Peripheries of the Enlightenment (review)

This volume arose from a colloquium held at the Queen’s University, Belfast. Expectations that contributors will seek to unwrap notions both of periphery and Enlightenment are not disappointed. Richard Butterwick’s introduction provides a useful état présent of Enlightenment studies. Next, France and Geneva are presented as the epicentres defining the peripheries. But the wince-inducing pun heralding Simon Davies’ discussion of the view from Ferney, ‘Whither/wither France’, reminds us that Voltaire, from the geographical margins, castigated France while extolling northern achievements. Graham Gargett, positing the Enlightenment as ‘in some ways at least the intellectual heir of the Reformation’ (p. 29), presents the ‘liberal’ pastor Jacob Vernet against the backdrop of contemporary events in Geneva, the first of numerous instances in this eclectic volume where readers with a normally francocentric perspective may benefit from accounts of events and issues from beyond France. Virtually all the contributions are of interest as much for the general historical information provided as for what they say about the reception of Enlightenment ideas: political economy and the ‘feudal system’ in Naples (John Robertson), the development of an entrepreneurial culture within the Hungarian elite (Orsolya Szakály), Jovellanos’ reformist projects in Asturias (Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa), provincial preachers in late-eighteenth-century Poland–Lithuania (Butterwick). Marie-Christine Skuncke on the Swedish reception of Rousseau stresses that Enlightenment was not just about influences from the centre, quoting Robert Darnton: ‘the foreigners talked back’ (p. 88). In Russia, however, as Simon Dixon comments, no play on the word ‘prosveshchenie’, rooted in the idea of religious enlightenment, ‘could fully bridge the gap between secular and religious world views’ (p. 235) and it was possible to argue, pace Catherine, that intellectual life existed in ‘some ghastly vacuum’ (p. 241). Elsewhere, the centre/periphery model proves usefully malleable, as Fiona Clark argues in her discussion of the Mexican polymath Alzate. Ireland, geographically peripheral, is convincingly depicted as an early crucible of Enlightenment thinking in Michael Brown’s case study of its Anglican community and in Ultán Gillen’s chapter on Irish political culture, while Lynda Pratt argues that, in England, provincially based writers producing canonically marginal works contributed to the development of literary and national identity. Simon Burrows’ reappraisal of the pre-revolutionary role of French exile pamphleteers in London’s Grub Street highlights an intriguing (both senses) milieu. Martin Fitzpatrick’s impressive panorama of late-eighteenth-century Liverpool shows how, in an arena where wealth flowed from the slave trade, Enlightenment ideas fostered debates about commerce and culture, found expression in a panoply of civic, philanthropic and medical advances and informed theological discussion. Indeed, a recurrent theme in the volume is the extent to which, even discounting ecclesiastical counterblasts, Enlightenment ideas drove religious discourse. Peter Hanns Reill’s account of Herder’s interpretation of ‘Aufklärung’ closes the volume on a suitably expansive note. In sum we are left with the conviction that the Enlightenment as a European movement finds its definition in the very diverse practical and intellectual outworkings of its principles, liberally adapted to local conditions on the so-called peripheries. At the very least it refreshed the parts that other movements did not reach.