Encyclopedia Of The Enlightenment

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This acclaimed translation of Michel Delon's Dictionnaire Europen des Lumires contains more than 350 signed entries covering the art, economics, science, history, philosophy, and religion of the Enlightenment. Delon's team of more than 200 experts from around the world offers a unique perspective on the period, providing offering not only factual information but also critical opinions that give the reader a deeper level of understanding. An international team of translators, editors, and advisers, under the auspices of the French Ministry of Culture, has brought this collection of scholarship to the English-speaking world for the first time.

Focuses on the entire range of philosophic and social changes engendered by the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia extends the conventional geographical boundaries of the Enlightenment, covering not only France, England, Scotland, the Low Countries, Italy, English-speaking North America, the German states, and Hapsburg Austria but also Iberian, Ibero-American, Jewish, Russian, and Eastern European cultures. Designed and organized for ease of use, its special features include more than 700 signed articles; annotated bibliographies following each article to guide further study; an extensive system of cross-references; a synoptic outline of contents; a comprehensive topical index providing easy access to networks of related articles; and high quality illustrations, including photographs, line drawings, and maps.

A comprehensive reference guide on the eighteenth century time period known as the Enlightenment.

The first introductory A–Z resource on the dynamic achievements in science from the late 1600s to 1820, including the great minds behind the developments and science's new cultural role. Though the Enlightenment was a time of amazing scientific change, science is an often-neglected facet of that time. Now, Science in the Enlightenment redresses the balance by covering all the major scientific developments in the period between Newton's discoveries in the late 1600s to the early 1800s of Michael Faraday and Georges Cuvier. Over 200 A-Z entries explore a range of disciplines, including astronomy and medicine, scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Benjamin Franklin, and instruments such as the telescope and calorimeter. Emphasis is placed on the role of women, and proper attention is given to the shifts in the worldview brought about by Newtonian physics, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's "chemical revolution," and universal systems of botanical and zoological classification. Moreover, the social impact of science is explored, as well as the ways in which the work of scientists influenced the thinking of philosophers such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot and the writers and artists of the romantic movement.

In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration--rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields--has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.

Highlights the life and discusses the history occurring during the upbringing of the French editor of the "Encyclopedia," the first of its kind.