Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World – serie

Sheds new light on European and regional book markets, the development of a public sphere and the impact of new media on intellectual, social, religious and political change.How do you become a citizen? Ever since printing was introduced, being a member of society increasingly involved reading and writing: for sociability and belonging, instruction and entertainment, profit and charity, spiritual awakening and political debate. Literary practices shaped and changed identities and the organisation of society during the Long Eighteenth Century. In Scandinavia, this happened locally, as well as transnationally - reading, writing and producing texts involved entanglements within and beyond the borders of the Northern European periphery of Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Focusing on 'literary citizenship', this volume uncovers the different ways in which engagements with print have mediated and established networks and communities, identities and agencies of multiple sorts in an interconnected media landscape. The result is a complex and intriguing history of the book in the Scandinavian region. This history is, on the one hand, influenced by a European market and tradition. On the other hand, it offers an important and different case of regional and local adaptation, marked by what has been termed a 'Northern Enlightenment'. This book will be of interest to scholars of European enlightenment studies and to those who are interested in the continuing debates surrounding print culture and history.This book is available in digital format as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.This book and the research upon which it is based was supported by funds from The Research Council of Norway and the National Library of Norway. CONTRIBUTORS: Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Jon Haarberg, Ruth Hemstad, Thor Inge Rørvik, Ellen Krefting, Karin Kukkonen, Ulrik Langen, Aina Nøding, Jonas Nordin, James Raven, Janicke S. Kaasa, Karen Skovgaard-Petersen, Frederik Stjernfelt, Iver Tangen Stensrud and Jonas Thorup Thomsen.

Places the central intellectual and religious debates of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England in a refreshing transnational perspective.Between 1650 and 1750 the intellectual and religious landscape of England underwent profound transformations, shaped by an unprecedented engagement with Dutch and French books and ideas. Works by Descartes, Grotius, Spinoza, Bayle and others introduced new modes of thought, prompting English thinkers to reimagine the relationship between scripture, reason, ethics and scholarship. These texts, circulating in Latin, French and English, challenged traditional authority and invited scholars to reconcile Christianity with history, philosophy and the emerging natural sciences.Marco Barducci presents a detailed exploration of how these imported ideas catalysed key conceptual shifts. This book shows how scripture was read as a cultural artifact; metaphysics was disentangled from natural philosophy; the church's role was reframed to prioritize social cohesion; and human agency was increasingly viewed through a worldly lens. By viewing these changes as part of a transnational framework of writers, the book highlights how intellectual exchanges between England and the Continent shaped English responses to crises of faith, scholarship, and epistemology.Combining intellectual and book history, this study not only reframes the notion of an "English Enlightenment" but also interrogates broader questions of secularization and modernity. It offers fresh insights into the interplay of ideas, books, and society, while examining how England adapted-and transformed - Continental thought.

A pioneering exploration of how differences in material textual forms conveyed and altered ideas in diverse but connected parts of the world in a period of exceptional social, political and intellectual change.Technological advances during the long eighteenth century brought new and exciting intellectual exchange between peoples in different parts of the world. Mutual unfamiliarity with textual forms - those sent to as well as received from Europe - also made knowledge transfer unpredictable and problematic.This volume examines how differences in the material production and circulation of textual objects transformed the ways in which knowledge was formulated and received between 1650 and 1850. Essays focus on diverse regions of Britain and Europe, European colonies in the Caribbean and North America, India and East Asia. The volume engages with varied and changing perceptions of China in Europe, the transmission of Christian texts in colonial South Asia, the cross-cultural circulation of natural history and Orientalist knowledge, and the diffusion of the Qu'ran in European Enlightenment libraries.In pursuing global perspectives, thirteen cultural and literary historians, collectively reassess Eurocentric interpretations of a republic of letters, a public sphere, an invention of the self and a reading revolution. They further challenge the extent to which European periodizations of 'the Enlightenment' map onto processes of technological and intellectual change in other regions of the globe.

The epic histories of the French Revolution, Enlightenment, and colonialism in the West Indies, told through the history of one family.The Labottières were the largest printing and bookselling dynasty in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. From the 1680s to the sale of their business in 1794 three generations of this family acted as major cultural brokers in this booming Atlantic port, serving the rapidly expanding commercial and legal sectors with books, pamphlets, and newspapers. The lives and businesses of this family are heavily entwined with the histories of the Enlightenment, French colonialism in the West Indies, and the French Revolution. We find the final generation, welcoming the Revolution, printing a pro-revolutionary newspaper that framed the revolts in Haiti and Martinique in pro-revolutionary terms. They would come to establish their shop as a Jacobin centre and, along with their workers and journalists, navigated the forces of popular censorship and state control. However, despite these activities, the Labottière printing and bookselling enterprise would, eventually, be destroyed by the very Revolution it had supported. Through this lively microhistory of the Labottières, Jane McLeod presents the important role played by the flourishing Atlantic port economy in supporting the expansion of printing and bookselling. Furthermore, from McLeod's extensive archival research into over thirty members of the Labottière family, emerges a new understanding of the role played by printers and booksellers in the spreading of the ideas and concerns that underpinned some of the landmark social, cultural and political changes of the eighteenth century.