The Making of the Enlightenment Common Reader

Publishers, Canons, Books and their Owners in Eighteenth-Century Holland, France and Britain
Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-1-83765-624-0
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 424 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World

This landmark study presents a richly evidenced challenge to inherited assumptions about Enlightenment culture and the people, institutions, and traditions that sustained it.

Historians of the Enlightenment have long asked how books shaped the emergence of modern European culture, politics, and intellectual life. Yet the readers who encountered those books have often remained elusive, reconstructed through modern-day canons that privilege celebrated authors, as well as partial archives. Taking the "common reader" both as a historical problem and as an echo of Samuel Johnson's essays on reading beyond specialist authority, this study asks what books eighteenth-century Europeans actually consumed.

Using large-scale digital bibliometric evidence from booksellers' archives, confiscation records, and private library catalogues, the authors offer a major reassessment of Enlightenment reading culture. Their comparative, transnational approach reveals a bookscape far more complex than the one supposedly dominated by Enlightenment authors, French philosophes or subversive texts. Focusing on specific reading communities, including women and provincial readers, it demonstrates that classical authors and religious books remained central to eighteenth-century libraries and to the formation of shared European reading cultures.

By examining how publication infrastructures, censorship, commerce, canon-making, and book ownership shaped access to knowledge, Making the Enlightenment Common Reader provides a fresh account of the Enlightenment, and makes a significant intervention in debates about print culture and the circulation of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe.

OA License: CC-BY-NC-ND
Funding for this Open Access publication was provided by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the Talent Programme (Vici) project entitled Civic Fictions, with file number VI.C.221.015

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burrows, Simon

Montoya, Alicia C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Interdisziplinäres Bibliothekswesen, Informationswissenschaften Bestandsaufbau, Bestandsentwicklung, Erwerbung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Why Search for the Enlightenment Common Reader?

1. New Digital Bibliometric Approaches
2. The Enlightenment as Process: The Politics and Economics of Publication
3. Inventing the Common Reader: Libraries, Canon-Making, and the Book Trade
4. The Circulation of Religious Works in France and Beyond
5. Classical Antiquity, Philosophie, and Enlightenment
6. The Enlightenment as Network: From Books to Reading Communities

Conclusion: Madame Desaint's Stock Catalogue and the Enlightenment Reader

Über Autor(innen)

Burrows, Simon
SIMON BURROWS is Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University and is the PI on the British AHRC-funded 'French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe' (FBTEE) and the Australian Research Council 'Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment' projects.

Montoya, Alicia C.
Alicia C. Montoya is Professor of French Literature at Radboud University (Netherlands). She was PI on the European Research Council-funded MEDIATE project and currently heads the Dutch Research Council-funded project 'Civic Fictions: Modelling book-reader interactions in the Age of Revolution'.