Simulating an Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Salon

This paper reflects on my experience simulating an 18th-century French salon for an academic conference and in an undergraduate classroom. I argue that simulating a salon is heuristically as well as pedagogically useful and allows historians to test hypotheses about the nature of the salon and the role of the salonnière proposed by scholars such as Dena Goodman and Antoine Lilti. The essay also engages with some of the important insights gained from feminist and performance theory regarding historical reenactment. Thus I caution against naive attempts to reenact the past and instead suggest practices that foster open-ended conversations about the nature of the Enlightenment and our relationship to the past

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Embodied cognition · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Salon · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity