Process, Contingency, and Cultural Entanglement: Toward a Post-Revisionism in Enlightenment Historiography?

A veritable scholarly revolution has been unfolding in recent decades, as historians of eighteenth-century France and elsewhere have attempted to illuminate the Enlightenment in all of its complexity and diversity, with a view toward its sometimes unexpected origins or progeny. From the 1980s through the early 2010s, studies of the cultural and intellectual history of the eighteenth-century (most often broadly conceived as late 1600s to the onset of the French Revolution) tended to oscillate between a focus on the Enlightenment’s role as a univocal process of secularization, or on the eighteenth-century as an era of frequently conflictive, discreet, and separate Enlightenments. More recent scholarly interventions, however, have broadened to include the question of religion, and to what extent the origins of Enlightenment secularization (or as some would prefer, Radical Enlightenment secularization) were shaped by different moderate variants of religious enlightenment.[1] Parallel to this process has been an effort to account for how the origins of the Enlightenment, as presently defined, relates to the narratives constructed by diverse participants about the cultural changes they promoted. Dan Edelstein’s short but crucial work, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, for example, focused less on origins of discrete Enlightenments than on the elements that French philosophes and Encyclopédistes drew upon in the process of retrospectively explaining and justifying their activities to themselves and their readers. This historiographical focus on narratological genealogy parallels the earlier investigations of James Schmidt and Darrin McMahon into the somewhat ironic and often retrospective construction of the Enlightenment by Counter-Revolutionary or by later nineteenth- and twentieth-century partisans and critics of the Enlightenment.[2] Accordingly, a wide variety of writers and readers content themselves with a far more complex eighteenth-century terrain in which an increasingly diverse array of writers and readers understood and deployed elements of Enlightenment thought, practice, or rhetoric in service of a surprising variety of divergent ends.[3]

Nevertheless, the sheer bulk and diversity of these historical revisionisms concerning the Enlightenment has also complicated how we teach and write about the period. The fracturing of consensus has muddied more coherent depictions of the Enlightenment, while leaving relatively intact one persistent historical problem. As Vincenzo Ferrone framed it, it has been increasingly difficult to disentangle the “historical Enlightenment” from the “Enlightenment of the philosophers”—this last being the critical, philosophical, and mythopoeic picture of the Enlightenment as the origin of Western modernity (for good or ill).[4] While none of the following contributors claim to resolve this dilemma, the three essays by Angela Haas, Leslie Tuttle, and Joseph D. Bryan suggest at least some elements of what is shaping up to be an increasingly coherent possible way around the dilemmas posed by so many competing and often conflicting interpretations, as well as those posed by the complicated relationship between Enlightenment as historical phenomenon, and Enlightenment as myth. Collectively, the perspectives in this forum exemplify new directions in eighteenth-century scholarship that contribute to a burgeoning post-revisionist turn in historical scholarship on the Enlightenment.

Since the early 1980s, revisionist interrogations of the presumption that the Enlightenment was a singular movement, phenomena, or object of study associated with patterns of Western modernity have revealed a surprising variety of enlightenment "species" living in sometimes surprisingly inhospitable habitats, often divided by national, cultural, confessional, or imperial styles.[5] Although the earliest critics of the more unitary or whiggish interpretations of the Enlightenment did not, by and large, work on French history, the ecological diversity (so to speak) of enlightenments readily coincided with, and seemed only to reinforce, the cultural turn in French Revolutionary studies—a turn that largely decoupled the Enlightenment from its more direct causative relationship to the origins of the French Revolution of 1789.[6] As studies privileging enlightenment pluralization proliferated, the result was the further undermining of still another assumed dichotomy: the picture of Enlightenment secularization as largely inimical to, and incompatible with, the presumably counter-Enlightenment impulses of religious institutions, clergy, or devoted lay-people. The result has been a renewed focus on the role of religious change and religious reform in the development of some schools of Enlightenment, as well as on focused studies of distinctive kinds of “religious Enlightenment” in the vein of David Sorkin.[7] But, if religious Enlightenments could give birth to both pro- and anti-Enlightenment outcomes, what does one make of the supposedly sacrosanct correlation of “secularization” or “modernization” with the impact of the Enlightenment? Efforts to interrogate the relationship of the Enlightenment to the genesis of the Modern have proven to be at least one implicit forum around which debates over the implications Jonathan Israel’s notion of a Radical Enlightenment often turn.[8] The very concept of “secularization” has likewise come under scrutiny, not as the historical opposite of the Enlightenment, but instead, as Charles Taylor, Jonathan Sheehan, Charly Coleman, and others have discussed, as a reframing or transposition of theological categories.[9]

The questioning of so many longstanding conceptual paradigms associated with Enlightenment study have, in short, led toward a new species of post-revisionism that privileges process as the locus of study rather than ideological, national, or religious taxonomies. In other words, the process by which different subcultures of reform and improvement through Enlightenment shaped and reshaped one another has tended to supplant the multiplication of discrete varieties of Enlightenment (religious, radical, or otherwise). Many such works have tended to draw more eclectically (and globally) on the sources and scholarship of eighteenth-century philosophy, theology, medicine, materialism, and political economy, even as they have become far more willing to suggest if not origins then at least precursors of Enlightenment far earlier than conventionally considered.[10] Many recent studies privilege contingency, entangled origins and outcomes, or polyvalent readings of common sources within constantly changing discursive fields of early modern controversies.[11] Medical discourse, for example, shaped theological discourse about the soul and vice versa. The texts of theologians were subversively used in service of Enlightenment radicalization, even as familiarity with radical texts shaped the re-formulation of religious or theological questioning.[12] As Leslie Tuttle notes, in quoting Jonathan Sheehan, many “eighteenth-century theologians engaged with them, producing a torrent of apologetics that sought . . . to ‘recuperate’ and ‘reforge scriptural authority along new lines’.”[13] At the same time, as Ann Thomson has shown, sometimes even the most radical of clandestine texts intervened in and subverted long-standing debates of an originally religious nature.[14] In this sense, as Dan Edelstein and Anton Matytsin have suggested, the Enlightenment had “religious or metaphysical origins.” But, the reframing of the sacred among religious scholars, institutions, and lay devotees likely could not have occurred as it did without the process by which the parti philosophe rhetorically rallied around the Encyclopédie and “Grubb Street” writers, and went on to refine and publicize a wide range of more imminent, practical, and secular prescriptions for social, moral, and political improvement.[15] As William Bulman and Richard Ingram have further noted, secularization (and, if you please, even “radical Enlightenment”) originally emerged contingently out of patterns of polemical confessional debates dating to the age of Reformations.[16] Thus, more recent scholarship reveals the religious origins behind various strands of Enlightenment discourse, just as innovative philosophical or political ideas had reframed religious thought, practice, and experience.

Recent scholarship privileging the creative process of constructive entanglement and interaction among discrete styles of enlightenment (sacred and secular, radical and religious, for example) furnishes a point of convergence between Professor Bryan’s, Professor Tuttle’s, and Professor Angela Haas’s papers. As is often the case, the process turns—as do the contributions of our participants—on what happened when eighteenth-century writers engaged in a debate over the limits of daring to know versus “daring to know too much” about any particular question.[17]

Angela Haas’ contribution revisits the fascinating and famous history of the rise of Mesmerism in order to focus, first, on how the medical discourses (pro- and contra-Mesmer) evaluated the testimony for the curative properties of Mesmer’s animal magnetism, and the therapeutic cures he devised. Second, it includes an intriguing analysis of how Mesmer and his critics remembered the miracles of Saint-Médard, especially the similarities between the convulsions following supposed miraculous healing at the tomb of Abbé de Paris, and the so-called “crisis” that followed Mesmer’s treatment. This episode, Dr. Haas tells us, fits within a broadening contemporary debate over what one could learn about the human mind (its nature, its behavior, its susceptibility to medical curatives) from witness testimony. The central issue in these controversies over witness testimony (both to Mesmer’s cures and to the miraculous convulsions associated with the Jansenist saint) turned on the question of whether the experiences of those who believed themselves cured by Mesmer ought to be considered valid as scientific evidence for the fact of having been cured. If so, what of the witness testimony concerning similar cures associated with the saintliness of the dead Abbé de Paris?[18]

Dr. Haas’s article, and much of her recent work, participates in scholarship that reveals the entanglement of medical and theological controversies over the nature of the mind-body or soul-body connection. Her contribution here further reveals that invoking reason and accusing one’s interlocutor of promoting superstition was more than just a Voltairean cudgel wielded against Catholic authority in France.[19] Instead, whatever the particular motive or content of one’s notion of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, a common rhetoric privileging light over darkness—nature, sentiment, and right reason over superstition—was pervasive and malleable. Accusing an opponent of superstition in the press asserted one's authority and legitimacy in society by means of language. Thus, the rhetoric of defense against superstition played a key role in defining and redefining the parameters of acceptable medical science, just as it helped shape the rhetorical and social legitimacy of different permutations of Enlightenment, religious experience, or even more traditional forms of confessional (in the case of France, Catholic) orthodoxy.

Leslie Tuttle’s contribution focuses on what occurred when theologians of the Enlightenment-era confronted the authoritative but problematic and pervasive Biblical accounts of God speaking to prophets, kings or other biblica figures, through dreams. She focuses on Dom Antoine Augustin Calmet, a well-regarded Catholic Benedictine apologist who directly tackled the question of divine dreams in his very popular, Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons, des esprits et sur les révenans et vampires (1746) by refusing to downplay the frequent instances of dream narratives in the historical texts of ancient religious and philosophical traditions. Calmet engaged, as many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century antiquarians, académiciens, and apologists did, in a global comparison of historical texts and monuments from throughout the world. He insisted that if one should posit the inspiration of the Scriptures, the pervasive historical evidence afforded by Christian Scripture, and the comparative frequency of significant dream narratives throughout the universal history of religion, then dreaming must actually be considered—even in an Enlightened age—as an important means of communication between the natural and supernatural realms. Calmet evocatively asserted therefore that biblical accounts of God communicating with humanity through dreams should not be hastily written off as credible evidence for the veracity of Christianity.[20]

Joseph Bryan investigates the efforts of still another Catholic writer, Abbé François-André-Adrien Pluquet, arguing “that in order to oppose materialism and its socio-moral component, luxury,” Pluquet used the language of the body in order to craft new ideas about society.[21] Joseph Bryan resists the urge to label Pluquet as an example of “moderate enlightenment,” “Christian Enlightenment,” “Catholic Enlightenment,” “Counter-Enlightenment,” or any such notional taxonomy. Instead, Bryan notes that, much like their more radical counterparts, Abbé Pluquet employed the language of sentiment and sensibility in order to critique the excesses of materialism and socio-economic luxury.[22] In Pluquet’s widely heralded De la Sociabilité (1767), Pluquet employed a trope that was increasingly common among apologetical works during the late eighteenth century: arguing against the socio-cultural utility of radical writers (those who had argued that human rational behavior and morality was fatalistically determined by the material body).[23] In doing so, he blamed “Neo-Epicureans, materialists, and fatalists” for the moral and emotional corruption resulting from excessive pursuit of luxury consumption.[24] Bryan further examines how late eighteenth-century figures (whether philosophe or Catholic writers) adopted what might be referred to as vitalistic-materialist notions of the human organism, but he does so by examining their entanglement with new policies and anxieties produced by the growth in commerce and luxury.[25]

As Bryan notes, Abbé Pluquet, “was surely not sympathetic to materialism,” but nor did he “refute the materialist position” by insisting on any substantial distinction between a spiritual soul and the physical body.[26] Instead, Pluquet spoke freely about the human person (understood by Pluquet as body, mind, and soul) as an “organized body”—one in which the “conglomeration of organs, nerves, muscles, and tissues gave rise to thought and sensibility,” and therefore to the understanding of “human life, morality, and society.”[27] In this sense, Pluquet further reinforces a growing body of evidence that some Catholic writers had effectively made their peace with advances in medical sciences. While this was an uneasy and uneven truce, it was one made possible by two factors. The first was a subtle late-eighteenth century apologetic return to a classical and late antique notion of soul as the animating vital principal or life force pervasive within matter, and perhaps in some measure miraculously emergent from its own properties of organization and sensitivity. The second was a growing awareness that Descartes’s stark substantial distinction between the spiritual mind/soul and the body (as mere matter extended in space) was increasingly at cross purposes with the findings of Enlightenment medicine and early Christian and Greco-Roman notions of corporeality. The resulting creative and cognitive dissonance was only enhanced by growing and increasingly sophisticated awareness of non-European religious and philosophical traditions.[28] As Alan C. Kors has recently and convincingly argued, the problem many orthodox writers had with espirts forts was ultimately less about their materialism and more about their “naturalism”—the notion that the evolution of nature was blind, directionless, fatalistic, or lacking in intelligent purpose.[29] Although Professor Bryan does not phrase it as such, his analysis suggests that Pluquet’s work aligns with this observation of Kors: that Pluquet’s quarrel with materialism was in effect a quarrel with the naturalistic fatalism certain forms of materialism implied. This form of fatalistic materialism, in Pluquet’s telling, led to disordered passions, a taste for excessive luxury, and social disruptions because it undermined the naturally ordered harmony of the embodied human person. In Pluquet’s view, “organization” is a defining characteristic of the human person that programs humankind “to be sociable and love all members of society.”[30]

In all three articles, methods and ends conventionally associated with the secular Enlightenment are employed for a variety of purposes. In the case of both contributions by Bryan and Tuttle, Calmet’s and Pluquet’s work—once associated commonly with anti-philosophe or “Catholic Enlightenment” impulses—is shown to have been entangled within some of the same discursive tropes and assumptions employed by philosophes. Materialism of one sort finds itself enlisted by a so-called anti-philosophe writer to combat materialism of other more naturalistic and fatalistic varieties in the work of the abbé Pluquet. Theological, medical, and socio-economic enlightenments are entangled for fundamentally apologetic ends in both Dom Calmet and Abbé Pluquet. And, the metaphor of a struggle against superstition, so often deployed by Voltaire and other self-conscious supporters of the parti philosophe, is reframed by embattled eighteenth-century medical theorists and critics of Mesmerism within the context of debates about the legitimacy of medicine as a curative practice, the nature of medical evidence, and the validity of empirical or historical testimony. All three of these case studies, in short, reveal salient characteristics of a nascent post-revisionism within the scholarship of the Enlightenment. In diverse ways, all of the contributions privilege contingency and the mutually-constructive entanglement of what was once framed, either as clashes between separate Enlightenments, or clashes of secularizing Enlightenment modernity with its conservative critics. Each case study self-consciously eschews the temptation to carve out new and separate enlightenments, and each avoids the borderline whiggish focus on the secularizing destination of many eighteenth-century debates without due consideration of the contingent outcomes of the period’s ecologically diverse and constantly evolving habitat.[31]

By way of conclusion, I will cite one more thought-provoking insight from Leslie Tuttle about Calmet because it affords a point of convergence among the contributions to this forum and beckons toward related and potentially fruitful avenues of investigation even transcending the scholarship on the Enlightenment. Tuttle writes that since “many of the apparitions [dreams] of all sorts documented within the historical record had taken place only within the contest of the human imagination,” Calmet went so far as to posit that perhaps the “immateriality of such experiences” were beside the point.[32] Instead, he mused, it might well be in one’s imagination—the content of which is a subjective experience of one’s own consciousness and lies beyond the purview of empirical reason—that God most directly interacts with the human mind and heart. In other words, Calmet suggested that the common sense of global history and Scriptural evidence pointed toward the conclusion that the imagination might be what connects humanity with the divine—even if one is powerless to conclusively and empirically demonstrate this hypothesis. Calmet thereby leaves open the possibility that the irreducible subjectivity of human consciousness might have “a definitive realness of its own” as Tuttle phrases it.[33] Such an insight, and the fact that Calmet’s work was a runaway publishing success, reinforces Angela Haas’s invocation of Robert Darnton’s conclusion in his own book on Mersmerism—that the popularity of Mesmer fed a growing popular “fascination with the supernatural” by the 1780s, one that prompted anxiety among some medical theorists that the human imagination was incompatible with sound science.[34] By showing diverse ways in which eighteenth-century figures interrogated the limits of human reason, the effects of materialism and luxury on natural sentiments, or the limits of empirical evidence based on eye-witness and historical testimony, all of these contributions further reinforce the growing scholarly fascination with what are shaping up to be central concerns of late Enlightenment culture: the importance of sentiment, emotion, imagination, renovations of religious experience, and newfound preoccupations with the supernatural.

The reframing of Enlightenment scholarship that is so clearly illustrated in Haas', Tuttle's, and Bryan's articles dovetails naturally and fruitfully with analogous developments in Revolutionary and early nineteenth-century historiographies. William Reddy’s pioneering call for a history of emotions has inspired numerous recent works that have further shaken the exclusive focus of Enlightenment scholarship on late-eighteenth-century and revolutionary preoccupations with the promise of human reason—this last lingering shibboleth of traditional Enlightenment historiography.[35] In a sense, then, this forum collectively reinforces a growing body of work ranging from Jessica Riskin’s notion of “sentimental empiricism” to Lynn Hunt’s conclusion that an emotional revolution was a significant factor making it possible to conceive of natural rights as emotionally self-evident; all of these recent studies imply intriguing points of convergence between scholarship of the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary period, and the nineteenth century developments.[36] Such transformations in the history of emotion and sentiment derived from and further propelled the medical, moral, and epistemological developments of the Enlightenment. But these developments were similarly entangled with theological and religious transformations of the period. Few historians would now relegate the reformism of the Methodists and Pietists, the ecstatic enthusiasm of the Convulsionnaires or the Anglo-American Great Awakening, or the theological zeal of Jansenists to the peripheries of a century most aptly characterized as an Age of Reason. Yet, scholars still often fall into the old habit of investigating religious discourse in so far it borrowed or adapted Enlightenment tropes, as though participants in religious and secular Enlightenments were by and large alien others who borrowed from discrete intellectual tool boxes. Instead, a more sweeping reframing of this picture emerges from a number of studies, including those afforded by our contributors: that the secular and religious transformations of the age were inextricably of a piece with the same process of cultural revolution unfolding throughout the Enlightenment period and beyond. As Vincenzo Ferrone phrases it:

Charly Coleman has further noted that “French mystics and materialists drew on analogous arguments, and at times identical terminologies, in their efforts to undermine the individual’s claims to active self-determination.” Late eighteenth century culture, then engaged in a process of “resacralization” that “valorize[ed] the immanent relations between human beings and the world.” Secularization, in Coleman’s view as well as my own, was “a contingent, multidimensional process.” It was a process to which the multifaceted cultural vogue for “enlightening” throughout the eighteenth-century and revolutionary period contributed, and it was a process that “originated within religion itself.”[38] If recent scholarship on the French Revolution—indeed to a degree, the age of Atlantic Revolutions more generally—is duly considered, the Revolutionary period only sped up and intensified ways in which individuals experienced the sacred through collective action, ritual, zeal for revolutionary virtue, and rights discourse. Taking a cue from the Emile Durkheim and Lynn Hunt, Blake Smith has proclaimed the French Revolution “a spiritual phenomenon, a manifestation of the sacred,” the “legacy and commemoration” of which “has become a religion with rituals, festivals, and idols.”[39] Although taking its cue more from Tocqueville and Charles V. Taylor than from Durkheim, the essays in the recent volume edited by Bryan Banks and Erica Johnson amount to a very similar claim that the global impact of the French revolution’s secularizing language was as much “a recalibration of the religious in the modern world, rather than its death knell.”[40] Nor was the recalibration of the sacred, theological enlightenment, and reorientation of religious experience an entirely a Francophone Enlightenment or Revolutionary affair. Recent work by philosopher Alexander J.B. Hampton on Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Friedrich Hölderlin has convincingly (if rather too abstrusely) made the case that the religious revolution of the late Enlightenment continued, informing attempts by German Romantics “to forge a new metaphysics and epistemology of transcendence” focused on aesthetics, poetry, and imaginative creativity, and thereby, to “reinvent modern religion.”[41]

The Post-Revisionst turn in Enlightenment studies, in short, is as diverse and wide-ranging as its subject matter. But, it does very evidently imply that the “secular Enlightenment”[42] is just one historically significant destination of a cultural revolution with European and global causes; one that might be considered to have unfolded throughout the breadth of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; and one that transformed theological assumptions, religious experience, and emotional regimes, much as it did methods of natural philosophy and the normative assumptions of moral and political thought.[43] Among other things, much is to be learned by abandoning any lingering tendency to consider the Enlightenment exclusively as an age of reason and the early nineteenth-century as an age of Romanticism, sentiment, imagination, creativity, and spiritual rebirth. The tenor of recent scholarship now cuts potentially shatters the Revolutionary divide and profitably suggests that aspects of the Revolutionary heritage and nineteenth-century romanticism—just as much as secularization and Enlightenment radicalization—were all in fact unlikely and unintended offspring of an entangled process of cultural revolution with multifaceted rational, moral, and religious dimensions.

1. For “Radical Enlightenment,” see early work on the topic by Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. 2nd rev. ed. (New Orleans: Cornerstone, 2006; 1981); and Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).

2. Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); James G. Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers to Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

3. One thought-provoking recent study even speaks of French military transformations during the eighteenth-century as having intersected with eighteenth-century developments associated with the Enlightenment: see Christy R. Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

4. Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3-11.

5. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1951); Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013); more critical treatments of the fruits of the Enlightenment and its association with Western modernity or imperialism include Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50; Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Los Angeles: Stanford University Press, 2012); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Basic Books, 1979); for the pluralization of Enlightenments, see various early examples in J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 of The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Roy Porter, and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Susan Manning, and Francis Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (London: Ashgate, 2007).

6. The association of the Enlightenment with the origins of the French Revolution had never been a principal feature of socio-economic or Marxist interpretative frameworks for the French Revolution; for significant examples of the cultural and linguistic turn in French Revolutionary studies and the further decentering of the French Enlightenment from the origins of the Revolution, see François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Robert Darnton, “High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 51 (1971): 113–32; Annie Jourdain, La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris: Flammerion, 2004); Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution from Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); for the notion that the selective appropriation of Enlightenment discourse furnished some elements of revolutionary cultural “scripts” in France and elsewhere, see the introduction and various essay in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

7. For different notions of religious Enlightenment, see David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Brad S. Gregory, “The Reformation Origins of the Enlightenment’s God,” in God in the Enlightenment, eds. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 201-214; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2010); Helena Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” in Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660–1815, vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of Religion in Early Modern Europe, eds. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283-301; on specifically Catholic Enlightenment, see Harm Klueting, Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993); Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and the essays in Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner, eds., Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014); Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy, eds., Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2010), and James E. Bradley and Dale Van Kley, eds., Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); also R. R. Palmer, Robert R. Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939); also Bernard Plongeron, “Bonheur et ‘civilisation chrétienne,’ une nouvelle apologétique après 1760,” in Transactions of the Fourth International Congress on the Enlightenment, ed. Theodore Besterman (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 1976), 6:1637–55; Bernard Plongeron, Conscience religieuse en Révolution: Regards sur l’historiographie religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1969), and Bernard Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’Aufklärung catholique en Europe occidental, 1770–1830,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 16 (1969): 555–605; on Judaism and the Enlightenment see (in addition to many works by Sorkin), Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) on Enlightenment and the Orthodox World, see Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ed., Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox World (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016) and Larry Wolff, The Enlightenment in the Orthodox World (Athens: Institute for Neo-Hellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2001); a recent and exceptionally useful synthetic perspective on the variety at the heart of various Enlightenment tendencies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is afforded by Dale K. Van Kley, “Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” in God in the Enlightenment, eds. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 278-316.

8. The best and most comprehensive distillation of recent controversies and applications of the Radical Enlightenment thesis derives from the essays in Steffen Ducheyne, ed., “The Radical Enlightenment: An Introduction,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2017); and see especially Jonathan I. Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’: A Game-Changing Concept,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, 15–47; and Margaret C. Jacob, “The Radical Enlightenment: A Heavenly City with Many Mansions,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, 48–60; more recent work on “Radical Enlightenment” has tended to focus on the complex origins and entangled genealogy of radical materialism, atheism, and secularization: see for example in Martin Mulsow, Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680–1720, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2015); Jeffrey D. Burson, “Unlikely Tales of Fo and Ignatius: Rethinking the Radical Enlightenment through French Appropriation of Chinese Buddhism,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 3 (2015): 391–420; also Margaret C. Jacob, “Dichotomies Defied and the Revolutionary Implications of Religion Implied,” in Religion(s) and the Enlightenment, ed. David Allen Harvey, special issue, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 40, no. 2 (2014): 108–16.

9. Charles V. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007); Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization.” American Historical Review 108 (October 2003): 1061–80; Jonathan Sheehan, “Thomas Hobbes, D.D.: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History,” Journal of Modern History 88, no. 2 (2016): 249–74; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2019), 372-82; Charly Coleman, “Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 82:2 (2010): 368–95; Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 9-12; Daniel Watkins, “The Two Conversions of François de La Pillonnière: A Case Study of Rationalism and Religion in the Early Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 6 (2016): 33–59.

10. Recent examples of this growing body of scholarship include the following: Jeffrey D. Burson, “An Intellectual Genealogy of the Revolt against esprit de système from the Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 44, no. 2 (summer 2018): 22– 45; Brad S. Gregory, “The Reformation Origins of the Enlightenment’s God,” in God in the Enlightenment, eds. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 201-214; Alan C. Kors, Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Alan C. Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Anton M. Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Dan Edelstein, “The Aristotelian Enlightenment,” in Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality, 187-201; Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jeffrey D. Burson, “The Culture of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment,” Jesuits in an Age of Enlightenment, special issue of Journal of Jesuit Studies 6, no. 3 (August 2019): 387-415; Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin, eds., The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment, 2019).

11. On polyvalence, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3-41; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019); Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).

12. Burson, “The Polyvalence of Heterodox Sources of Eighteenth-Century Religious Change,” in Clandestine Philosophy: New Studies on Subversive Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe, 1620–1823, eds. Gianni Paganini, Margaret C. Jacob, and John Christian Laursen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 328-51; L.W.B. Brockliss, “Medicine, Enlightenment and Christianity in Eighteenth-Century France: The Library Evidence,” in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 101-21; Jonathan I. Israel, “Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment and the ‘Medical Revolution’ of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, 5–28; Roland Mortier, “Conclusions,” in Le Matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle et la littérature clandestine: actes de la table ronde des 6 et 7 juin 1980 organisée à la Sorbonne à Paris avec le concours du C.N.R.S. par le Groupe de recherché sur l’Histoire du Matérialisme, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1982), 275-77; Roselyne Rey, “Psyche, Soma, and the Vitalist Philosophy of Medicine,” in Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, eds. John P. Wright and Paul Porter (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 255-65; Ann Thomson, “Qu’est-ce qu’un manuscrit clandestine?” in Le Matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle et la littérature clandestine, 13–16; Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Aram Vartanian, “Quelques réflexions sur le concept d’âme dans la littérature clandestine,” in Le Matérialisme du XVIIIe siècle et la littérature clandestine, 149–65.

13. Leslie Tuttle, “Dom Calmet and Divine Dreams during the Enlightenment,” 35.

14. Ann Thomson, L'âme des lumières: Le débat sur l'être humain entre religion et science Angleterre-France, 1690–1760 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2013); see also Roland Mortier, “‘Lumière et ‘lumières’: Histoire d’une image et d’une idée au xviie et au xviiie siècle,” in Clartés et ombres du siècle des lumières: Études sur le XVIIIe siècle littéraire, ed. Roland Mortier (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 13-59.

15. Anton M. Matytsin and Dan Edelstein, “Faith in the ‘Age of Reason’,” in Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality, eds. Anton M. Matytsin and Dan Edelstein (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 1-20. For ways in which religious debates and theological questioning inadvertently led to greater secularization, radicalism, and the self-consciousness of the parti philosophe in France, see Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 113-123, 372-82; for the shaping of Christian Enlightenment apologetics see Anton M. Matytsin, “Reason and Utility in French Religious Apologetics,” in God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 63-82; Didier Masseau, Les Ennemis des philosophes: L’antiphilosophie au temps des lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion and the Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary Europe (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2012); and most recently, Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 123-27; for the coalescing of the religious rhetoric of a “Counter Enlightenment” against the increasingly assertive radicalism of the philosophes (even if this Counter Enlightenment was still deeply informed by the early Enlightenment), see McMahon, Enemies of Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001).

16. William J. Bulman, “Introduction: Enlightenment for the Culture Wars,” in God in the Enlightenment, ed. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-41.

17. Dan Edelstein, ed., The Super Enlightenment: Daring to Know too Much? (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010).

18. Angela C. Haas, “The ‘Physico-Medical Superstition’: Enlightenment Debates over Mesmerism and Miracles,” 17-31.

19. Haas, “The ‘Physico-Medical Superstition’,” 17-31; see also Angela C. Haas, “Medical Marvels and Professional Medicine,” Social History of Medicine (forthcoming), and Haas, “Miracles on Trial: Wonders and their Witnesses in Eighteenth-Century France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History (Spring, 2012).

20. Tuttle, “Divine Dreams,” 32-41; one major work that distilled, illustrated, and disseminated European awareness of other religious traditions, and further promoted a new comparative universal history of human religious practice, was Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes du peuple de tout le monde, studied in the contributions to Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnardt, eds., The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010); and in Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnardt, Decoding the Divine: The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

21. Joseph D. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability, Organisation, and the Theology of Abbé Pluquet (1716-1790), 43.

22. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 42-58.

23. For the turn toward utilitarian apologetics, see Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, 299-309; Masseau, Ennemies des philosophes, 161-171; Alan C. Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 114-17; Matytsin, "Reason and Utility in French Religions Apologetics," in God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 63-82.

24. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 48.

25. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 48-52. In addition to works on the British Enlightenment (and in particular, Scottish Enlightenment) now far too numerous to mention, the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment preoccupation with political economy and the explosive growth in luxury consumption has garnered consistent attention from historians of eighteenth-century and Revolutionary France as well. See most notably Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

26. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 50.

27. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 53.

28. Kara E. Barr, “‘A Crucible in Which to Put the Soul’: Keeping Body and Soul Together in the Moderate Enlightenment, 1740–1830” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2014); Sylvain Matton, La “Clangor buccinae” de Gabriel Poitevin et la tradition du matérialisme chrétien (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007); Jeffrey D. Burson, “Healing the Skeptical Crisis and Rectifying Cartesianisms: The Notion of the Jesuit Synthesis Revisited,” in The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason, 21–44; John P. Wright, “Substance versus Function Dualism in Eighteenth-Century Medicine,” in Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, 237–54; Ann Thomson, “Toland, Dodwell, Swift and the Circulation of Irreligious Ideas in France: What Does the Study of International Networks Tell Us about the ‘Radical Enlightenment’,” in Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas in England, France and Ireland, eds. Lise Andries and Frederic Ogee (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 159-75, and Thomson, “‘Mechanistic Materialism’ vs. ‘Vitalistic Materialism’?” in La lettre de la Maison française d’Oxford 14 (2001): 22–36; Jeffrey D. Burson, “Vitalistic Materialism and the Theological Enlightenments of Abbé Claude Yvon in the Encyclopédie,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 40, no. 2 (2014): 7–33; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening, 163-202; Burson, “Dark Night of the Early Modern Soul: Humanists, Clashing Cartesians, Jesuits, and the New Physiology,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historioques 45, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 4-27.

29. Alan C. Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief, 5, 269-88, esp. 292-3, and Kors, Epicureans and Atheists, 143.

30. Bryan, “Corporeal Sociability,” 42-58, and for quote, see 54.

31. Worth noting here, in all fairness, is that fact that it is possible to speak of the narrative genealogy of modern secularization rooted in the Enlightenment, but in a way that eschews whiggish implications. Margaret C. Jacob’s recent synthesis, for example, is a largely successful attempt to showcase the secular implications of the Enlightenment while avoiding the implication that Enlightenment secularization was “a teleological process that took hold particularly in the Western world and ... is here to stay.” See Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 9.

32. Tuttle, “Divine Dreams,” 39.

33. Ibid., 39.

34. Haas, 30.

35. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

36. Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 15-34; a similar focus on emotions and the transformation of emotional regimes is evident in Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap, 2017); for an important and erudite synthesis and nuancing of Lynn Hunt and Samuel Moyn on the evolution of natural rights talk, see Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

37. Ferrone, The Enlightenment, 102.

38. All quotes from Coleman, Virtues of Abandon, derive from 11-12.

39. Blake Smith, “The Sacred French Revolution: Emile Durkheim, Lynn Hunt, and Historians,” Posted 4 December 2019, Age of Revolutions, ed. Bryan Banks, Cindy Ermus, Katlyn Carter, Erica Johnson Edwards, Javier Puente, Blake Smith, Rob Taber, and Kacy Dowd Tillman, www.ageofrevolutions.com

40. Bryan Banks and Erica Johnson, Introduction to The Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, ed. Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, div. Springer, 2017), x.

41. Alexander J.B. Hampton, Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1-9 at 9 for quote.

42. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment, 263-65.

43. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening, 372-82; for transformations in political and international thought across the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 93-195; for specific ways in which certain ideas of the Enlightenment, as institutionalized by the French Revolution, transformed and complicated the normative conventions of relations between states and international law, see Edward James Kolla, Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).