Debating Enlightenment: Scholarship, Historiography and the Transmission of Books and Ideas

A bold reappraisal of Enlightenment legacies this volume uncovers the fractured, global, and contested nature of modern Europe’s most influential intellectual transformation.

Emerging from the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment has long served as both a foundational moment and a battleground for narratives of Western modernity. Once anchored in the writings of Spinoza, Kant, Diderot, and D’Alembert, its genealogy is now understood to stretch from the rhetorical afterlives of Renaissance humanism and the polemics of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, through the religious pluralism of the Dutch Republic and the confessional fractures of the Holy Roman Empire, to the text-critical methods of orthodox theologians and the radical secularism of the philosophes.

This volume rethinks the Enlightenment as a dynamic espace de débat-a field of contested meanings shaped by transnational circulation, institutional conflict, and historiographical reinvention. Drawing on debates around the ＂Enlightenment project＂, ＂radical＂ and ＂religious＂ Enlightenment, and the tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and national traditions, it engages with the works of Jonathan Israel, Dan Edelstein, and Jeffrey Burson, amongst others, to explore longue durée patterns of intellectual exchange and secularisation.

Rich in case studies from Paris, London, Amsterdam, Leipzig, and beyond, the collection speaks directly to those navigating the plural legacies of Enlightenment historiography in an era increasingly shaped by digital tools, global frameworks, and postcolonial critique.