Introduction: Wonder in the Eighteenth Century

1 Introduction: culture and power during the long eighteenth century

In December 1774, seventeen-year-old Carl August, Prince of Saxe Weimar, met the celebrated young author Johann Wolfgang Goethe in a Frankfurt hotel room. The meeting was cordial, indeed the two men got along together so splendidly that, less than a year later, Goethe accepted the prince’s invitation to move to Weimar, where he would spend the rest of his long and incredibly productive life. I ...

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth century in England was an age equal to the age of Augustus Caesar, when the Roman society had reached the peak of its glory. The name Augustan Age was chosen by writers who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the day of Augustus. Past ages of England were l...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

This fine volume of essays on the nobility in the later eighteenth century is a most welcome addition to the existing literature. It comprises eleven essays by American historians whose research engages with the concept of nobility. The collection issues from a conference in 2004 and reflects the cultural turn in historiography that has such sway, particularly in America. There is a stimulating...