Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

Around 1788, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach compiled a list of notable contributions to the discussion on Kant's concept of race. This list included references to Kant's second and third essays on race, Georg Forster's 1786 response, and two essays by Johann Daniel Metzger. Blumenbach's compilation stands in stark contrast to contemporary discussions of Kant's racial theories. Despite the increasing interest in this subject, Metzger's critiques are still largely unnoticed. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of eighteenth-century discussions on race, it is crucial to broaden our perspective beyond the viewpoints of Johann Gottfried Herder and Forster and include Metzger's contributions. In this article, I aim to elucidate (the context surrounding) Metzger's endeavours to engage with Kant's concept of race.

This article examines the scientific background of Daniel Defoe's The Storm (1704). This work is a collection of letters on the Great Storm, a tempest which battered the south of England on 26–27 November 1703 causing casualties in the thousands and extensive damage. Like other extreme natural phenomena, the Great Storm was interpreted by many as divine warning. This article argues that, differently to Defoe's other works on the Great Storm, The Storm reconciles the traditional religious reading of catastrophes with recent breakthroughs in empiricist philosophy and early meteorology. In its concluding section, the article offers a reassessment of Defoe's interest in scientific ideas in The Storm so as to include early-eighteenth-century empiricism and examines Defoe's ambivalent attitude towards them.

The fate of diplomatic gifts after their presentation can reveal patterns of instability and shifting narratives on the items themselves and how they were perceived and received at the time. Often, these important pieces of material evidence disappear or are decontextualised from their exchange. This has been the case with the Persian embassy to Louis XIV's court at Versailles in 1715, where the gifts that were presented to the Sun King were thought to have been lost. This paper traces the afterlives of two of the gifted items: a string of pearls and two gold boxes of mumia. Each of these gifts were retained by the French administration and can be tracked through the eighteenth century. Their journeys reveal much about their evolving significances and the re-evaluations that occurred once they entered the French collections.

This article analyses the Ottoman and Russian proclamations during the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768–1774 to understand their similarities and differences in discourse and their intended audiences, with a special focus on the elites of the Ottoman Empire. The article shows that Ottoman diplomacy practiced Enlightenment diplomacy in the same way as its rivals, using the language of enlightened absolutism to win the hearts and minds of the Polish nobility. However, the war made diplomacy and its accompanying discourses an internal affair, and the imperial elite rejected the idea of fighting for Polish liberties. This had a lasting impact on how Ottoman power was framed and understood by both the imperial elite and its subjects. This was the main difference between the Ottoman and Russian empires; the former had already created an elite consensus based on shared European cultural signifiers that depended on the European Enlightenment, while the latter never did.

This article explores Spain's positioning in the shifting currents of the later Enlightenment through the polemic works of lawyer and satirist Juan Pablo Forner. Forner's attempts to prove the existence of an autochthonous tradition of Spanish pragmatism and empiricism form an index of the penetration of intra-Enlightenment debates into Spanish thought in the late eighteenth century. Forner, profoundly aware of tensions between Cartesian rationalism and Lockean sentimental empiricism across Europe, intervenes on the side of empiricism, insisting that Cartesianism is nothing but a guise of Scholastic hyperrationalism. The article disputes scholarly perceptions of Forner as a Christian reactionary.

This article examines a group of Georgian needlework pictures based on late eighteenth-century cabinet prints of literary works. Focusing on how these needlework productions were realized, including which decisions regarding the colour of silk thread and chromatic patterns, as well as visual revision, were made by the female silkworker, the article seeks to introduce these pictures as meaningful remediations of printed visual literary culture. The silkworks will be shown to advance interpretations of and to provide framing for six literary characters and the ways in which their stories were iconically rendered by the silkworkers.