Debating Enlightenment

Scholarship, Historiography and the Transmission of Books and Ideas
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-914967-23-8
Verlag: Durham University IMEMS Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 244 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 534 g

Reihe: Ideas and Practices, 1300–1850

A bold reappraisal of Enlightenment legacies this volume uncovers the fractured, global, and contested nature of modern Europe's most influential intellectual transformation.

Emerging from the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment has long served as both a foundational moment and a battleground for narratives of Western modernity. Once anchored in the writings of Spinoza, Kant, Diderot, and D'Alembert, its genealogy is now understood to stretch from the rhetorical afterlives of Renaissance humanism and the polemics of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, through the religious pluralism of the Dutch Republic and the confessional fractures of the Holy Roman Empire, to the text-critical methods of orthodox theologians and the radical secularism of the philosophes.

This volume rethinks the Enlightenment as a dynamic espace de débat-a field of contested meanings shaped by transnational circulation, institutional conflict, and historiographical reinvention. Drawing on debates around the "Enlightenment project", "radical" and "religious" Enlightenment, and the tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and national traditions, it engages with the works of Jonathan Israel, Dan Edelstein, and Jeffrey Burson, amongst others, to explore longue durée patterns of intellectual exchange and secularisation.

Rich in case studies from Paris, London, Amsterdam, Leipzig, and beyond, the collection speaks directly to those navigating the plural legacies of Enlightenment historiography in an era increasingly shaped by digital tools, global frameworks, and postcolonial critique.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barducci, Marco

Weitere Mitwirkende

Blanchard, Shaun

Burson, Jeffrey D

Raffe, Alasdair

Wallnig, Thomas

Walsh, Ashley James

Gil, Linda

Barducci, Marco

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: Neuzeit
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction - Marco Barducci

1. Historical Enlightenment research in Germany and Austria, c. 1930 - c. 2000: an intellectual Sonderweg? - Thomas Wallnig
2. Catholic Enlightenment from Catholicisme intransigeant to the Reception of Vatican II: Black Legend, Myth, or Historiographical Tool? - Shaun Blanchard
3. Transposing Erudition from late Humanism to the Early Enlightenment - Jeffrey D. Burson
4. Intellectual Pluralism, the Enlightenment and Scottish Responses to Deism - Alasdair Raffe
5. Was there an Anglo-Dutch Enlightenment? Republicanism, religion and secularisation c.1650-1750 - Marco Barducci
6. 'Divisos orbe Britannos'. Posthumous Voltaire in England: circulation of the book and controversial reception in war time - Linda Gil
7. Ideas of International Protestant Union and the Enlightenment in England and Switzerland, 1688-1722 - Ashley Walsh

Index of names and subjects

Über Autor(innen)

Walsh, Ashley James
ASHLEY WALSH is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University, Wales.

Barducci, Marco
MARCO BARDUCCI is Associate Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Pavia. He has published widely on political and intellectual history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Barducci, Marco
MARCO BARDUCCI is Associate Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Pavia. He has published widely on political and intellectual history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.