Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

The Useful Enlightenment: Theories, Practices, and Representations of Usefulness
Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 26–27 June 2025

Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras

Proposals due by 31 December 2024

Clément-Pierre Marillier, Jean-François de Troy, Allégorie de l’enseignement des Arts (Château de Pau).

“What’s the use?” is often the very first question asked of a scientific endeavour. Indeed, the notion of utility has come to dominate our understanding of knowledge in the humanities as well as in the practical and fundamental sciences. It also furnishes the criterion by which we regularly assess the relevance of scientific research, where utility is often linked to potential applications and their economic benefits. This close relationship between knowledge, utility, technological improvement, and economic advantage dates back to the Enlightenment. This period saw not only the flowering of reason and human rights but also the beginning of the industrial exploitation of natural resources and the development of the logistical and economic infrastructures necessary to profit from the forced labour of displaced populations. As this conflict suggests, the question of utility has never had a simple answer, insofar as it requires us to consider for whom something is useful and to what ends.

This conference invites researchers from a wide range of historical disciplines (including the history of philosophy, literature, institutions, economics, and the sciences) to explore the many aspects encompassed by the notions of utility, usefulness, and usage over the course of the long eighteenth century. The aim is to reconsider how the circulation of various conceptions of utility shaped the relationship between knowledge, technology, politics, and the economy and how this relationship gave rise, in turn, to the concept of ‘useful knowledge’, whose links with the historiographical idea of the ‘industrial revolution’ and the accompanying rise of capitalism have been strongly emphasised through the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Mokyr 2002). This follows research over the last twenty years that has challenged these intrinsic relationships, whether by applying a gender perspective (Serrano 2022; Maerker, Serrano, and Werrett 2023), by framing approaches in the global context of the circulation, exchange, or appropriation of knowledge and commodities (Schäfer and Valeriani 2021; Berg and Hudson 2023), or by focusing on the long-term transmission of practices and knowledge (Nigro 2023).

In the wake of this research, the conference will question the special relationship that developed during the eighteenth century between utility and value, be that economic, scientific, artistic, moral, or literary. Contributions will thus shed new light on the emergence of utility as a criterion for evaluating knowledge, goods, and cultural production. Particular attention will also be paid to the relationship between utility and improvement, how this was translated into the implementation of social, agricultural, or industrial reform, and the conditions of such practical application.

During the eighteenth century, the increasing valorisation of ‘useful’ knowledge, that is to say, practical, experimental and innovative knowledge, challenged the former hierarchy between the ‘liberal’ and the applied, ‘mechanical’ arts. This shift caused significant disruption in how the sciences were viewed in relation to nature and society. It also had a significant impact on both nature and society themselves, creating new means of exploiting human and natural resources according to such new criteria as not only utility but also productivity, efficiency, and progress. These changes gave rise to the debates that animated the political and intellectual reforms of the Enlightenment in the areas of slavery, luxury, and the control of wheat prices—to name but a few examples.

If, in the course of the century, utility did indeed become a central value in the construction of modern Western societies, it is essential to question the causes of this valorisation and relativise its supposed universality, particularly from extra-European points of view or by considering dissident voices, victims, and those excluded, who have questioned or suffered from the growth model centred on the politics and economy of useful knowledge.

Contributions may focus on issues such as the following:
• The relationship in eighteenth-century thought between the notions of interest, profit, or efficiency and those of utility, usefulness, and use.
• The different criteria used to assess utility in various fields of economics, literature, science, technology, or morality and the expertise or institutions needed to carry out such assessments.
• How the usefulness of certain types of knowledge, technologies, or reform projects was evaluated, for whom they were deemed useful, and how this evaluation was carried out.
• The role of learned societies such as academies and economic, patriotic, agricultural, or improvement societies in defining, disseminating, and implementing useful knowledge.
• The importance of non-Western knowledge in the development of a global economy in the eighteenth century.
• How the notion of utility can be used to reshape and reconceptualise the Enlightenment, particularly in terms of the relationship between centre and periphery.
• Voices against the valorisation of utility: scientists, gens de lettres, religious figures; those victimised or left behind by the implementation of public interest projects; those excluded from the determination of utility (colonisation, alternative conceptions of usefulness, criticisms of utility).
• The relationship between innovation, useful arts, science, and technology.
• The evolution of the notion of utile dulci in art and literary theory; the usefulness of rhetoric; fiction and representation; ‘useful’ passions; exemplarity and morality of the arts and literature.
• Growth, progress, sustainability, and usefulness: the agricultural Enlightenment; exploitation of resources and land; agrarian profitability and the acclimatisation of (useful) exotic plants in Europe and the colonies.
• Women and useful knowledge; women and the sciences; the usefulness of women’s labour; social reform projects aimed at women.
• Scientific research deemed futile: squaring the circle, metaphysics, alchemy, etc.
• Pedagogy and usefulness: educational programmes and reforms, popular schools and education and the ‘popular Enlightenment’.
• The utility of the Enlightenment in contemporary political, historiographical, or scientific debates.

Proposals, including an abstract and a short biography and list of publications, should be sent by 31 December 2024 to jean-alexandre.perras@izea.uni-halle.de.

Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras, Humboldt Research Fellow, with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the IZEA (Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg), the Voltaire Foundation (University of Oxford) and the Pôle Europe des Lumières (Sorbonne Université)

i n d i c a t i v e  b i b l i o g r a p h y

Berg, M., and P. Hudson. (2023). Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, Polity.

Böning, H., H. Schmitt and R. Siegert, eds. (2007). Volksaufklärung: eine praktische Reformbewegung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Bremen: Edition Lumière.

Brockmann, S. (2022). The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838. Cambridge University Press.

Burnard, T., and G. Riello. (2020). “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism.” Journal of Global History 15.2: 225–44.

Butterwick, R., et al., eds. (2017). Peripheries of the Enlightenment. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation.

Crogiez-Labarthe, M. and A. J.-M. S. Ibeas, A., eds. (2017). Savoir et civisme: les sociétés savantes et l’action
patriotique en Europe au XVIIIe siècle: actes du colloque de Berne. Geneve, Slatkine Érudition.

de Vries, J. (2008). The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge University Press.

Fox, C. (2009). The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Hilaire-Pérez, L. (2000). L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières. Paris, Albin Michel.

Hilaire-Pérez, L., et al. (2016). L’Europe des sciences et des techniques, XVe–XVIIIe siècle: Un dialogue des savoirs. Presses universitaires de Rennes.

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Howes, A. (2023). Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation. Princeton University Press.

Jacob, M. C. (2014). The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. Cambridge University Press.

Jones, P. (2016). Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840. Oxford University Press.

Khan, B. Z. (2020). Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy. Oxford University Press.

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Kühn, S. (2011). Wissen, Arbeit, Freundschaft: Ökonomien und soziale Beziehungen an den Akademien in London, Paris und Berlin um 1700. Göttingen, V&R unipress.

Kwass, M. (2022). The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800. Cambridge University Press.

Leckey, C. (2011). Patrons of Enlightenment the Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newark, University of Delaware Press.

Lehmbrock, V. (2020). Der denkende Landwirt: Agrarwissen und Aufklärung in Deutschland 1750−1820.
Gottingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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Lowood, H. (1991). Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlightenment: The Economic and Scientific Societies, 1760–1815. New York, Garland.

MacLeod, C. (2007). Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914. Cambridge University Press.

Maerker, A., Elena Serrano, and Simon Werrett. 2023. “Enlightened Female Networks: Gendered Ways of
Producing Knowledge. 1720–1830.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 77: 225–34.

McClellan, J. E. and F. O. Regourd (2011). The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. Turnhout, Brepols.

McClellan, J. E. and V. Saint-Louis (2010). Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. University of Chicago Press.

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Nigro, G. (2023). Economia della conoscenza: Innovazione, produttività e crescita economica nei secoli XIII–XVIII Firenze University Press.

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Mokyr, J. (2002). The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press.

Mokyr, J. (2018). A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press.

Morel, T., et al., Eds. (2016). The Making of Useful Knowledge. Berlin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

O’Brien, P. (2013). “Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development, and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge.” Journal of Global History 8.1: 1–24.

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Schäfer, D, and Simona Valeriani. 2021. “Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate.” Technology and Culture 62: 327–47.

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Serrano, E. (2022). Ladies of Honor and Merit: Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain. University of Pittsburgh Press.

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From  ArtHist.net (which includes the CFP in German). . .

Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints —
Part IV: Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities
Bildwerdung der Antike: Zur Episteme von Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken der Frühen Neuzeit — IV: Fake-News? ­­Fantasie-Antiken
München, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 14 February 2025

Organized by Ulrich Pfisterer, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch

Proposals due by 15 September 2024

The academy project Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (thesaurus.bbaw.de/en), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (zikg.eu) are organizing a series of colloquia in 2023–2025 on the topic Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Drawings and Prints in the Early Modern Period. The significance of drawings and prints for ideas, research, and the circulation of knowledge about ancient artifacts, architecture, and images in Europe and neighboring areas from the late Middle Ages to the advent of photography in the mid-19th century will be examined.

The three previous colloquia were dedicated to the topics of the ‘unrepresentable’ properties of the depicted objects and the documentation of various states and contexts of ancient objects from their discovery to their presentation in collection catalogues. The fourth and final event will examine the problem of invented or imitated antiquities.

In fact, all types of objects from the arts and crafts of antiquity—aegyptiaca, coins and gems, statuettes and statues, objects of everyday culture from jewellery to weapons and much more —were reproduced as real artefacts and/or in graphic illustrations on all kinds of different occasions over the centuries following antiquity. The father of modern ‘forgeries’ is undoubtedly Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), who knew how to create new objects (‘capricci’) from numerous ancient spolia, which were highly sought after, in particular by northern European collectors. But this is not about him.

In addition to the physical ‘fakes’ on the marketplace of the antiquities trade, their pictorial representations or even antiquities ‘invented’ solely on paper often played a decisive role in the dissemination of a partially distorted, tendentious or ‘false’ idea of past cultures and their materiality.

Starting from the counterfeit imitations of the early modern period, our colloquium is interested in a very broad spectrum of ‘fantastic’ antiquities or ‘forgeries’ of antiquities and their motivations. The following aspects are of particular interest, but other suggestions are also welcome:
• ‘Forgeries’ of ancient art in drawings and prints
• Historical backgrounds, intentions, and contexts of the illustrations
• Techniques and methods of ‘forgeries’ in drawing and printmaking
• The influence of ‘fakes’ on the reception of ancient art
• The role of printmaking in the dissemination of ‘fake’ antiquities
• The use of images of ‘forgeries’ in certain lines of argumentation
• The influence of images on the collective imagination of antiquity
• Debates about ‘forgeries’, their quality, and value

Solicited for the fourth colloquium are papers in English, French, German, or Italian, 20 minutes in length, ideally combining case study and larger perspective. Publication in extended form is planned. Proposals (max. 400 words) can be submitted until 15 September 2024, together with a short CV (max. 150 words) to thesaurus(at)bbaw.de keyword ‘Episteme IV’.

Hotel and travel expenses (economy-class flight or train; 2 nights’ accommodation) will be reimbursed according to the Federal Law on Travel Expenses (BRKG).