture of Woodgrain in Japanese Woodblock Prints — Kit Brooks
5  Reconsidering the Origins of Yongzheng Guwantu: From the Aniconic Period to Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra — Chih-En Chen
6  Fooling Art History: John F. Peto and William Harnett — Yinshi Lerman-Tan

Part 3 | Alternative Realities
7  First Nations’ Wampum Belts: A Colonial Vision of Artifice in Eighteenth-Century New France — Clémence Fort
8  ‘An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane…’: The Stereo-Illusion’s History of Frustration — Eszter Polonyi
9  Self-Reference and Medium-Reference in Virtual Reality and Trompe l’Oeil — Sonia Coman

Index