Anglo-Dutch-American Enlightenment

This chapter studies cultural invention in light of the North-Western European cultural movement called Enlightenment. Enlightenment refers, in the first place, to a description by European intellectuals of what they took to be an advanced present state of moral and natural knowledge by comparison to that of the ancients. With related self-confidence, in the heyday of their empires, some described their culture as possessed of a dynamic modernity to be distinguished from the ‘oriental' lethargy and backwardness existing elsewhere. Yet Enlightenment also originated as European self-criticism. One context for that was the comparative perspective acquired by discovery of non-European cultures. In this and in other ways the origin of Enlightenment, including its ‘conviction that progress had become unstoppable', lies in the period when Renaissance and Reformation combined with printing and natural philosophy to establish the culture of the European North-West.

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Spanish America. Debating Historiographic Categories

This article gives an overview of the historiographic revolution that the study of the Enlightenment has gone through in the last fifteen years in the Western world and assesses part of the recent bibliography on the Spanish and Spanish American Enlightenments. It is also a critical analysis not only of Jonathan Israel’s perspective on the Spanish American Enlightenment, but mainly, in a more general sense, of the a-critical application of the categories ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Counter- Enlightenment’ to Spain and, particularly, to the Spanish American case. As the Spanish American Enlightenment shows, this was a social and intellectual process with a series of peculiarities or specificities that complicate the indiscriminate application of the aforementioned categories. A critical review of Israel’s interpretation of the Spanish American Enlightenment and especially the ambiguous character of the Spanish American Counter-Enlightenment brings to the fore the need for a more subtle and profound debate on these issues.

An enlightened beauty and a natural beast. A dialogue of epochs in a fairy-tale dimension

The article analyses the dialogue happening between two historical periods inside the fairy-tale context of Beauty and the Beast: a story with its origins in the late days of the ‘gallant’ age and on the cusp of the Age of Enlightenment. A product of the conflict between the two, the fairy-tale provides ample inspiration for contemporary re-tellers of classical stories. The original work by Madame de Villeneuve centres on the idea of assimilation of a territory, its colonization and its integration into the political and economic context of the inhabited world. The same idea is taken up and reinforced by the American author M. Lackey, who considered the French original and its origination period through the concept of a national idea, in particular, the notion of the ‘hearth’. The article demonstrates how this idea, reaching its peak during the American Enlightenment, helped Lackey to transform the original’s colonization motifs and endow the classical plot with new prospects. In her ‘domestication’ of the fairy-tale world, Lackey delivers it a paradoxical blow at the end of the story, and turns de Villeneuve’s triumph of civilization into a more relevant ideal of freedom and unlimited opportunities, where the female protagonist enjoys emancipation and is invested with her rights.