Enlightenment and reform

An overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

Bibliographic Data

ID12547801
AuthorsAnna Maria Rao (0000-0002-3496-732X, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume10
Issue2
Pages142-167
Publication date2005-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Modern Italian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1354-571X • E-ISSN: 1469-9583
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13545710500111280
OpenAlexW2038076924
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited5

This essay analyses the influence of the work of Franco Venturi on Italian studies of the eighteenth century over the last fifty years. Venturi's ‘model’ has certainly been of fundamental importance in stimulating new research on the connections between Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Italian states and is still an essential point of reference for all research in the field. But the direction of eighteenth-century studies in Italy has been shaped also by the contributions of many other scholars. Starting in the 1970s Italian historians became increasingly interested in new questions that were being posed by historians in France and Britain, which contributed to a more general shift away from the biographical focus on individuals characteristic of much of Venturi's work in favour of more collective topics, new types of sources and new ways of interpreting them. This article describes the different themes around which relations between culture and politics in eighteenth-century Italy have been studied, from civil, military and ecclesiastical institutions to the administrative and reform elites, the world of salons and sociability, publishing, religious beliefs, gender differences and science

Enlightenment · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Publishing · Social science · Sociology · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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