Artisanal Enlightenment

Author : Paola Bertucci
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300231628
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Artisanal Enlightenment written by Paola Bertucci and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. Artisanal Enlightenment provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, Bertucci provides a groundbreaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

Author : Paola Bertucci
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300227418
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Artisanal Enlightenment written by Paola Bertucci and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, the author places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France's colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. This work provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, the author provides a ground-breaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

Author : Adelheid Voskuhl
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022603402X
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Androids in the Enlightenment written by Adelheid Voskuhl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized. In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

Author : Leslie Tomory
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262300451
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Progressive Enlightenment written by Leslie Tomory and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that the gas industry was the first integrated large-scale technological network and that it signaled a new wave of industrial innovation. In Progressive Enlightenment, Leslie Tomory examines the origins of the gaslight industry, from invention to consolidation as a large integrated urban network. Tomory argues that gas was the first integrated large-scale technological network, a designation usually given to the railways. He shows how the first gas network was constructed and stabilized through the introduction of new management structures, the use of technical controls, and the application of means to constrain the behavior of the users of gas lighting. Tomory begins by describing the contributions of pneumatic chemistry and industrial distillation to the development of gas lighting, then explores the bifurcation between the Continental and British traditions in distillation technology. He examines the establishment and consolidation of the new industry by the Birmingham firm Boulton & Watt, and describes the deployment of the network strategy by the entrepreneur Frederick Winsor. Tomory argues that the gas industry represented a new wave of technological innovation in industry because of its dependence on formal scientific research, its need for large amounts of capital, and its reliance on business organization beyond small firms and partnerships—all of which signaled a departure from the artisanal nature and limited deployment of inventions earlier in the Industrial Revolution. Gas lighting was the first important realization of the Enlightenment dream of science in the service of industry.

Author : Lauren R. Cannady
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781800857841
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crafting Enlightenment written by Lauren R. Cannady and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans - some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins - translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment. Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history. Her previous publications include analyses of early modern garden patterns and French aesthetic philosophy, and her current project is a book on northern European gardens as sites of knowledge production and transmission. Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT. Her second co-edited book 'Land Air Sea' will address how architecture and environment(s) in the early modern era forecasted contemporary issues related to climate change and sustainability.

Author : Robert DARNTON
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674030184
Total Pages : 639 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Business of Enlightenment written by Robert DARNTON and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Darnton's history of the Encyclopedie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization. In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's Encyclopedie, Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished. Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.

Author : Adriana Craciun
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137443790
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences written by Adriana Craciun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.

Author : Ken Alder
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226012654
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Engineering the Revolution written by Ken Alder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Author : Charles Walton
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271050721
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Into Print written by Charles Walton and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment&’s &“evil&” or &“liberating&” potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity&’s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture&—the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought&—they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time. These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of ideas and values that we now associate with the Enlightenment. They reveal the financial and fiscal stakes of the Enlightenment print industry and, in turn, how Enlightenment ideas shaped that industry during an age of expanding readership. They probe the limits of Enlightenment universalism, showing how demands for religious tolerance clashed with the demands of science and nationalism. They examine the transnational flow of Enlightenment ideas and opinions, exploring its domestic and diplomatic implications. Finally, they show how the culture of the Enlightenment figured in the outbreak and course of the French Revolution. Aside from the editor, the contributors are David A. Bell, Roger Chartier, Tabetha Ewing, Jeffrey Freedman, Carla Hesse, Thomas M. Luckett, Sarah Maza, Renato Pasta, Thierry Rigogne, Leonard N. Rosenband, Shanti Singham, and Will Slauter.

Author : Elizabeth Franklin Lewis
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351718878
Total Pages : 913 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment written by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary volume that brings together an international team of contributors to provide a unique transnational overview of the Hispanic Enlightenment, integrating both Spain and Latin America. Challenging the usual conceptions of the Enlightenment in Spain and Latin America as mere stepsisters to Enlightenments in other countries, the Companion explores the existence of a distinctive Hispanic Enlightenment. The interdisciplinary approach makes it an invaluable resource for students of Hispanic studies and researchers unfamiliar with the Hispanic Enlightenment, introducing them to the varied aspects of this rich cultural period including the literature, visual art, and social and cultural history.