Papers by Andrei Pesic
Past & Present, 2021
Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the En... more Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the Enlightenment. From 1725–90, the Concert spirituel in Paris, one of the earliest and most famous concert series in Europe, presented a mixture of sacred and secular music when other entertainments were forbidden during religious holidays. Over the course of the century, the proportion of religious works in its repertoire declined significantly. Whereas previous interpretations tended to describe secularization as resulting either from battles between philosophes and the Church or from broader declines in belief, this article casts doubt on these explanations by showing the heterogeneous composition of the Concert’s audience. Instead, it depicts a process of ‘inadvertent secularization’ stemming from market pressure, in this case due to the multiplication of new concert series and other entertainments in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. This framework accounts for secularization at the institutional level without assuming that the society as a whole was marked by declining Christian belief. Bringing together the study of markets and religion reveals how multiple logics increased the autonomy of artistic fields formerly subject to religious constraints.
French Historical Studies, 2019
French colonists in Saint-Domingue brought a variety of entertainments from the metropole to the ... more French colonists in Saint-Domingue brought a variety of entertainments from the metropole to the island’s theaters during the later eighteenth century. This included the Parisian Concert Spirituel, which replaced theatrical entertainments with performances of religious and instrumental music during religious holidays. Yet these concerts never caught
on in earnest and began to diverge significantly from the metropolitan institution: the Easter concert in Port-au-Prince entirely composed of opera arias would have been unthinkable in the metropole. Linking developments in the colony’s entertainments with the understudied subject of religious practices among France’s Caribbean colonists, this article argues that
strong market pressures overrode weaker religious constraints in Saint-Domingue, making opera arias acceptable for Eastertide. It presents a new fine-grained approach for studying how cultural practices are transformed when traveling within an empire, with implications beyond the history of the arts.
Eighteenth Century Music, 2014
© Cambridge University Press
Book Reviews by Andrei Pesic
H-France Review, 2020
The contentious parsing of different Enlightenments-singular, plural, national, religious, radica... more The contentious parsing of different Enlightenments-singular, plural, national, religious, radical, skeptical, and many more-has enriched our understanding of the variety of intellectual movements during the long eighteenth century. Yet these important conceptualizations of new subspecies of the genera can occlude the work of writers who sit between seemingly irreconcilable categories. Jeffrey Burson's The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment sets out to demonstrate that even relatively obscure figures like the Abbé Claude Yvon (1714-1791) can teach us a great deal about the interconnections between different varieties of thinkers in what he calls "the culture of enlightening," as well as about the changes this culture underwent during the eighteenth century. At first glance, the Abbé Yvon is an archetypical eighteenth-century figure, the penurious "abbé philosophe" accepting money from the church with one hand and writing unorthodox articles for the Encyclopédie with the other.[1] In broad strokes, Burson confirms this picture, but the events of Yvon's career mark him out as atypical in fascinating ways. Three large themes stand out in Burson's telling: first, the lasting effect of Yvon's involvement in the Prades Affair, which dogged his career for the rest of his life; second, Burson demonstrates significant continuity in Yvon's ideas through phases in which he was labeled variously an Encyclopédiste, freemason, and antiphilosophe; and third, the ways that the intellectual landscape shifted around Yvon throughout the course of his long career. Taken together, Burson's account of Yvon's strange career shows the continued dynamism of theological debate and the fascinating cross-pollination of intellectual movements that we often consider in different contexts. The first turning point of Burson's story is the Prades Affair of 1751, a scandal that erupted over the thesis defended at the Sorbonne by Jean-Martin de Prades, which despite its seemingly innocent proposal for proving the historical veracity of the gospel nonetheless became a cause célèbre among eighteenth-century religious debates. Burson's previous book on the case of Prades, The Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France, untangled the web of accusation and counter-accusation that surrounded the denunciation of the Prades thesis by Jansenist and pro-Jesuit forces in turn, as well as the ways that the editors of the Encyclopédie used the ensuing chaos to criticize both sides.[2] Following this condemnation, Prades was forced into exile alongside his former
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Papers by Andrei Pesic
on in earnest and began to diverge significantly from the metropolitan institution: the Easter concert in Port-au-Prince entirely composed of opera arias would have been unthinkable in the metropole. Linking developments in the colony’s entertainments with the understudied subject of religious practices among France’s Caribbean colonists, this article argues that
strong market pressures overrode weaker religious constraints in Saint-Domingue, making opera arias acceptable for Eastertide. It presents a new fine-grained approach for studying how cultural practices are transformed when traveling within an empire, with implications beyond the history of the arts.
Book Reviews by Andrei Pesic
on in earnest and began to diverge significantly from the metropolitan institution: the Easter concert in Port-au-Prince entirely composed of opera arias would have been unthinkable in the metropole. Linking developments in the colony’s entertainments with the understudied subject of religious practices among France’s Caribbean colonists, this article argues that
strong market pressures overrode weaker religious constraints in Saint-Domingue, making opera arias acceptable for Eastertide. It presents a new fine-grained approach for studying how cultural practices are transformed when traveling within an empire, with implications beyond the history of the arts.