Bøger udgivet af Voltaire Foundation

This book offers a reassessment of radical writing in the late Enlightenment by examining the construction of a provocative authorial posture. It focuses on French and British writers who confronted the authorities as self-proclaimed outsiders, presented their authentic personalities to their readers, and boasted of their own political importance. This posture, and focus of the volume, was possible against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century media revolution that gave print a new presence in many people's daily lives. To stage protests, create scandals, and encourage political mobilisation, radical writers interacted with a growing and ever-curious audience consuming a variety of printed goods. Radical writing and the media revolution in the late Enlightenment features in-depth case studies of writers such as John Horne Tooke and Olympe de Gouges, among others. It also provides a systematic analysis of typical rhetorical gestures and paratextual forms that were frequently used to create a provocative posture. Finally, this study reconstructs contemporary anxieties about popular writers that have been largely overlooked by scholarship. Indeed, many proponents of the Enlightenment worried that emotions and entertainment were taking over public debate. Rather than siding for or against radical writing and the media revolution, this book uses these critical reactions to re-emphasise the ambivalence of popular politics in the late Enlightenment.

Gender and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Raging Women and Crying Men investigates emotional excess from the perspectives of performance studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, "raging women" and "crying men" illustrate how gender affects an audience's willingness to accept emotional performances. Female rage and male despair were both associated with the stage where their excessiveness was singularly allowed--if often also criticized. When these emotions appeared in prose works, they were often portrayed as exaggerated, manipulative performances. In this monograph, Anne F. Widmayer argues that female rage and male despair are both precipitated by power inequities. Female rage defies gender inequality, whereas male weeping reinforces gender ranking. Women's rage assumes men's power; men's grief reveals their feminine weakness. Angry women and grieving men were thus viewed as equally monstrous because they upset contemporary gender roles. Employing the figures of Medea, Odysseus, and Achilles, Widmayer surprisingly delineates how stoicism and sentimentalism coexisted for much of the eighteenth century. As the far more taboo emotion, women's rage had to be suppressed in order to maintain a distinction between masculinity and femininity. To sometimes cry like women did not significantly lessen men's privilege, but to allow angry women to act like men risked endangering the gendered power structure of the eighteenth century.

This book is about the parlance of political economic ideas with scientific practices in the Duchy of Milan, from the late eighteenth-century Habsburg monarchy to the early nineteenth-century Napoleonic era. It advocates for a shift in perspective from the history of ideas of political economy to the history of scientific practices, as an innovative methodological stance, to offer a more articulated understanding of how political economic ideas circulated and were appropriated in Europe and Milan between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In sum, the book asserts that the making and enforcement of political economic ideas into policies could not be possible without the mediation of scientific practices, and draws on a number of concrete examples to substantiate this claim. Following approval, policies had to be tested; these involved practitioners such as mechanicks, artisans, bakers and land surveyors, alongside institutions. These figures, mostly kept out of the picture of eighteenth-century political economy; built machines to grind grain in a Physiocratic fashion; drained marshes to realise Joseph II's plans of economic improvement; surveyed abandoned mines as a way to embrace Cameralist conceptions of the state; and wrote chemistry manuals as a celebration of Republican values and models of production. It was these figures who were entrusted with translating political and economic ideas and policies into practices, and with putting them at the service of the public good and advantage of society, two of the tenets of the Enlightenment. More broadly, this book also situates the Duchy of Milan at the centre of European transfers of political economic knowledge, delving into the broad interconnections between ideas and technological practices in the Enlightenment.

Part of the complete works of the French philosopher, historian and social reformer, Voltaire. Contains his last philosophical story, "Le Taureau blanc", and other works designed to shape his image after his death. For students and scholars of the 18th-century Enlightenment.