Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton(15 Penn State Series in the History of the Book)

The famous clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine over the Enlightenment’s “evil” or “liberating” potential in the French Revolution finds present-day parallels in the battle between those who see the Enlightenment at the origins of modernity’s many ills, such as imperialism, racism, misogyny, and totalitarianism, and those who see it as having forged an age of democracy, human rights, and freedom. The essays collected by Charles Walton in Into Print paint a more complicated picture. By focusing on print culture—the production, circulation, and reception of Enlightenment thought—they show how the Enlightenment was shaped through practice and reshaped over time. These essays expand upon an approach to the study of the Enlightenment pioneered four decades ago: the social history of ideas. The contributors to Into Print examine how writers, printers, booksellers, regulators, police, readers, rumormongers, policy makers, diplomats, and sovereigns all struggled over that broad range of ideas and values that we now associate with the Enlightenment. They reveal the financial and fiscal stakes of the Enlightenment print industry and, in turn, how Enlightenment ideas shaped that industry during an age of expanding readership. They probe the limits of Enlightenment universalism, showing how demands for religious tolerance clashed with the demands of science and nationalism. They examine the transnational flow of Enlightenment ideas and opinions, exploring its domestic and diplomatic implications. Finally, they show how the culture of the Enlightenment figured in the outbreak and course of the French Revolution. Aside from the editor, the contributors are David A. Bell, Roger Chartier, Tabetha Ewing, Jeffrey Freedman, Carla Hesse, Thomas M. Luckett, Sarah Maza, Renato Pasta, Thierry Rigogne, Leonard N. Rosenband, Shanti Singham, and Will Slauter.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Charles Walton “Un garçon plein d’esprit mais extrêmement dangereux: The Darnton Subversion” Roger Chartier Part 1: Making News 1 A Trojan Horse in Parliament: International Publicity in the Age of the American Revolution Will Slauter 2 “The Bastard Child of a Noble House”: Détective and Middle-Class Culture in Interwar France Sarah Maza Part 2: Print, Paper, Markets, and States 3 Who Were the Booksellers and Printers of Eighteenth-Century France? Thierry Rigogne 4 Making the Fair Trader: Papermaking, the Excise, and the English State, 1700–1815 Leonard N. Rosenband 5 Commerce with Books: Reading Practices and Book Diffusion at the Habsburg Court in Florence (1765–1790) Renato Pasta Part 3: Police and Opinion 6 Invasion of Lorient: Rumor, Public Opinion, and Foreign Politics in 1740s Paris Tabetha Ewing 7 Book Seizures and the Politics of Repression in Paris, 1787–1789 Thomas M. Luckett Part 4: Enlightenment in Revolution 8 A Grub Street Hack Goes to War David A. Bell 9 Reading in extremis: Revolutionaries Respond to Rousseau Carla Hesse 10 Les graines de la discorde: Print, Public Spirit, and Free Market Politics in the French Revolution Charles Walton Part 5: Enlightenment Universalism and Cultural Difference 11 The Limits of Tolerance: Jews, the Enlightenment, and the Fear of Premature Burial Jeffrey Freedman 12 From Cosmopolitan Anticolonialism to Liberal Imperialism: French Intellectuals and Muslim North Africa in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Shanti Singham Appendix: Publications by Robert Darnton List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Charles Walton is Associate Professor of History at Yale University.

Review :
“Into Print conveys the impressive scale and scope of Darnton’s enduring influence on research on the Enlightenment and its antecedents as well as historical scholarship itself.” —Greg Matthews RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage “This book is a treat. It is well produced and edited and comes with a very useful and comprehensive bibliography of Darnton’s publications.” —Brandon High Rare Books Newsletter “Along with Daniel Roche, Robert Darnton has been the most influential historian of eighteenth-century France during the last four decades. From his early work on Mesmerism to his most recent study of communication networks in Enlightenment Paris, Darnton has written about an impressively broad array of topics, from peasant folk tales to the publishing business. . . . Charles Walton’s volume will be of great interest to a wide audience because the chapters are skillfully compressed, providing the advanced undergraduate and graduate student accessible entry points into the historical debates and trends that Darnton has shaped. Because this volume contains contributions from leading historians who, like their mentor, are opening new vistas of French and European history, this collection is both a celebration of a pathbreaking past and an adumbration of a promising future.” —Kenneth Loiselle H-France Review