EBRO Review Archives

The biographies of women writers of the eighteenth-century have been multiplying in the wake of cautions against sweeping narratives about women at particular moments in time. To study the uniqueness of an author’s circumstances and motivations is to take women’s studies more seriously.

Volume 7 of the magnificent new edition of the Correspondance de Bayle covers the period from July 1686 to December 1688. For this period, Pierre Desmaizeaux’s edition of his missives in the Oeuvres diverses contained ten letters; this volume contains 132 (nos. 588-719).

Constructing knowledge through institutions, people and culture is the generally accepted method of social research. The study of prominent personalities and their works helps contextualize the historical period itself. Methodologically, this genre of literature draws deeply on a hermeneutic approach and archival materials.

As slim and elegant as a tube of lipstick, this volume traces the history of the French cosmetics trade from the thick fard of the mid-eighteenth century to the wan visages of the Romantic era. Fittingly for a book about truth in advertising, Martin has titled hers Selling Beauty.

As Peter Hanns Reill puts it in his introduction, tolerance, in its modern, positive sense is very much “a child of the Enlightenment.”(3) It is not difficult to locate instances of limited religious coexistence or grudging toleration in the medieval and early modern periods but these aberrations invariably derived from pragmatism: temporarily, there was more

From 13 March 1765 until 21 April 1766 – a period of just over one year – Pierre –Étienne Bourgeois de Boynes (1718-1783) kept a diary almost daily.  By the time Bourgeois began this journal, he was already rich, powerful, and a close advisor of King Louis XV.

To those interested in the history of history, Donald R. Kelley’s is a familiar name.

In Volume 11 of Françoise de Graffigny’s Correspondance with her longtime friend François Devaux, we find Graffigny at the pinnacle of her success as a writer. Her best-selling novel, Lettres d’une Péruvienne, had already brought her international attention in 1747. Now, three years later, she is hailed for her hit play, Cénie, at the Théâtre-Français.

Stephen Miller’s Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought presents the reader with some curious juxtapositions.

This well-presented volume offers a brief and incisive feminist meditation on identity, difference, and Enlightenment universalism, critiquing still-current theories of subjectivity based in Rousseau and Kant and seeking a more egalitarian code of democratic justice. It combines good writing with a poised synthetic overview of its agenda.

Must We Burn Sade? is a collection of essays edited by Deepak Narang Sawhney that highlights different aspects of Sade's work.

Jean Meuvret and Steven L. Kaplan have both written extensively on the grain question in the Old Regime. In Mastering the Market, Judith Miller adds to their work in two ways. First, she wants to show how “free trade in grain was not the result of the market but of the state’s intervention” (300).