ABOUT THIS BOOK

A study of the experience of nature in the eighteenth century based on the life of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99).

In The Alpine Enlightenment, historian Kathleen Kete takes us into the world of the Genevan geologist, physicist, inventor, and mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. During his prodigious climbs into the upper ranges of the Alps, Saussure focused intensely on the natural phenomena he encountered—glaciers, crevasses, changes in the weather, and shifts in the color of the sky—and he described with great precision what he saw, heard, and touched. Kete uses Saussure’s evocative writings, which emphasized above all physical engagement with the earth, to uncover not just how people during the Enlightenment thought about nature, but how they experienced it. As Kete shows, Saussure thought with and through his body: he harnessed his senses to understand the forces that shaped the world around him. In so doing, he offered a vision of nature as worthy of respect independent of human needs, anticipating present-day concerns about the environment and our shared place within it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kathleen Kete is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., ‘58/H’95 Professor of European History at Trinity College in Connecticut.

REVIEWS

"As a form of microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondence, Kete’s scrupulously researched text identifies Saussure with the higher aims of human endeavor, with the Enlightenment’s penetrating rigor, and with a pursuit of knowledge through systematic enquiry and elemental union with nature’s 'sensorium.'"

— Leonardo

"Kete's book is knowledgeable, engaging, and original. With its spatial arrangement of the chapters, it is also suitable for cultural tourism purposes. Those interested can take it on a hike on site, where many tours around and on Mont Blanc are offered today. In paperback format, the book fits well in the backpack."

— H-Soz-Kult

“Kete makes Saussure’s experience of the natural world tangible to the reader, guiding us along the paths he walked and describing the flowers he picked, the people he met, and the major discoveries and events of his time, including the observations of the transit of Venus, the mapping of the shape of the Earth, and the political revolutions of the end of the century. More importantly, her study captures and articulates a fundamental through-line in Enlightenment sciences: that of the scaling up of the material body as a way to know nature and to create environment.”

— H-France

“The Alpine Enlightenment is at once a study of a major Swiss savant’s hard-headed love affair with the Alps, a plea for the singularly respectful view of nature that he embodied, and a vivid evocation of the Swiss milieu from which he came. The author makes a powerful case for seeing Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s view of nature as scrupulously empirical and based on tangible bodily experience, vividly explaining how his life in Geneva and in the mountains fashioned his understanding of the natural world.”

— John Brewer, California Institute of Technology

“In this innovative and exciting environmental biography, Kete places Saussure in an expanding set of contexts from family and home, through the urban milieu of his native Geneva and the trans-European sociability of Enlightenment science, to the mountain on the horizon. The Alpine Enlightenment is a sensitive study that shows how Saussure’s own alertness to his bodily, sensorial, emotional, and aesthetic relationship with the Alps led him to a new and personally engaged sense of humanity’s relationship to nature.”

— Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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