Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [242]
WOMEN AND SCIENCE On the subject of women and early modern science, see the comprehensive and highly informative work by L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). See also C. Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY The social and political context for the triumph of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is examined in M. Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988) and The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976).
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CHAPTER 17
The Eighteenth Century: An Age of Enlightenment
The Parisian salon of Madame Geoffrin (third figure from the right in the first row)
Chateaux de Malmaison et Bois-Preau//© R_eunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
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CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS
The Enlightenment
What intellectual developments led to the emergence of the Enlightenment? Who were the leading figures of the Enlightenment, and what were their main contributions? In what type of social environment did the philosophes thrive, and what role did women play in that environment?
Culture and Society in the Enlightenment
What innovations in art, music, and literature occurred in the eighteenth century? How did popular culture differ from high culture in the eighteenth century?
Religion and the Churches
How did popular religion differ from institutional religion in the eighteenth century?
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CRITICAL THINKING
What was the relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment?
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THE EARTH-SHATTERING WORK of the “natural philosophers” in the Scientific Revolution had affected only a relatively small number of Europe’s educated elite. In the eighteenth century, this changed dramatically as a group of intellectuals known as the philosophes popularized the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and used them to undertake a dramatic reexamination of all aspects of life. In Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, women took the lead in bringing together groups of men and women to discuss the new ideas of the philosophes. At her fashionable home in the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marie-Thérése de Geoffrin (ma-REE-tay-RAYZ duh zhoh-FRANH), the wife of a wealthy merchant, held sway over gatherings that became the talk of France and even Europe. Distinguished foreigners, including a future king of Sweden and a future king of Poland, competed to receive invitations. When Madame Geoffrin made a visit to Vienna, she was so well received that she exclaimed, “I am better known here than a couple of yards from my own house.” Madame Geoffrin was an amiable but firm hostess who allowed wide-ranging discussions as long as they remained in good taste. When she found that artists and philosophers did not mix particularly well (the artists were high-strung and the philosophers talked too much), she set up separate meetings. Artists were invited only on Mondays, philosophers, on Wednesdays. These gatherings were among the many avenues for the spread of the ideas of the philosophes. And those ideas had such a widespread impact on their society that historians ever since have called the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment.
For most of the philosophes, “enlightenment” included the rejection of traditional Christianity. The religious wars and intolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had so alienated intellectuals that they were open and even eager to embrace the new ideas of the Scientific Revolution.