Tracking “ the Enlightenment ” Across the Nineteenth Century 1 !

This paper draws on the my earlier discussion of problems with the (now revised) entry "Enlightenment" in the Oxford English Dictionary ("Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary," Journal of the History of Ideas 64:3 (2003): 421-443) and material that previously appeared on my research blog Persistent Enlightenment (http://persistentenlightenment.wordpress.com).

The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture , 2021

This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. Addressing essential period-related themes---from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics---this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its tenets in light of new data. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017

European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 2006

The essays gathered in this issue explore possibilities for re-conceptualising the historical topography of the European Enlightenment through an examination of its communicative practices. By what means did the Enlightenment emerge, how did it take root in particular places, and how did it unfold in time and space-as local experience, as a Europe-wide movement and as a global phenomenon? It is an adventure in a new form of cultural geography; it rejects a simple mapping of cultural forms and movements on to purportedly deeper economic, social and political structures and instead proposes that culture be understood as a historical force in its own right, which, through the elaboration of a series of institutions, practices and systems of signification played a constitutive role in the reshaping of economic, social and political structures along new lines. Arguably, no cultural movement, at least since the advent of Christianity, presents a more compelling case for the constitutive claims of culture than the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. For much of the twentieth century the Enlightenment was studied almost exclusively as a chapter in the history of ideas, a story of great thinkers, of philosophical systems and debates that unfolded among a cosmopolitan elite of European men of letters. The historical question was posed (paraphrasing Kant) as follows: 'What was the Enlightenment?' 1 In this historiography the questions of where or how the Enlightenment made itself manifest mattered little or their answers seemed self-evident-it occurred in the minds of a few men who were well positioned to be in dialogue with one another. But a generation ago, a group of scholars of the European eighteenth century, notably Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche, Roger Chartier, Roy Porter and Jürgen Habermas, began posing a different series of questions: How did the

Central Europe, vol. 3/1, 2005

Margaret C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001),, 2003

German History, 2017

he December 1783 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift [Berlin Monthly] carried a response by the clergyman Johann Friedrich Zöllner to an anonymous article, published in the journal a few months earlier, that questioned whether the participation of clergy was necessary at marriage ceremonies. Zöllner took issue with the proposal, arguing that it would further corrupt public morality at the very moment when "the most horrible blasphemies are spoken with smiles," when libertinism ran rampant, when "French charlatanry" threatened to choke off whatever patriotic sentiments still remained, and when-"in the name of enlightenment [Aufklärung]"-much confusion had been wrought in the hearts and minds of the citizenry. This confusion, in Zöllner's view, extended to the very notion of enlightenment itself. So he inserted a footnote in his essay that asked: What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins to enlighten! And still I have never found it answered! 1

The German Quarterly, 2008

Books have always been considered dangerous by some, but rarely as dangerous as in late eighteenth-century Germany. The meteoric growth of the market for books and periodicals in this period not only gave rise to a literary public sphere; it also triggered wide-ranging and often hysterical fears of a "reading epidemic" among German intellectuals and other educated elites. These fears have attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention over the years, with more recent studies generally addressing the topic from the perspective of the history of genre, class conflict, or gender politics. Commentators like Erich Schön have made it clear how significant the discussions of "Lesesucht" and "Lesewut" are for our understanding of the history of reading, and how our own notions of what it means to be a reader, especially a reader of novels, take shape in this period. Others have emphasized eighteenth-century concerns about the politicization of readers from the lower social strata following the French Revolution or about women readers who allegedly neglect the duties of motherhood. 1 The discussion of these facets of the controversy has certainly been illuminating, but the emphasis on drawing distinctions among text genres or social groups has tended to narrow scholarly focus, whereas the scope of the controversy itself seems to demand a more comprehensive approach. Despite the frequent singling out of certain groups or genres for condemnation, one cannot help but be struck by how widespread concerns about reading and textuality were throughout Germany in the late eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century: how many commentators expressed them (from Wieland to Friedrich Schlegel, from Mendelssohn to Fichte), how many different text genres came under suspicion (from novels to plays to political journalism), and how many different groups were seen to be at risk (not just young people, peasants, and women, but also adult middle-class readers of both sexes). In the following contribution, I propose that we take a step back from the focused types of analysis mentioned above in order to adopt a more holistic view of the anxieties about reading, a view that builds upon recent work done on consumer culture in eighteenth-century Germany (e.g., Purdy; Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure).

Journal of Early Modern History, 2009