The Enlightenment on Trial

The following lines are likely to raise heart rates and cause generalised upset to those attached to the idea that the study of the global Hispanic world should be confined to a Golden Age, loosely situated between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, based on the conviction that, beyond that barrier, only a continuum of obscurantism, irrelevance and mediocrity awaits. A significant amount of literature covering later periods produced since the 1990s not only has undermined the myth of a path to modernity manqué, but also has gathered enough confidence to start challenging received wisdoms about how best to approach the study of the phenomenon widely considered as the midwife of such process: the Enlightenment. The two books reviewed here take up the task from quite different angles—one clearly ‘bottom-up’, the other, ‘top-down’—although they agree in considering the Enlightenment not as an ideology akin to liberalism, but as a state of mind that could only be achieved through experience. Bianca Premo traces the genealogy of its status as a historical event believed to have taken place throughout the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in an introduction that offers a comprehensive survey of the scholarship, including those works which in recent years have used the concept as ‘an avatar for the West itself, in all of its glory and all of its shame’ (p. 5). Her monograph seeks to dislodge the persistent intellectual habit of taking the Enlightenment as an idea that originated in Europe among a small group of individuals which was then spread to the Americas, usually through print or by travellers, either originating from the Old Continent or suitably enlightened by prior life-changing visits to France and/or England. The relevance of emerging public spheres (coffee houses, salons, theatres, etc.) and reading publics is thus relativised as the Enlightenment that seems to be more easily recognised within the walls of university lecture halls, laboratories and, particularly germane for Premo’s study, the courtrooms. Traditional scholarship has tended to equate the Enlightenment to the reformist agenda of late eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchs; Premo sees it as a wider and more profound shift in attitudes towards selfhood and secularism, not necessarily incompatible with deeply rooted Catholicism (a view shared by the author of our second book, Brian Hamnett) that was more popular practice than the result of state imperative. Radically, she argues that, far from being received, the Enlightenment was to a large extent produced by people who often could not read or write, and mainly in Spanish America

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Empire · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Glory · Ideology · Literature · Modernity · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Scottish Enlightenment · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy