Authors:Guido Abbattista Pages: 35 - 44 Abstract: From the mid-1770s onwards there was a clear shift in perspective in the way European commentators looked at China, a subject that, especially in an era defined by Paul Hazard as the crisis of European consciousness, had long appealed to Western culture as both a cognitive and more generally an intellectual challenge. The contrast between sinophilic and sinophobic attitudes, which often characterized the evolution, even temporal, of the eighteenth-century perception of Chinese reality, cannot alone explain the shifts in interest and changes of opinion that occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. What this contribution aims to highlight is how, in some key observers of and commentators on China between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century – from Adam Smith, Abbé Raynal and Denis Diderot, to Lord Macartney and John Barrow – one can detect perspectives and reflections that cannot be due to a simple descriptive register or to attempts at apologia or devaluation, but rather to approaches tending to include China in global comparative historical or socio-economic reasoning. And how, with that reasoning, the assumption of the superiority of the European model leads to China being seen no longer as a mere object of admiration or a source of inspiration, but as a new actor with a new role in global history. The discourse thus tends to take on, in various ways, prescriptive overtones, aimed at identifying the internal and external changes necessary for the part that, from a Western perspective, China could play in a connected world. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13341 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Marc André Bernier Pages: 45 - 52 Abstract: The February 1706 issue of the «Mercure galant» offered its readers the account of an agreement made between the Iroquois and the Ottawa in 1705. Given the context in which this negotiation was received, the «Mercure»’s journalist decides to render each party’s remarks, as he writes, in «savage style». This style’s characterization and the function it plays within the article’s overarching narrative invite us to question received notions on the colonial imaginary of Ancien Régime news periodicals. Moreover, this article rethinks the essential role played by mondain fashions’ short historical time and the present moment in the construction of the figure of the Other. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13329 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Monica Bolufer Pages: 53 - 63 Abstract: This article explores the role of gender in the construction of images of Islam in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Although Spanish Arabism has been largely neglected in international historiography, research has proved that Spanish erudites since the 16th century had an important role in the study of the Arabic language and sources; also, interest in the Islamic world was popularized via fictional works and coverage in newspapers and journals. Spain is a distinctive and particularly interesting case within European Orientalism because Islam was part of its history and cultural legacy and a close neighbour in the north of Africa, but also because orientalization of the country by European travellers and philosophers – not yet as intense as during Romanticism – had already started, notably in relation to gender. If the Enlightenment developed a less aggressive, more open – although not devoid of stereotypes – vision of Islam, is the same true in the Hispanic world' To what extent was the tendency to bracket together the Hispanic and the Islamic either accepted or challenged by Spanish and creole intellectuals' Did the country’s own Islamic past help create more nuanced visions of the «Orient» or did it instead lead to highlighting the contrasts in order to claim a place for Spain in European modernity' This article will address in an exploratory way these questions, seldom considered from the point of view of gender, through an analysis of learned works and reformist essays. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13260 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Christophe Martin Pages: 65 - 73 Abstract: At least since the rise of postcolonial studies, the questioning of the supposed European-centrism of the Enlightenment has been recurrent. How can we situate Rousseau in this respect' In his justly famous analyses, Claude Lévi-Strauss recognised him as the “founder of the human sciences” and the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité as “the first treatise on general ethnology”. In De la grammatologie, however, Jacques Derrida proposed another reading, arguing that “Rousseau’s dynamics is a strange system in which the critique of ethnocentrism organically composes with eurocentrism”. Should we then consider that Rousseau, far from offering a counter-example to the European-centrism of the Enlightenment, would give an illustration of it which is all the more remarkable because it is more insidious' These are the questions that we would like to try to shed light on, by insisting on Rousseau’s grievances with regard to the European “philosophical mob”, which commit the egregious error of ignoring the essential plasticity of the human species. It is obviously no coincidence that the art of travelling constitutes Emile’s ultimate apprenticeship: it is on this condition that he will be able to become both a man and a citizen, capable of judging customs and mores while remaining radically alienated from the prejudices of his contemporaries, who despite all their books and all their travels, know of men only Europeans. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13321 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Nadezda Plavinskaia Pages: 75 - 83 Abstract: The Instruction of Catherine II (the Nakaz, 1767) represented an original attempt of the Russian supreme power to introduce certain ideas of the European Enlightenment into the practice of national legislation. The ‘philosophical’ origins of the Nakaz, which incorporated broad borrowings from Western eighteenth-century thinkers, ensured the empress’s work a place among the most liberal texts of the Russian Enlightenment and promoted its spread beyond borders. In the last third of the XVIII century more than thirty editions of the Nakaz in several languages – German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Greek and Latin – circulated in Europe. Such editorial activity attested the great interest of the public opinion in the reforms announced by Catherine II at the beginning of her reign. Nevertheless, the Nakaz translations were not without consequence to the original text, having caused its modifications. An additional point is that most of these translations were initiated or supported by the people connected with Russia by their functions or by their interests. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13185 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Reinier Salverda Pages: 85 - 99 Abstract: This contribution will engage with a key question concerning the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot, viz. What can the ideas and the writings of these two philosophes still teach us today' In our discussion we will focus first on Raynal’s Histoire and its 18th-century Europeans, their commerce and colonies outside Europe, with special attention to what at the time was almost a paradigm case: the global maritime merchant empire of the Dutch. Secondly, we will consider what Diderot’s many contributions have added to the Histoire’s power and impact, especially his critique of European colonial, commercial and civilisational endeavour around the world. At the time, as Diderot and Raynal gave voice to the discontents arising from the ongoing global expansion of Europe, their Histoire – as Jonathan Israel has shown in his magnum opus – became a major vehicle for the dissemination of their Radical Enlightenment. The question that will concern us here is the one posed by Anthony Pagden: What relevance do those radical ideas still have in our postcolonial and globalised world of today, where the former colonial empires and their peoples are today writing back themselves, clamouring to be heard' PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13323 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Ann Thomson Pages: 101 - 110 Abstract: This article looks at a certain number of writers in the early 18th Century, mainly British and French, who reacted against the dominant hostility to Islam and the Muslim world and tried to provide a more accurate presentation of them. After surveying different ideological uses of more positive representations of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the work of some scholars of Arabic who were concerned with greater accuracy, I concentrate on two authors about whom we know very little; they both spent time in and wrote about the North African state of Algeria and tried openly to counter European prejudices against Muslims. A brief discussion of the only work written by the French diplomat Jean-Philippe Laugier de Tassy (a history of Algiers) is followed by a longer section on Joseph Morgan, who published several works. Both his History of Algiers and his annotated translations of a poem on Islam written by a Spanish Moor and of a work on North Africa by French monks who went there to ransom captives show an excellent knowledge of the region, its people and their language. While far from being totally positive about the state which lived by piracy, he makes a vigorous case against disinformation concerning Islam and Muslims and encourages his readers to understand others and to judge them by the same standards we apply to ourselves. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13198 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Carlo Borghero Pages: 111 - 126 Abstract: Follower of Malebranche, H.S. Gerdil is one of the greatest Eighteenth-Century Catholic philosophers. His Dissertation on the incompatibility of the principles of Descartes and Spinoza (1760), the subject of this article, highlights, thanks to an analytical examination of the texts, the irreconcilability between the two metaphysical perspectives. But the dissertation is not only a defense of Cartesianism against the accusation of closeness to Spinozism made by Leibniz and others – an accusation that for the author is denied by Spinoza’s own Epistolary – it is also a recapitulation of Gerdil’s philosophical apologetics. This is characterized by a skilful use of Descartes’ philosophy to contrast all forms of materialistic monism, whether they derive from Spinoza, Locke or Leibniz. Against these philosophies Gerdil does not use the Aristotelian scholasticism but the philosophy of Descartes, considered the true champion of Modern philosophy. By clearly separating Descartes from Spinoza, Gerdil also constructs a narrative of philosophical modernity different from the one made by Voltaire in the Lettres philosophiques and accepted by the manifestos of the Lumières. The modèle anglais is replaced with the defense of the relevance of Cartesianism and its usefulness in contrasting the Eighteenth-Century materialistic and atheistic philosophies, presented as a corruption of Descartes’ genuine principles, the only ones to guarantee the coexistence of philosophy with religion. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13850 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Lorenzo Mattei Pages: 127 - 135 Abstract: The presence of the choir in the Opera increases in the second half of the eighteenth century on the thrust of reformist demands aimed at the hybridization of Italian and French melodramaturgy. The mechanisms of the impresarios’ system and its reception have not been adequately explored, even though they can explain the reasons for the growing importance that the choir obtained during the transition from post-metastasian Opera to romanticism. The article provides some quantitative data, referring above all to those theatrical centers that more than others hosted permanent groups of choristers, and gives a summary of the vision of the choir from the perspective of both treatise writers and theatre audience. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13342 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Valentina Lepore Pages: 137 - 145 Abstract: The paper shows the apologetic intent of Claude Yvon (1714-1789) in his contribution to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (1751-1772). The article focuses on his Aristotélisme, which allows us to solve the mid-18th-century debate on whether Yvon was heterodox or orthodox. In particular, the examination concerns what Yvon expressed about the Aristotelian theory of the mortality of the soul, paying attention to the sections on the Italian Aristotelians of the Renaissance and of the modern age Andrea Cesalpino (1524 or 1525-1603) and Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631). PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13364 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Wolfgang Schmale Pages: 147 - 152 Abstract: In the early modern period, the representation of the continents by means of allegorical figures enjoyed great popularity. The book Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli, is very stimulating, richly documented and fundamental with regard to the detailed source-critical examination of concrete individual visualisations of the continents. The focus of the book rather lies with the 16th century, while part 5 focuses on the 18th century. In the 18th century, continent allegories entered into the public sphere and reached broader strata in the society. In this century, Eurocentrism progressed considerably, but did not invent it. The volume’s co-authors pose the question of Eurocentrism as well as that of racism with regard to the late Middle Ages and the 16th century. Because of their widespread use, continent allegories can be counted among the most important primary sources from which we can draw conclusions about how extra-European cultures could be represented, interpreted and viewed from a European perspective. They represent much more than just an art-historical source, they are, especially when one thinks of their accessibility in public spaces for everyone, actually a historical source of the first rank, behind which not least travelogues and theoretical concepts such as the history of civilisation as a universal history compete with the Christian history of salvation in the Bible. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13179 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Giampaolo Salice Pages: 153 - 156 Abstract: While offering an overview of the leading digital projects related to the 18th century, the review critically reflects on the benefits and threats for research in the humanities generated by employing computational devices and the dematerialisation of information sources. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13371 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Leman Berdeli Pages: 157 - 162 Abstract: The color organ with its modern interpretation is an electronic device representing sound in a visual configuration. The origins of the color organ inventions can be traced back to the hand-operated models based on harpsichord design promising the splash of colors upon pressing a key. In this perusal, the harpsichord appears as a tool of fashion with its unique interpretation taking place in a setting where the author got into the habit of calling the ocular harpsichord ‘la toilet’. The acquisition of a certain tendency made the author develop a habit of calling ornaments in general as ‘visible music’. Throughout the narrative incorporating romantic features, the concept of ornament in music manifests itself visibly on clothing and architectural decoration adhering to the philosophical fulcrum between the 18th-century decorative aesthetics and the inventiveness of the Lumières. As a logical consequence, a mathematical structure applied in architecture could turn into keyboard compostition. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13359 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
Authors:Valentina Dal Cin Pages: 163 - 167 Abstract: This review describes the topics covered during eleven meetings held from February 4 to June 17, 2021 within the “Venice in Question” seminar, coordinated by Daniele Dibello (Universiteit Gent) and organized by the Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie, alongside other Venetian institutions. Presenting recent studies on Venetian history, the seminar involved Italian and international scholars, animating a dialogue between different historiographical approaches and traditions. While embracing a broad chronological span, from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, the seminar pointed out aspects relevant to scholars of the 18th century. PubDate: 2022-11-18 DOI: 10.36253/ds-13073 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2022)
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