Academic literature on the topic 'Enlightenment – Europe, Northern'

Abstract The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the balance of power in Europe. Spanish officials, in this context, turned to the ideas of Hugo Grotius to establish joint-stock companies that could allow the Crown to regain control over its imperial domains and establish perpetual peace in Europe. This article recovers the writings of Félix Fernando de Sotomayor, Duke of Sotomayor (1684–1767), who drew on the works of Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Charles Dutot in order to show that the history of these corporations chronicled the contestation and erosion of Spanish power and the diversion of European states from their true interests. Sovereigns, not merchants, argued Sotomayor, could guarantee fair trade and the equitable distribution of wealth. The study of Sotomayor’s views on trade, natural law, and alienation challenges traditional interpretations about the Iberian engagement with Grotius, the rise of capitalist hopes in Southern and Northern Europe, and Spain’s investment in the Enlightenment.

Populism, particularly in its radical right-wing variants, is often posited as antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Yet a number of contemporary cases of populist radical right parties from Northern Europe complicate this characterisation of populism: rather than being directly opposed to liberalism, these parties selectively reconfigure traditionally liberal defences of discriminated-against groups—such as homosexuals or women—in their own image, positing these groups as part of ‘the people’ who must be protected, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty, free speech and ‘Enlightenment values’. This article examines this situation, and argues that that while populist radical right parties in Northern Europe may only invoke such liberal values to opportunistically attack their enemies—in many of these cases, Muslims and ‘the elite’ who allegedly are abetting the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe’—this discursive shift represents a move towards a ‘liberal illiberalism’. Drawing on party manifestoes and press materials, it outlines the ways in which these actors articulate liberal illiberalism, the reasons they do so, and the ramifications of this shift.

The inventory of Tallinn merchant Michael Meyer’s (1704–1758) property is one of the largest inventories of an 18th century citizen of Tallinn. Almost the entire world of his possessions is reflected in this unique source. The inventory provides a comprehensive picture of his success, lifestyle, and hobbies, and the diverse list of household items provides a good idea of a prosperous merchant’s home in northeast Europe in the 18th century. The unique body of sources (Michael Meyer’s will, property inventory, and auction reports) provides comprehensive insight into the development of Tallinn’s material culture, i.e., the material culture history of Northern Europe, during the century of Enlightenment.

This paper explores the literary representation of Iceland and Norway in two short stories by contemporary German writer Judith Hermann. It analyses both the depiction of these countries as part of the globalised western world and the redemptive power they are tentatively ascribed by the author. Continuing a long German tradition of looking at Scandinavia from an almost colonial perspective, Hermann on the one hand presents these northern countries as a mere extension of central Europe, largely devoid of distinguishing national characteristics. At the same time she makes reference to the topos of the north as a vast and empty space and highlights both the specific arctic nature of the environment and the effect it has on her urban characters, who find themselves on a search for meaning and orientation in a postmodern fragmented world. Despite Hermann's overall sceptical attitude towards her characters' quest for happiness, these northern locations ultimately appear as potential places of self-realisation and enlightenment.

<p>This article is an analysis of the Swedish abolitionist and Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s (1746&ndash;1799) writings in the British anti-slavery debate in the years between 1788 and 1795. Previous historical scholarship has seen Wadstr&ouml;m primarily as a Swedenborgian visionary on a quest for religious fulfilment in Africa. An alternative perspective on Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings is offered in this article by highlighting his comparatively overlooked polemical publications and Parliamentary testimonies in the British anti-slavery debate. Instead of treating Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings and colonial plans as manifestations of his Swedenborgian dreams, they are reassessed as contributions to the contemporary anti-slavery debate. The focus is on how Wadstr&ouml;m participated and argued in this debate in order to show the ideological tenets underlying his views. Wadstr&ouml;m is linked to the Scottish Enlightenment discourse by showing how he uses the concepts of classical political economy in his argumentation for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Through this alternative reading of Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings, it is possible to gain another entry point into the complex and motley character of late eighteenth-century political thought in Northern Europe.</p>

The purpose of the paper is revealing the peculiarities of Voltaire’s views on the last stage of the Northern War, ended by the Treaty of Nystad, as well as presenting the specific character of the great enlightener’s evaluation of the Russian empire and its historical role. The author finds out, why Voltaire, condemning fascination with the history of wars and kings, in his two works: «The History of Charles XII» and «The History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great» paid great attention to the Northern War and Peter I’s participation in it.The reasons of the French historian interest to the named subject are viewed in terms of the modern methods of historical analysis, «philosophical» basis of his views on war and civilization, features of historical presentation.The paper shows Voltaire’s change in attitude on interpretation of the military historical subjects, first covered in «The History of Charles XII» and then in «The History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great». The focus of the paper is on the up to the present-day controversial issue, whether Peter I was involved in Gorth–Alberoni conspiracy, aimed at the complete political change in the appearance of Europe. The 18th century historian ultimately came to the conclusion that the Tsar had made use of Gorth’s plans as a tactic means for solving his own foreign policy problems. This point of view is shared by many contemporary historians. Peter I’s declaring Emperor was the direct consequence of victorious end of the Northern War. It was found that Voltaire drew a more optimistic picture of Peter I’s imperial title recognition, than it actually was. According to Voltaire, the specific feature of the Russian Empire, created by Peter I, lies in the fact that it was a self-civilizing empire, bringing enlightenment on the neighboring «barbaric» peoples.The author of the paper, reviewing specific cases, arrives at a conclusion, that Voltaire’s works of high confidence for their time took a worthy standing in the world historiography of the Petrine era, due to a wide range of sources, the historian’s ability for their critical assessment, his seeking to maintain a certain evaluation independence in the description of events from different perspectives, his commitment to historical truth, his talent of a writer.The work is carried out within the project, aimed at publishing a first complete scientific edition of «The History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great» in Russian.

The love-hate nature of the relations between England and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well known. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to allow his divorce, things Italian were a popular object of satire and general disdain. An ever-increasing British nationalism founded on political, religious, and aesthetic principles during the seventeenth century fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment. This nationalism, newly consolidated in the seventeenth century by the ambitions of the Stuart monarchs to destroy Parliament, was intimately connected with English Protestantism. As Samuel Kliger has argued, the triumph of the Goths—Protestant Englishmen's Germanic ancestors—over Roman tyranny in antiquity became for seventeenth-century England a symbol of democratic success. Moreover, observes Kliger, an influential theory rooted in the Reformation, the “translatio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasized traditional German racial qualities—youth, vigor, manliness, and moral purity—over those of Latin culture—torpor, decadence, effeminacy, and immorality—and contributed to the modern constitution of the supreme role of the Goths in history. The German translatio implied an analogy between the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Goths (under Charlemagne) and the rallying of the humanist-reformers of northern Europe (e.g., Luther) for religious freedom, understood as liberation from Roman priestcraft; that is, “the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers…the epithet ‘Gothic’ became not only a polar term in political discussion, a trope for the ‘free,’ but also in religious discussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values contained for the eighteenth century in the single word ‘enlightenment.’”

Drinks and customs related to their consumption play a special role in the social history (essentially, that of the human community). However, research of the customs of alcohol consumption in Lithuania (along with the history of daily life in general and the culture of the nobility’s daily life in particular) is rather sporadic so far. The article presents a research work in cultural anthropology on the alcohol consumption as means (or prerequisite) of achieving more important aims of religious, social, economic or other kind. Because of the big scope of research and low level of prior investigation, the subject of this article is limited to a single aspect – namely, the custom of drinking from the same glass; to the culture of only one social layer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) – the nobility; and to a distinct period – the 17th–18th centuries. The aim of analysis is revealing sources of this custom, its development and meaning in the social community of the given period.According to the research, the GDL presented a sphere of interaction between the local pre-Christian Lithuanian culture, which had been developing for an incredibly long period – even until the end of the 15th century, and the Western European cultural tradition. The Western European culture, formed in the course of joining together elements of the antique heritage, the Christian worldview and the inculturized “Northern barbarism”, acquired in the 14th–16th century Lithuania one of its essential constituents – namely, the culture of the “Northern barbarism” still alive and functioning. On the other hand, the nobility of the GDL, raised in pre-Christian Lithuanian culture, had no trouble recognizing elements of its local heritage in the Western Christian culture. The local custom of drinking from the same glass characteristic to the higher social layers supposedly stemmed from the drinking horns. Along with Christianity and spread of the wine culture, the local pre-Christian custom of drinking from the same glass should have been abandoned by the nobility, surviving instead solely in the lower social classes. The western custom of drinking from the same glass spread in Lithuania along with Christianity and the wine consumption. However, its influence on the nobility was rather limited. In the 15th–16th centuries, when this custom was still rather widespread in Europe, the Lithuanian nobility was just beginning its acquaintance with the wine culture, while in the 17th–18th centuries, when the wine culture grew popular in Lithuania, the western-like custom of drinking from the same glass had already waned in other European countries. Therefore, the western custom of drinking from the same glass was rather a marginal phenomenon among the Lithuanian nobility, affected by the cultural exchange with the Polish nobility (which grew especially intense following the union of Lublin) and the ideology of Sarmatianism. The custom of drinking from the same glass disappeared in the culture of the Lithuanian nobility at the turn of the 18th–19th century due to the ideas of Enlightenment and the altered notions of healthy lifestyle and hygiene. However, drinking from the same glass, as a distant echo of the ancient customs representing social community was quite popular in the peasant culture as late as the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st centuries.

Abstract While figurative terracottas from Greco-Roman antiquity were brought to light in considerable numbers from sites on the Italian mainland and in Sicily in the seventeenth century, they were consistently overlooked as important and representative examples of classical art. It was only in the later eighteenth century in Sicily that important collections of Greek figurative terracottas were assembled that began to attract the attention of northern Europeans. A demand for these accessible examples of miniature Greek sculpture arose that ultimately contributed to the formation of some of the most important antiquities collections in Europe.

The bearded Eskimo Looking at old Inuit and North American Indian portraits one can see that the men very often have a full beard; these representations are in this respect factually inaccurate and also in conflict with the written texts from the Renaissance that describe these people as beardless. Based on actual examples, this article shows how this can be explained with reference to Renaissance anthropology: the beard showed what kind of humans those natives really were, which was far more important than showing exactly what they looked like in a mirror.Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in search of the North West Passage brought him to Baffin Island, and his 1576-expedition was the first to bring back to England a native Inuit man. This attracted huge public and probably also royal interest, not least when the Inuit showed his hunting skills by catching ducks with a spear in a river. On his second expedition to Baffin Island in 1577, Frobisher brought back another man, a woman, and a baby. These Inuits were also put on show and attracted huge interest. All these Inuits died shortly after their arrival in England, but before they died portraits had been made of them, and these portraits circulated in Europe less than one year after they were made in England. Except for one portrait of an Inuit woman and her child from 1567, these were the first authentic portraits of Inuits in Europe.Since European expansion into the wider world was still relatively new, it was important to make these portraits show what kind of humans these foreign people were. At one level, all the newly found people were the same and thus easy to categorise. They were all heathens, and Christian Renaissance Europe knew of two kinds of heathens, the people of Roman and Greek antiquity, and the savage or wild man frequently used as an emblematic figure. It was thus important to demonstrate this paganism, and the first portraits from 1567 and 1576 solved the problem in a very direct way, with writing on the portraits saying that this was a savage or pagan. On the 1576 portrait, made by the Dutchman Lucas de Heere in London, a text in French at the top explains this to be a “Sauvage” from the Northern countries. The three Inuits from the expedition in 1577 were drawn by John White among others, and in his portraits the Inuits were distinguished as heathen by arranging them in classical sculptural positions. However, when these portraits were copied in the Low Countries and in the German territories, this was not enough. Here they were sometimes supplied with a text explaining that these people were savages. But very often not even this was enough – perhaps because many people could not read – and so the savage or wild man was used as the model. In spite of the description of the Inuits as being nearly beardless, they were given a hirsute beard – just as had happened to the first portraits of the American Indians in the early 16th century when their savagery and paganism was to be communicated in engravings. In several different copies – made between 1578 and 1580 in the Low Countries and the German territories – of John White’s original and beardless portraits, the men had beards, whereas the woman remained the same as on the original portraits, as long as she was placed beside the man. However, in some cases, it was necessary to show the Inuit woman alone, and in these cases, she could not be depicted in the nude as Venus – as was done to show the paganism of the Indian women – because then she would not be recognised as an Inuit woman. Instead, she was given a club in her hand, the club known from the drawings of the wild men. In this way her savagery could also be represented in the illustrations.This visual indication of savagery is the reason why people who had been in the Arctic and had met Inuits depicted them with a huge beard while at the same time presenting these pictures as lifelike portraits of the savages of the Arctic. This, for instance, was the case with the wooden figure which Andrew Barker, the captain and leader of the James Hall expedition to Greenland in 1612, placed in the kayak which he donated to Trinity House in Hull in 1613.The article ends with a short description of the opposite situation in the Age of Enlightenment, when in Europe a huge beard became a symbol of masculinity, and when the beardlessness of the American Indians was discussed as an indication that the Indians, in the eyes of that age also, were considered to have failed to attain full development as men and as humans.Ole HøirisCenter for KulturforskningAarhus Universitet

Defence date: 22 April 2016
Examining Board: Professor Martin van Gelderen (EUI/ Lichtenberg-Kolleg, The Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies, Supervisor); Professor Ann Thomson (EUI, Second reader); Professor Knud Haakonssen (University of Erfurt), Doctor Timothy Stanton (University of York)
This thesis deals with the thought of Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) from the perspective of intellectual history; its aim, to think about the enlightenment anew. The historical problem, to which the thesis offers an answer, is twofold. What was the nature of Holberg's thought in relation to the enlightenment and how can it be said to have constituted an early Northern enlightenment more specifically? To the extent that we can talk historically of a specific early Northern enlightenment, it cannot, of course, be reduced to the case of Holberg. Yet, this thesis argues that any proper understanding of the question whether there was a particular early Northern enlightenment, as one amongst a multitude of enlightenments, must necessarily begin from an understanding of the thought of Holberg, the most prominent writer in the early eighteenth century. Describing Holberg as an eclectic thinker, the main argument of the thesis is that the early Northern enlightenment is best understood in light of Holberg's engagement with a wide range of intellectual traditions, both secular and religious. Thus, the thesis aims to reconstruct the trajectories of Holberg's thought and to situate his thinking about monarchism, religion, and moral philosophy in relation to a broader range of European enlightenments. It aims to show that the key to understanding the early Northern enlightenment is to be found in the connection between the thought of Ludvig Holberg and the multiple enlightenments with which he was engaged. In addressing such issues, the thesis sets an essentially revisionist agenda: the enlightenment of Holberg is best understood as an eclectic blend of Lutheranism, Arminianism, and modern natural law.