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Rather than envision themselves as agents of state-sponsored repression, the royal book censors of eighteenth-century France wished, through their reports and decisions, to guide the literary traffic of the Enlightenment and expand public awareness of progressive thought.
The ambition is of this volume to study the role censorship played in the intellectual culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how it was implemented, and how it affected the development philosophy and literary writing. It contains contributions by intellectual historians, philosophers and literary theorists. The first section studies how Enlightenment thinkers were submitted to censorship, in particular the German Spinozists, Pierre Bayle, and the French Encylopedists. The second section on the institutional aspects of censorship contains an analysis of the breakdown of censorship in England around 1640 and a discussion of the impact of censorship on philosophy in the Netherlands. The final section studies the stand three Enlightenment thinkers, namely John Toland, Denis Diderot, and G. W. Leibniz, took on the issue of censorship.
Birn's exceptionally well-written narrative covers the century and a half that preceded the French Revolution. The first section, "An Age of Crisis and Discovery (1648-1715)," treats the period between the Peace of Westphalia and the death of Louis XIV as a time of political experimentation, colonial exploitation, hardening social lines, economic regression, and scientific advance. The second section covers the period known retrospectively as the "Ancien Régime" (1715-1789). Eighteenth-century politics are viewed as replete with confrontation and conflict; and a broadened view of the Enlightenment emphasizes the significance of print culture, while also introducing the reader to sites of sociability such as academies, salons, Masonic lodges, and coffeehouses. This is the third edition, revised and expanded, of Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648-1789, and new to it is an examination of European contact with Africa, the Americas, and South and East Asia. More attention is also paid to the slave trade, women, family life, religion, exploration, and the emergence of a civil society. It contains an index, 17 maps, and 20 illustrations.
A concise and lively survey that introduces students to the people, ideas, and conflicts in European history from the Thirty Years' War to the Napoleonic Era. The authors draw on new work in gender studies, environmental history, anthropology and cultural history to illustrate the animating force of the period: the assumption that the world could be made amenable to human reason, though precisely how that was to be done remained highly contested. The nature of those contests--in politics, culture, and society--is traced throughout the book. The work includes discussions of developments in science, art, and literature. A chronology of people and events concludes each chapter and there is a glossary of key terms at the end of the book.
Tracking the relationship between the theory of press control and the realities of practicing daily press censorship prior to publication, this volume on the suppression of dissent in early modern Europe tackles a topic with many elusive and under-researched characteristics. Pre-publication censorship was common in absolutist regimes in Catholic and Protestant countries alike, but how effective it was in practice remains open to debate. The Netherlands and England, where critical content segued into outright lampoonery, were unusual for hard-wired press freedoms that arose, respectively, from a highly competitive publishing industry and highly decentralized political institutions. These nati...
With courtesy and restraint Professor Woodbridge administers a series of knock-out blows to the confidently voiced claim that factual inerrancy is no authentic element in the historic Christian view of Scripture.
The story of how book piracy in pre-Revolutionary France expanded the reach of the works that would inspire momentous change.
Patrons of Enlightenment emphasizes the dependency of thinkers upon patrons and compares the patron-client relationships in the French, English, and Scottish republics of letters.
The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclop die, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing h...