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18th-century research in dialogue

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Welcome to the Café Lumières

Café Lumières

Welcome to the Café Lumières! A digital meeting space to encourage the informal exchange of ideas and to help generate connections between colleagues and their projects.

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Students ‘disciplining’ the cameral sciences

In late 1794, the then twenty-year-old former cameralism student Ferdinand Beneke criticized the expectations placed onto students regarding their choice of study. In his extensive diary he explains that he regrets the decision he made when he was fifteen to study both law and cameralism instead of just cameralism. He made this decision because he wished […]
Blog

Sophie von La Roche: Appearances at Lake Oneida

The German author Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) was an exceptional woman: a writer and a polymath, who landed a bestseller with her first epistolary novel History of Lady Sophia Sternheim (1771) at a time when female writers were an absolute rarity. Her creativity proved indefatigable: after publishing a plethora of diverse texts ranging from […]
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Project of the Month: Solipsism and Autonomy in the German Enlightenment

Each month, we aim to feature a current research topic by a doctoral student or Early Career Researcher. This month, Ingrid Schreiber (Oxford, Wadham College) talks about the tension between intellectual self-sufficiency and the need to test ideas in an intellectual community in the work of Kant and the Königsberg circle.   Human beings, argued philosopher […]
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Aufklärungsforschung am IZEA

Interdisziplinarität in Zeiten des Umbruchs Institutionell verankert an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, widmet sich das IZEA der interdisziplinären Aufklärungsforschung. Die Etablierung des Zentrums nahm ihren Anfang in der Vorwendezeit mit den Bemühungen von Paul Raabe, dem damaligen Direktor der Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, und Ulrich Ricken, Professor für Romanistik an der Universität Halle, eine gesamtdeutsche Forschungsstätte Europäische Aufklärung […]
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Project of the Month: The Genetic Definition in the 17th and 18th century

Each month, we aim to feature a current research topic by a doctoral student or Early Career Researcher. This month, Theodor Berwe (IZEA/University of Mainz) talks about tracing the historical development of the genetic definition as an ideal form of forming concepts.   Since antiquity and until the 19th century, geometry has been considered a paragon […]
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Enlightenment Studies at Oxford: Intellectual History Across the Disciplines

Ever since the 1950s, Oxford-based authors have pondered the difficult ambiguity and polysemy of the term ‘Enlightenment’. In the process they produced a remarkable amount of original research, accompanied by a critical mass of controversy and debates. This short blog post focuses (in very broad brush strokes) on the history of Enlightenment studies at Oxford […]
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Project of the Month: Disability in Early Modern French Literature: Working with Anachronism

Each month, we aim to feature a current research topic by a doctoral student or Early Career Researcher. This month, Sam Bailey (School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham) talks about a theme that emerged from his doctoral thesis on disability in early modern French literature.   When speaking about my work on disability in […]
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Famous, beautiful and successful: Marfa Matveeva as the first ambassadress of Petrine Russia

‘D’un excellent époux rejoignant la carriere, votre gloire, Madame, egalé son renom,’ so Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz praised Marfa Feodorovna Matveeva (1686?–1720) (neé Princess Baryatinskaya) alongside her husband Andrei Artamonovich Matveev (1666–1728), the ambassador of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) to the Austrian emperor Charles VI (r.1685–1740). The poem is dated 6 June 1714, when Leibniz […]
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Project of the Month: European Old Testament Tragedies in the Age of Enlightenment

Each month, we aim to feature a current research topic by a doctoral student or Early Career Researcher. To start off the series, Sarah Fengler (Medieval and Modern Languages / Jesus College, Oxford) talks about her thesis topic on European dramatizations of Old Testament narratives in the Age of Enlightenment.   When Adam sees Eve […]
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Être médecin et homme de lettres au XVIIIe siècle : visages multiples et portraits croisés de Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg

Le prospectus de la Gazette d’Épidaure fait apparaître son auteur comme bien décidé à occuper une place singulière dans la littérature journalistique de son temps, en particulier celle qui a trait à la médecine. Loin de se limiter à la Gazette ni même au domaine médical, homme de sociétés et d’échanges, Barbeu-Dubourg participe aussi diversement […]
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