Writing the Enlightenment: Reflections on Work in Progress

Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies: Mikko Tolonen on Books as Objects, Data and Meaning: A Computational Approach to Eighteenth-Century Book and Intellectual History In this lecture, I will present a framework developed by the Helsinki Computational History Group and implemented together with its partners for investigating eighteenth-century book and intellectual history through three interconnected lenses: Books as Objects, Books as Data and Books as Meaning. We treat bibliographical detail as a key factor for understanding the flow of ideas, examining also the physical attributes of books including the ornaments embedded within them. Using a dedicated machine learning pipeline, we automatically extract and categorize these ornaments at scale from the ECCO corpus, then integrate the results with bibliographical metadata. This approach enables us to trace publishing practices and how books circulated and transformed within the broader distribution of intellectual traditions, thus shedding new light on the activities of publishers and printers, such as Jacob Tonson and John Watts. We also approach Books as Data by leveraging computational methods for text reuse, translation mining and cross-lingual investigation for reception studies—particularly focusing on English, Scottish and French Enlightenment corpora drawn from ECCO and Gallica. These pipelines illuminate textual overlaps and uncover patterns of influence, offering insights into large-scale cultural and historical questions—for instance, the eighteenth-century reception of David Hume’s essays—and providing the means to reevaluate fundamental issues such as the boundaries of translations. Finally, we turn to Books as Meaning by applying cutting-edge large-language models. Through “meaning matching”, we not only quantify textual overlaps but also track how semantic content evolves over time, capturing cultural shifts once considered out of reach for computational study. By combining physical features of the books, computational workflows and interpretive practices, this threefold perspective—object, data, meaning—expands our capacity to analyze and reconstruct the multifaceted history of books, authors and ideas in the eighteenth century.

The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive First Annual Voltaire Foundation Lecture on Digital Enlightenment Studies Glenn Roe (Sorbonne University & University of Oxford) The Poetics of Text Reuse: Digital Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-century Archive

Professor Richard Bourke delivers the 2023 Annual Besterman Lecture. Hegel described philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. For him, that meant understanding the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Examining what the Enlightenment meant for Hegel involves separating its generic meaning as an historical process from its specific sense as a determinate period and its still narrower significance as a canon of thinkers. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel depicted the Enlightenment era as a struggle between Reason and Faith. This was a stage in a longer development, the passage from rudeness to refinement, which might itself be depicted in terms of gradual enlightenment. As Hegel saw it, the latest episode in the world-historical drama bred crisis, a collision between human values and the conditions of existence. For Hegel, among the most resourceful responses to this situation came from Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Jacobi. However, resourcefulness did not entail success. The lecture will reconstruct Hegel’s thought in terms of his analysis of how these philosophers failed to reconcile rational inquiry with the content of belief.

Dan Edelstein from Stanford University gives the Inaugural George Rousseau Lecture, the convenor is Avi Lifschitz, Magdalen College.

A highly critical account of Adam Smith's views on famine, which fail to recognize that you can have starvation in the midst of plenty.

Final talk of the Besterman Enlightenment Workshop 2017, Laurence Brockliss explains the popularity of Paris as a place to visit in the 18th century and explores the opportunities for and obstacles to making contacts in the European Republic of Letters. Laurence Brockliss is Fellow and Tutor in History at Magdalen College and Professor of Early Modern French History at the University of Oxford.

Professor Ritchie Robertson FBA, Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford, will speak on ‘Writing the Enlightenment: Reflections on Work in Progress’.

Professor Colin Jones CBE (Queen Mary University of London) delivers the annual Besterman Lecture for the Voltaire Foundation at Wolfson College, Oxford

Professor Joachim Whaley, Professor of German History and Thought, Cambridge, gives the 2014 Besterman Lecture, hosted by The Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment and the TORCH Enlightenment Programme. Introduced by Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature.

Short podcast looking at Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert, housed in the Bodleian Library.