A study of the experience of nature in the eighteenth century based on the life of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740!--StartFragment --–!--EndFragment --99). In The Alpine Enlightenment, historian Kathleen Kete takes us into the world of the Genevan geologist, physicist, inventor, and mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. During his prodigious climbs into the upper ranges of the Alps, Saussure focused intensely on the natural phenomena he encountered—glaciers, crevasses, changes in the weather, and shifts in the color of the sky—and he described with great precision what he saw, heard, and touched. Kete uses Saussure’s evocative writings, which emphasized above all physical engagement with the earth, to uncover not just how people during the Enlightenment thought about nature, but how they experienced it. As Kete shows, Saussure thought with and through his body: he harnessed his senses to understand the forces that shaped the world around him. In so doing, he offered a vision of nature as worthy of respect independent of human needs, anticipating present-day concerns about the environment and our shared place within it.

"Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time. Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda. In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again. Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.

DIVEnlightenment’s Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith’s famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism./div

Each book in this series is designed to make available to students important new work on key historical problems and periods that they encounter. Each volume, devoted to a central topic or theme, contains specially comisssioned essays from scholars in the relevant field. These provide an assessment of a particular aspect, pointing out areas of development and controversy and indicating where conclusions can be drawn or where further work is necessary, while an editorial introduction reviews the problem or period as a whole. In this text the contributors assess reform and reformers in late 18th century Europe, covering such topics as Catherine the Great, the Danish reformers, the Habsburg Monarchy and events in Spain and Italy.

Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action, especially government reform, in the long eighteenth century have long provoked stimulating scholarly quarrels. Generations of historians have grappled with the elusive intersections of enlightenment and absolutism, of political ideas and government policy. In order to complement, expand and rejuvenate the debate which has so far concentrated largely on Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, this volume brings together historians of Southern Europe (broadly defined) and its ultramarine empires. Each chapter has been explicitly commissioned to engage with a common set of historiographical issues in order to reappraise specific aspects of 'enlightened absolutism' and 'enlightened reform' as paradigms for the study of Southern Europe and its Atlantic empires. In so doing it engages creatively with pressing issues in the current historical literature and suggests new directions for future research. No single historian, working alone, could write a history that did justice to the complex issues involved in studying the connection between enlightenment ideas and policy-making in Spanish America, Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. For this reason, this well-conceived, balanced volume, drawing on the expertise of a small, carefully-chosen cohort, offers an exciting investigation of this historical debate.

"Essays cover a range of media from painting and the decorative arts to theater, sculpture, and the science of seeing." from Introduction.

The Alps have exerted a hold over the German cultural imagination throughout the modern period, enthralling writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and tourists alike. The Draw of the Alps interrogates the dynamics of this fascination. Though philosophical and aesthetic responses to Alpine space have shifted over time, the Alps continue to captivate at an individual and collective level. This has resulted in myriad cultural engagements with Alpine space, as this interdisciplinary volume attests. Literature, photography, and philosophy continue to engage with the Alps as a place in which humans pursue their cognitive and aesthetic limits. At the same time, individuals engage physically with the alpine environment, whether as visitors through the well-established leisure industry, as enthusiasts of extreme sports, or as residents who feel the acute end of social and environmental change. Taking a transnational view of Alpine space, the volume demonstrates that the Alps are not geographically peripheral to the nation-state but are a vibrant locus of modern cultural production. As The Draw of the Alps attests, the Alps are nothing less than a crucible in which understandings of what it means to be human have been forged.

An Emma Lord mystery by the author of "The Alpine Christmas." When a beautiful young African-American nurse with a shady past takes a job in Alpine, some locals show their true bigoted natures, filling editor-publisher Emma Lord with disgust. But when a second newcomer -- a young black man -- is found shot through the head, Emma is stuck with a story she will never forget. Though Sheriff Milo Dodge connects the victim to the nurse, Emma believes there's something more sinister afoot. So she and Vida Runkel, her formidable house-and-home editor, try writing their own scenario. But the case offers too many subplots, too many suspects, and one crafty killer who leaves no tracks. That is, until Emma hits the deadly trail . . .