Ideas and Enlightenment

Eighteenth-century studies has a long and distinguished history in Australia and New Zealand, a tradition celebrated and fostered through the tradition of the David Nichol Smith Seminar. This conference commemorates the important foundation for future research that the National Library of Australia established in the 1960s by acquiring the Nichol Smith Collection of books, pamphlets, and issues of periodicals, a collection centered on the eighteenth century. While the great strength of this collection is English literature, the printed and manuscript materials have supported research in other disciplines, such as history, philosophy, art history, politics, and economics. Building on this foundation, the David Nichol Smith Seminar brings together researchers from all of these fields to exchange ideas and further our understanding of the Enlightenment as a period defined by interdisciplinary thought.

By name, the conference honors Professor Nichol Smith (1875–1962), who was Meriton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Educated in Scotland and France, he developed a connection to Australia in the 1950s when he was a visiting professor of English at the University of Adelaide. This experience must have made a lasting impression, as he later expressed his desire to preserve his substantial holdings of research materials in an antipodean institution. Four years after the purchase of Nichol Smith's collection by the National Library in 1962, the first David Nichol Smith Seminar was held in Canberra. It has subsequently been hosted every few years by Monash and La Trobe Universities in Melbourne, the Universities of Otago and Auckland in New Zealand, the Australian National University in Canberra, and most recently, in 2014, the Fifteenth David Nichol Smith Seminar (DNS XV) was held at the University of Sydney. Our host institution provided support through the Sydney Intellectual History Network, the Putting Periodization to Use Research Group, the Power Institute, the School of Literature, Arts, and Media, the Faculty of Architecture, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. External sponsors included the National Library of Australia, the Ian Potter Foundation, and the Australian Garden History Society, testament to the wide-ranging appeal of Enlightenment ideas and their relevance for our thinking today.

The theme of DNS XV was "Ideas and Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century." Our initial call for papers was as an appeal to rethink the history of Enlightenment thought and creativity, acknowledging the full range of cultural practices and intellectual pursuits in which ideas developed and took root between 1660 and 1815. The resulting interdisciplinary depth of the conference confirmed that scholars in eighteenth-century studies understand "ideas" as a diverse and complex topic, appropriate to the diversity and complexity of thought during the Enlightenment itself. DNS XV thus showcased new research in eighteenth-century studies as an excitingly diverse field with 6 plenaries and over 110 papers from scholars working within (and across) the disciplines of architectural history, art history, economic history, garden history, the history of science and medicine, intellectual history, literary studies, philosophy, politics, and religion. A separate edited volume under way and entitled Making Ideas Visible will comprise papers presented in art, architecture, and garden history. This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life complements that research with a selection of papers focused on literature and history.

Michael McKeon presented the opening keynote to the conference. His essay on Milton thus takes up one of the main subthemes addressing periodization. Countering what he calls the "vagaries of literary historical periodization," McKeon urges a reading of Paradise Lost that resituates its formal innovation in the context of the Restoration rather than as the culminating production of experiments with epic poetry during the English Renaissance. Looking at parody as a rhetorical figure and a mode of historical change—that is, as a strategy that preserves form as it adapts it—McKeon demonstrates that Milton's Paradise Lost, and contemporary long narratives such as Hudibras, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, Mac Flecknoe, and Pilgrim's Progress, were motivated by a common formal enterprise. By taking this perspective, McKeon reveals the discursive strategies and techniques shared by Milton and his contemporaries specifically as they grappled with the authority of...