Networks of European Enlightenment (Day 2)

Friday, April 29, 2016
10:00 AM - 5:30 PM
(Pacific)

Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall

From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated communication was the lifeline of the Enlightenment. Where historians once spoke of the Enlightenment in national terms (e.g., the “Scottish Enlightenment” vs. “German Enlightenment”), they are increasingly recognizing the ways in which the communication networks that spread across countries provided the infrastructure for thinking in a new, “European” fashion. What’s more, the recent influx of metadata from the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study these networks at both the micro and macro levels. We are therefore well poised to produce far clearer maps of how the Enlightenment spread out across Europe and beyond, to European colonies. And we can trace the return of knowledge from the periphery back to the center’s capitals.

 

This 2-day conference, convened by Dan Edelstein, will assemble some of the leading scholars who are using data-driven scholarship to study the information networks that made the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to create a new sense of European identity.

 

April 29, 10:00am – 5:30pm

9:30am-10:00am       Breakfast & Coffee

10:00am - 12:00pm   Correspondence & Communication
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “Experiencing the 'Communication Process' of the Enlightenment: Three Case Studies”
Charlotta Woolf, “Un ami des philosophes modernes": The Networks of Swedish Ambassador Gustav Philip Creutz in Paris, 1766-1783”
Andrew Kahn, “The Enlightenment Correspondence of Catherine the Great: the Digital Project”

12:00pm – 1:00pm     Lunch

1:00pm - 3:00pm       Science & Technology
Paola Bertucci, “Artisanal Networks: The République des lettres and The Société des arts”
Jessica Riskin, “Lamarckiana” 
Paula Findlen, “Imagining a Community:  The Scientific Networks of Laura Bassi, Emilie du Chatelet, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi” 

3:00pm-3:30pm         Coffee break

3:30pm - 5:30pm       Religious Networks
Thomas Wallnig, “Catholic Early Enlightenment in Central Europe? - Abbot Gottfried Bessel between Order, Church, Court and Booktrade”
Christopher Warren, “Quaker Networks and Quaker Enlightenment”
Claude Willan, “The English Enlightenment Network”

 

For further information, please visit the conference website.

 

Sponsored by The Europe Center, The Stanford Humanities Center, The French Culture Workshop, The France-Stanford Center, and The Division for Literature, Cultures, and Languages.