‘Maria Edgeworth, and the Novel as Education’ argues that we should consider most of Maria Edgeworth’s novels as ‘educational’, not in the sense of narrating an education as in a Bildungsroman or of having a didactic intent, but rather as making possible a certain kind of educational experience. Beginning with the book she co-authored with her father, Practical Education (1798), it is argued that in her successive works of fiction, from Castle Rackrent (1800) to Belinda (1801), Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1816), her literary technique is a development of the earlier theory of education. Edgeworth’s fiction (particularly her Irish fiction) proceeds by a literary version of the Enlightenment method of discovery by experiment, in which the reader is invited to test out various hypotheses concerning characters and situations. The reading experience comes to be staged as a kind of educational game, for anyone ready to play.

Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Japanese scholars and commercial authors wrote extensively about lamps, lanterns, and candles. The forms of intellectual curiosity for lights presented in this chapter reveal original paths in Tokugawa Japan’s history of investigations and discoveries. On the one hand, they point at homegrown innovations that remove Japan from the orbit of Western knowledge; on the other, they illuminate connections with important global trends. The history of the early modern curiosity for illumination points at revolutions in knowledge that encompass the small and the large, the local and the global, and scramble the timeline of Japan’s enlightened modernity.

The chapter examines Beethoven’s encounter with the Catholic Enlightenment in the lands of the Bohemian crown, where his music had been widely known as early as the 1790s. Since the eighteenth century, linguistic issues, as championed by Bohemia’s Catholic Enlightenment, were key to addressing local questions of nationality and societal progress. Central to these debates were the teachings of Bernhard Bolzano. A priest, philosopher and theologian, but also a respected mathematician and astronomer, Bolzano wanted Catholicism to be compatible with the demands of reason. Although his radical thought was dismissed by the government, his ideas remained a source of inspiration for societal reforms when Beethoven’s famous pupil and patron archduke Rudolph became prince-bishop of Olomouc/Olmütz. For Beethoven, Rudolph’s new role was an important point of connection to the Catholic Enlightenment in the region. Among the many works Beethoven dedicated to the archduke was the Missa solemnis, op. 123, where he presented the world with a musical response to philosophical questions that had occupied him for decades and that also were at the core of the Catholic Enlightenment in Bohemia.

Ideas usually associated with the Enlightenment – such as freedom, equality, and individualism – have featured prominently in commentary on Beethoven’s life and music, and have especially influenced accounts of the composer’s political and religious outlook. This chapter demonstrates that, at least in terms of published biographies of the composer, the main elements of this “enlightened” image of Beethoven first appear explicitly in the work of Anton Schindler and are largely absent from earlier writings. It is likely that Schindler’s portrayal of Beethoven’s worldview was influenced by his own political commitments, which were shaped by the particular context of the Vormärz era and the failure of the 1848 liberal revolutions. Schindler’s perspective was then taken up by later writers, especially Alexander Wheelock Thayer, thus solidifying their impact on Beethoven reception. Recent Beethoven scholarship has become more attentive to doubts as to the reliability of Schindler’s biography, though commentators are often inconsistent is their use of Schindler’s claims, dismissing some of them while still at least tacitly accepting others. That Schindler’s account was affected by his personal biases during a period of political turmoil in the German lands should encourage greater caution in accepting traditional assumptions about Beethoven’s “enlightened” outlook.

The Enlightenment is commonly understood as a period during which freedom of thought, individual liberties, scientifically informed reason, and revolutionary change spread across Europe during the long eighteenth century. Yet the license to determine what, exactly, counted as “enlightened” ideas and art paradoxically entailed a multilayered form of censorship that belies tolerance. As evident in the case of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bildung and artistic production, especially his 1790 funeral cantata mourning the death of Joseph II, the Enlightenment not only served to inculcate and nourish freedom of thought but also inadvertently justified the need for authoritative control over what comprised enlightened thinking. As a case in point serves, on the one hand, Immanuel Kant’s well-known essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” and, on the other, Eulogius Schneider, a monk who became a poet. Elector-archbishop Maximilian Franz, brother of Joseph II and a promoter of a belated enlightenment in Bonn, hired him as a professor of aesthetics until he could no longer tolerate his religious publications. Enlightened leaders like him thus often exercised the very sort of censorship many authors and artists sought to avoid, problematizing the notion of enlightened thinking and the relationship between freedom and Bildung.

Following the death of Emperor Joseph II and election of Emperor Leopold II in 1790, the nineteen-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven was invited by Bonn’s Lesegesellschaft (founded in 1787 by some former Illuminati) to compose two cantatas responding to each of these momentous events: Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II (WoO87) and Cantata on the Accession (Elevation) of Emperor Leopold II (WoO88). The first of these odes (and probably the second one) was by a local poet/cleric Severin Anton Averdonk (1768–1817), whose language shows him to be clearly sympathetic to Enlightenment and some Jacobin ideals.

This chapter reconstructs how Bonn remembered the emperor at the time of his death and various ways in which that perspective influenced the poem and music of Beethoven’s first cantata, the seven-movement Funeral Cantata. Through a close study of professor/cleric Eulogius Schneider’s memorial address in March 1790 to the Lesegesellschaft, a contemporary’s perspective on the “enlightened” aspects of Joseph’s rule is surveyed. Averdonk’s and Beethoven’s approaches to the text and music are summarized.

The cantata’s striking elements of drama and surprise and prodigious use of musico-rhetorical topics reflect Beethoven’s fervent commitment to the philosophical currents of the time, some of which were likely stimulated by his contact with Professor Schneider at Bonn’s Universität as well as through his multifarious, deep, autodidactic reading of poetry and classics. Although the work was never performed or published during Beethoven’s lifetime, it remains uncanny how many of its aspects “haunted” much of his later music.

This introduction begins by explaining the volume’s starting point: Traditional assumptions concerning Beethoven as an “enlightened” composer rest on an overly simplistic conception of the Enlightenment emphasizing secular humanism and political liberalism. This conception has been called into question in much historical scholarship on the Enlightenment over the past few decades, which has created a more pluriform view of the Enlightenment as encompassing different outlooks on issues such as politics and religion that were often in tension with one another. The goal of the volume is thus to invite a diverse group of scholars to consider the implications of new perspectives on the Enlightenment for our understanding of Beethoven’s life and music. The introduction briefly summarizes the various contributions in each of the volume’s three sections. The first section concerns Enlightenment historiography and its impact on established narratives in Beethoven reception. The other two sections focus on Beethoven’s life in Bonn and Vienna respectively. A number of common themes connect several different chapters with each other: religion, politics, social life, and material culture. The introduction concludes by clarifying that the volume does not seek to overthrow entirely the received wisdom concerning Beethoven and the Enlightenment, but to introduce more nuance and complexity in the way this issue is treated.

Beethoven spent his earliest years in Bonn (1770–1792), the residence of the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne. Enlightenment thought had dominated educated circles in Protestant Germany for years. However, in Catholic Bonn it arrived later, flourishing precisely at the time that the young Beethoven grew up there. What did he learn of Enlightenment ideas? Who might have transmitted them to Beethoven, who had enjoyed about four years of formal schooling?

Based on archival research, this chapter offers a detailed look at the attitudes and activities of one of three men – all of them Beethoven’s colleagues in the Hofkapelle and his teachers – who had the opportunity to influence him daily. Nikolaus Simrock, hornist in the orchestra, was an especially active and radical Aufklärer, involved in Freemasonry and with the Illuminati. He judged the young Elector harshly, and his republication of a text by Diderot shows him critical of absolutist governance and dedicated to ideas of “natural law.” Their correspondence reveals that Beethoven is aware of Simrock’s revolutionary attitudes and seems not unsympathetic to them. Other contemporary sources show Beethoven imbued with ideals of human dignity and speaking truth to power.

This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

This chapter explores how early modern philosophers used deafness to probe the nature of language, knowledge and human rationality. Contemporaries tested the idea that vocal speech was a marker of reason by teaching deaf people to speak vocally. This chapter focuses on the efforts of linguists, and philosophers to teach two young deaf men, Alexander Popham and Daniel Whalley, in seventeenth-century Oxford. This chapter examines how deaf signers inspired the parallel project of developing a universal or ‘philosophical’ language. Encounters with deaf individuals, including those observed by John Wallis, prompted some academics to change their mind about the eloquence of signed communication, and to reconsider whether speech was the only valid expression of rational thought. Deaf people thus became central to debates about how humans acquire knowledge, whether language shapes cognition, and what forms of expression could signify full participation in human society.

The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

This chapter provides an overview of music in Spain during the Age of Enlightenment. It first focuses on several transversal aspects, such as musicians’ professional profiles, networks of circulation and mobility, and the reinterpretation of popular music as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity. It then examines the principal musical genres, along with their most significant works and authors, such as Domenico Scarlatti, José de Nebra, or Luigi Boccherini, among others. On the one hand, sacred music, which held great importance in such a Catholic country, reflected the tension between continuity and aesthetic change. On the other hand, a rich variety of stage genres flourished in the theatrical sphere, including the zarzuela, although a distinct ‘Spanish opera’ never emerged. In these, the dramaturgy inherited from the Golden Age was enriched through the influence of imported European models. Finally, instrumental genres first gained prominence in keyboard repertoire, before expanding into chamber music and orchestral works, as instrumental music became increasingly autonomous in the final third of the century.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.

The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.