Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe ed. by Thomas Biskup et al. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe ed. by Thomas Biskup et al. Roberto Quirós Rosado Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Ed. by Thomas Biskup, Benjamin Marschke, Andreas Pečar, and Damien Tricoire. (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford. 2022. xi+ 367 pp. £65. ISBN 978–1–80085–507–6. The Enlightenment, one of the key pillars in the construction of Europe in the early modern age, is the axis of this collective book. Despite the usual divergences in the quality of the chapters included in this type of work, the four editors offer the reader—both in the arrangement of the chapters and through the hierarchy of ideas and debates in an extensive Introduction—the opportunity to engage with a multiplicity of views on the political, cultural, religious, and social connections of this intellectual phenomenon as it played out in what we can call the 'court ecosystem'. Through the aforementioned Introduction and its eleven contributions divided into four large blocks, a multifocal analysis of the historiographical issues covers [End Page 584] the major areas of development of political culture in the eighteenth century: from monarchical patronage to the (not always victorious) reformism of the Enlightenment, passing through the mechanisms of individual or collective representation and the emergence of a real public sphere. One of the greatest merits of the volume is how, for the first time, it brings together case studies that synthesize the rhetorics and practices of palatine networks, the links between reformers and philosophers, and the multiple facets of the cultural (understood as an eminently political means of dissemination on different scales). It does so not by making only timid links—e.g. between the French Lumières, Germanic Aufklärung, and British Enlightenment—but by opening up to spaces less known to general historiography, such as Spain, Russia, or Sweden. The divergences in the behaviour and sociability of some of these regions, such as the imperial, royal, and princely courts in the Holy Roman Empire (Berlin, Anhalt, Bayreuth, and Vienna), are examined in great detail. However, explorations of other essential spaces in this European melting pot, such as the three most important cities of the Italian Grand Tour—Rome, Venice, and Florence—or reformist Naples under the Habsburgs and Bourbons, are missing. Thanks to the results provided by Enlightenment at Court, we can observe the full validity of the court socio-political system in the face of the propagandistic criticism of its emulators in the transition to revolution and liberalism. We also see how palaces, gardens, and reserved cabinets constituted spaces of mimesis between the reformism of the ancien régime and the safeguarding of the essences of the absolutism of the eighteenth century. Finally, the collection reinforces the thesis that the great changes experienced at the end of that century were not extemporaneous phenomena, radically breaking with tradition, but were the direct consequence of the dynamics of interaction between thought and the practical reality of a whole political community forged throughout the old (court) Europe during the time of despotism. Roberto Quirós Rosado Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association