You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection of essays explores the emergence of economic societies in the British Isles and their development into a European, American and global reform movement in the eighteenth century. Its fourteen contributions demonstrate the intellectual horizons and international networks of this widespread and influential phenomenon.
"A collection of essays examining how print culture shaped the legacy of the Enlightenment. Explores the challenges, contradictions, and dilemmas modern European societies have encountered since the eighteenth century in trying to define, spread, and realize Enlightenment ideas and values"--Provided by publisher.
The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically f...
Franco Venturi, premier European interpreter of the Enlightenment, is still completing his acclaimed multivolume work Settecento Riformatore, a grand synthesis of Western history before the French Revolution as seen through the perceptive eyes of Italian observers. Princeton University Press has already published R. Burr Litchfield's English translation of the third volume of Settecento Riformatore, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768-1776: The First Crisis. Now the story continues with The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776-1789, translated from Volume IV of Venturi's work. The earlier volume dealt with European and Italian public opinion through the important decade that ended wit...
Modern Italian historiography has undergone a substantial revision in the last quarter of a century. From an almost exclusive focus on the process of nation-building, the attention of historians has shifted. The most innovative research is now devoted to assessing to what extent the cosmopolitan attitude that was evident in the late eighteenth century morphed, but did not disappear, in the ensuing two centuries. The essays in this volume make the case that the age of nations had a profound impact on Italian history and contributed to the creation of an Italian identity within the framework of well-functioning imperial and global networks. They also acknowledge that the process of national individualization carried with it a variety of aspects that reconnected Italian history to the foreign cultures that were undergoing constant self-fashioning. Cosmopolitan Italy in the Age of Nations: Transnational Visions from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century will be of interest to scholars throughout the world and intellectual and transnational historians.
Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together a range of case studies and fresh approaches to early modern intellectual history by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840. Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in early modern Europe. Yet intellectual historians have been slow to adopt the study of translations as an analytical tool for the understanding of such cultural transfers. Recently, a number of different approaches to transnational intellectual history have emerged, allowing historians of early modern Europe to draw...
This book offers a new, salutogenic, perspective on the development of early modern cities by exploring profound and complex ways in which architecture and landscape design served to promote public health on an urban scale. Focusing on fifteenth- through nineteenth-century Europe, it addresses the histories of spaces and institutions that supported salubrious living, highlighting the intersections of medical theory, government policy, and architectural practice in designing, improving, and monumentalizing the infrastructure of sanitation and healthcare. Studies in this book highlight the joint role of design thinking and scientific practice in reforming the facilities for treating and preventing disease; the impact of cross-cultural exchange on early modern strategies of urban improvement; and the creation of new therapeutic environments through state, communal, and private initiatives concerned with the preservation of physical and mental health, from recreational landscapes to spa resorts.
Explores how the idea of rare books was shaped by collectors, traders and libraries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using examples from across Europe, David McKitterick looks at how rare books developed from being desirable objects of largely private interest to become public and even national concerns.
This book provides a fascinating insight into the life and scientific work of Laura Bassi, the first female member of the influential Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna and also the first woman to be appointed a university professor in physics, or universal philosophy as it was then termed. The book describes Laura Bassi’s research activities and achievements, explaining the influence of Newton, her role in promoting Newtonian experimental physics in Bologna, and her work as an experimentalist, including on electricity. Much attention is paid to the context in which Bassi developed her career. The very considerable difficulties faced by a woman surrounded by male university teachers and members of the Academy are discussed, casting light on the constraints that led Bassi to set up the first experimental physics laboratory in her home, complete with the many instruments required for experimentation and private teaching. The aim is to provide a rounded and well-documented account of the scientific endeavors and achievements of a too often overlooked scientist who struggled to overcome the prejudices of her age.
Theatre of the Book explores the impact of printing on the European theater, 1480-1880. Far from being marginal to Renaissance dramatists, the printing press played as essential role in the birth of the modern theater. Looking at playtexts, engravings, actor portraits, notation systems, and theatrical ephemera as part of the broader history of theatrical ideas, this illustrated book offers both a history of European dramatic publication and an examination of the European theater's continual refashioning of itself in the world of print.