Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

A fascinating look at communication in the eighteenth century.

This volume addresses questions of communication in several media, from the oral, printed, and visual to the physical. It encompasses essays featuring France, Germany, Early America, Scotland, and Britain more generally.

The first section, Manuscript Communications, opens with Dena Goodman’s presidential address on the secret history of learned societies. It is followed by a panel on manuscript and print circulation introduced by Colin Ramsey, which includes essays by Ryan Whyte, Chiara Cillerai, and Jurgen Overhoff. This section concludes with an essay by Carla J. Mulford on Benjamin Franklin’s electrification of London politics.

The second section, Arts and Manufactures, opens with David Shields’s Clifford Lecture on the flavors of the eighteenth century. It contains essays by Hanna Roman on Buffon’s language of heat and Jason Pearl on the perspective of aerostatic bodies and concludes with essays by Matthew Mauger and Michael C. Amrozowicz on the languages of physical disciplines and social organization.

The final section, Devotion and Other Passions, begins with essays on silence and spectacle as means of convening the passions, by Adam Schoene and Anne Vila respectively, and it concludes with a forum introduced by Laura M. Stevens on Enlightenment representations of devotion. This section includes presentations by Clare Haynes, Penny Pritchard, Jennifer L. Airey, Sabine Volk-Birke, Megan E. Gibson, Laura Davies, and Theresa Schoen and an afterword by Emma Salgard Cunha.