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THE CLASSICAL TURN IN ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

DAN EDELSTEIN
DAN EDELSTEIN*
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, Stanford University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” of philosophes with “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue durée of Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 61 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–9)Google Scholar.

2 Darnton, Robert, “In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas,” Journal of Modern History 43 (1971), 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 A few significant markers in this very schematic overview of the post-Gay historiography would include, respectively, own, Darnton'sThe Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979)Google Scholar; Jacob, Margaret, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981)Google Scholar; and Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikuláš, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 I offer a fuller account of recent scholarship in The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010), which also touches on some of the other topics addressed here.

5 Soll, Jacob, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Winterer, Caroline, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Cornell, 2007)Google Scholar.

7 See, for instance, Grafton, Anthony, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in the Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1991)Google Scholar; and more recently Grafton, Anthony, Most, Glenn W., and Settis, Salvatore, eds., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.

8 For the revisionist scholarship on the Quarrel see in particular Yilmaz, Levent, Le temps moderne: Variations sur les anciens et les contemporains (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar; and Norman, Larry F., The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Sonenscher, Michael, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, 2009), 142Google Scholar.

10 Kavanagh, , Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.