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Friendship, an acquired relationship primarily based on choice rather than birth, lay at the heart of Enlightenment preoccupations with sociability and the formation of the private sphere. In Brotherly Love, Kenneth Loiselle argues that Freemasonry is an ideal arena in which to explore the changing nature of male friendship in Enlightenment France. Freemasonry was the largest and most diverse voluntary organization in the decades before the French Revolution. At least fifty thousand Frenchmen joined lodges, the memberships of which ranged across the social spectrum from skilled artisans to the highest ranks of the nobility. Loiselle argues that men were attracted to Freemasonry because it en...
"The book mounts a challenge to the notion of a clear distinction between public and private and attempts to account for the mobility of the many boundaries between the two. The first essay introduces some of those problematic boundaries in the light of the influential studies of Habermas, Koselleck, Aries and Chartier, who together have helped shape our understanding of the formation of the modern public and private spheres. A number of essays deal with the nature of public opinion in relation to state control and with the role of the intelligentsia. Some investigate non-political forms of sociability and the creation of various kinds of publics within the cultural realm. Others scrutinize gender roles and the validity of the accepted correspondence of male/female to public/private in the light of women's use of the printed word.
Long recognized as more than the writings of a dozen or so philosophes, the Enlightenment created a new secular culture populated by the literate and the affluent. Enamoured of British institutions, Continental Europeans turned to the imported masonic lodges and found in them a new forum that was constitutionally constructed and logically egalitarian. Originating in the Middle Ages, when stone-masons joined together to preserve their professional secrets and to protect their wages, the English and Scottish lodges had by the eighteenth century discarded their guild origins and become an international phenomenon that gave men and eventually some women a place to vote, speak, discuss and debate...
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When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution.
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A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.
An exploration of current scholarly thinking about the wide and surprisingly complex range of historical problems associated with the study of Ancien Régime Europe