83 books match the query 'Enlightenment' and 6 start with c

cover of Changing Identities in Early Modern France

Changing Identities in Early Modern France

Michael Wolfe, ed.

Duke University Press, 1997

Changing Identities in Early Modern France offers new interpretations of what it meant to be French during a period of profound transition, from the outbreak of the Hundred Years War to the consolidation of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century. As medieval notions were gradually replaced by new definitions of the state, society, and family, dynastic struggles and religious wars raised questions about loyalty and identity and destabilized the meaning of "Frenchness."
After examining the interplay between competing ideologies and public institutions, from the monarchy to the Parlement of Paris to the aristocratic household, the volume explores the dynamics of deviance and dissent, particularly in regard to women’s roles in religious reform movements and such sensationalized phenomena as the witch hunts and infanticide trials. Concluding essays examine how regional and confessional identities reshaped French identity in response to the discovery of the New World and the spectacular spread of Calvinism.

Contributors. Charmarie Blaisdell, William Bouwsma, Lawrence M. Bryant, Denis Crouzet, Robert Descimon, Barbara B. Diefendorf, Richard M. Golden, Sarah Hanley, Mack P. Holt, Donald R. Kelley, Kristen B. Neuschel, J. H. M. Salmon, Zachary Sayre Schiffman, Silvia Shannon, Alfred Soman, Michael Wolfe

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cover of Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment

Cherubino's Leap

In Search of the Enlightenment Moment

Richard Kramer

University of Chicago Press, 2016

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn’s focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder’s imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one’s world changes. 

In Cherubino’s Leap, Richard Kramer unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino’s daring moment of escape in Mozart’s Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart’s operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.
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cover of Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator

Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment

Tom Zille

University of London Press, 2021

Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804) is best known as a dramatist and an influential children’s writer of the Enlightenment period. This volume is the first book to explore his singularly extensive output as a literary translator. Tom Zille investigates the conditions which allowed Weiße to become the most prolific German translator of English literature in the eighteenth century, a popular translator of French drama, and an influential editor and “entrepreneur” of the translations of others. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the study examines Weiße’s wide-ranging professional networks as a cultural mediator of European significance. Special attention is paid to his role in the German reception of the Ossian cycle of poems, his introduction of English children’s literature to Germany, his translations of popular prose, and the intersections between his original writing and translations.
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cover of Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project, and the Scottish Enlightenment

Civilizing Money

Hume, his Monetary Project, and the Scottish Enlightenment

George Caffentzis

Pluto Press, 2021

Taking the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as its subject, this book breaks new ground in focusing its lens on a little-studied aspect of Hume’s thinking: his understanding of money.

George Caffentzis makes both an intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxian conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist development. He vividly charts the ways in which Hume’s philosophy directly informed the project of ‘civilizing’ the people of the Scottish Highlands and pacifying the English proletariat in response to the revolts of both groups at the heart of the empire.

Built on careful historical and philosophical detective work, Civilizing Money offers a stimulating and radical political reading of the ways in which Hume’s fundamental philosophical claims performed concrete political functions.

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cover of Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope: Contemporary Implications of the Scottish Enlightenment

Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope

Contemporary Implications of the Scottish Enlightenment

Ronald C. Arnett with Foreword by Thomas M. Lessl

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

WINNER, 2022 National Communication Association Top Single-Author Book of the Year in the Communication Ethics Division!

Tenacious hope, the heart of a just and free society 
 
During the Enlightenment, Scottish intellectuals and administrators met the demands of profit and progress while shepherding concerns for self and other, individual and community, and family and work. Communication Ethics and Tenacious Hope captures the “unity of contraries,” offering the Scottish Enlightenment as an exemplar of tenacious hope countering the excesses of individualism. Ronald C. Arnett reveals two stories: the struggle between optimism and tenacious hope, and optimism’s ultimate triumph in the exclusion of difference and the reification of progress as an ultimate good. 
 
In chapters that detail the legacies of Lord Provost George Drummond, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Adam Ferguson, and Sir Walter Scott, Arnett highlights the problematic nature of optimism and the ethical agency of tenacious hope. Arnett illustrates the creative union of education and administration, the ability to accept doubt within systems of knowledge and imagination, and an abiding connection to local soil. As principles of progress, free will, and capitalism swept Europe, proponents of optimism envisioned a world of consumerism and absolutes. In contrast, practitioners of tenacious hope embraced uncertainty and compassion as pragmatic necessities.
 
This work continues Arnett’s scholarship, articulating the vital importance of communication ethics. Those seeking to discern and support a temporal sense of the good in this historical moment will find in this timely work the means to pursue, hold, and nourish tenacious hope. This insightful theorization of the Scottish Enlightenment distills the substance of a just and free society for meeting dangerous and uncertain times. 
 
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cover of Cultural Revolution in Berlin: Jews in the Age of Enlightenment

Cultural Revolution in Berlin

Jews in the Age of Enlightenment

Shmuel Feiner and Natalie Naimark-Goldberg

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

The Enlightenment, which marked a social and philosophical turn away from religion and toward science and reason, swept across Europe in the eighteenth century, and these civil and rational values were embraced byJewish intellectuals, bringing about a cultural revolution within traditional Jewish society. The story of this transformation is presented here through a close look at the works held in the Leopold Müller Memorial Library of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which was the private library of Leopold Zunz, the father of the “Science of Judaism.”
 
As Shmuel Feiner and Natalie Naimark-Goldberg reveal in this insightful and approachable history, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) was a multifaceted movement, articulated in many different ways in the varied settings where Jews lived. Rather than providing a comprehensive story of the Haskalah, Feiner and Naimark-Goldberg use these impressive literary treasures to trace the cultural transformation that took place mainly in Germany, from its moderate and scattered beginnings in the early 1700s, through the height of the movement in the second half of the eighteenth century, until its final stage around 1800, when the Haskalah began to give way to new movements and ideologies.
 
Richly illustrated with images of eighteenth-century manuscripts, books, and pamphlets, Cultural Revolution in Berlin provides an excellent guide to the significant cultural metamorphosis brought about by the Jewish Enlightenment.
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