Margaret Jacob

Lynn Hunt

Joyce Oldham Appleby

Margaret C. Jacob

Lynn Avery Hunt

"A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."--Booklist

Telling the Truth about History

Marvin Perry

James R. Jacob

Theodore H. Von Laue

Myrna Chase

Ideas, Politics & Society (One-Volume Edition)

Western Civilization

As more and more historians acknowledge the central significance of science and technology with that of modern society, the need for a good, general history of the achievements of the Scientific Revolution has grown. Scientific Culture and The Making of the Industrial West seeks to explain this historical process by looking at how and why scientific knowledge became such an integral part of the culture of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how this in turn lead to theIndustrial Revolution. This comparative study not only looks at England, and its success, but follows through with the history of France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West

The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps, the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even secrecy—Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob investigates what it was to be cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then—as now—being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically, nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived experiences and practices. From the representatives of the Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority, to the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse faltered. Jacob pays particular attention to the impact of science and merchant life on the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal. In the decades after 1650, modern scientific practices coalesced and science became an open enterprise. Experiments were witnessed in social settings of natural inquiry, congenial for the inculcation of cosmopolitan mores. Similarly, the public venues of the stock exchanges brought strangers and foreigners together in ways encouraging them to be cosmopolites. The amount of international and global commerce increased greatly after 1700, and luxury tastes developed that valorized foreign patterns and designs. Drawing upon sources as various as Inquisition records and spy reports, minutes of scientific societies and the writings of political revolutionaries, Strangers Nowhere in the World reveals a moment in European history when an ideal of cultural openness came to seem strong enough to counter centuries of chauvinism and xenophobia. Perhaps at no time since, Jacob cautions, has that cosmopolitan ideal seemed more fragile and elusive than it is today.

The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe

Strangers Nowhere in the World

Ever since the Industrial Revolution debate has raged about the sources of the new, sustained western prosperity. Margaret Jacob here argues persuasively for the critical importance of knowledge in Europe's economic transformation during the period from 1750 to 1850, first in Britain and then in selected parts of northern and western Europe. This is a new history of economic development in which minds, books, lectures and education become central. She shows how, armed with knowledge and know-how and inspired by the desire to get rich, entrepreneurs emerged within an industrial culture wedded to scientific knowledge and technology. She charts how, across a series of industries and nations, innovative engineers and entrepreneurs sought to make sense and a profit out of the world around them. Skilled hands matched minds steeped in the knowledge systems new to the eighteenth century to transform the economic destiny of western Europe.

Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850

The First Knowledge Economy

Can the ancestry of freemasonry really be traced back to the Knights Templar? Is the image of the eye in a triangle on the back of the dollar bill one of its cryptic signs? Is there a conspiracy that stretches through centuries and generations to align this shadow organization and its secret rituals to world governments and religions? Myths persist and abound about the freemasons, Margaret C. Jacob notes. But what are their origins? How has an early modern organization of bricklayers and stonemasons aroused so much public interest? In The Origins of Freemasonry, Jacob throws back the veil from a secret society that turns out not to have been very secret at all. What factors contributed to the extraordinarily rapid spread of freemasonry over the course of the eighteenth century, and why were so many of the era's most influential figures drawn to it? Using material from the archives of leading masonic libraries in Europe, Jacob examines masonic almanacs and pocket diaries to get closer to what living as a freemason might have meant on a daily basis. She explores the persistent connections between masons and nascent democratic movements, as each lodge set up a polity where an individual's standing was meant to be based on merit, rather than on birth or wealth, and she demonstrates, beyond any doubt, how active a role women played in the masonic movement.

Facts and Fictions

The Origins of Freemasonry

Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans

The Radical Enlightenment

Gianni Paganini

John Christian Laursen

Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment.

New Studies on Subversive Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe, 1620?1823

Clandestine Philosophy

This revised edition of The Scientific Revolution highlights the difficulty of engaging, discarding, or assimilating religious paradigms in the course of scientific development. Jacob's introduction outlines the trajectory of the Scientific Revolution and argues that the revival of ancient texts in the Renaissance and the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation paved the way for science. The collected documents include writings of well-known scientists and philosophers, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton, as well as primary sources documenting discoveries in medicine, innovations in engineering, and advances in scientific investigation. New to this edition are the writings of John Toland and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who both attempt to redefine the role of God in an age of science, and an excerpt from Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems that provides context to the popular understanding of Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church. Document headnotes, questions for consideration, a chronology, and a selected bibliography support students' study of the Scientific Revolution.

A Brief History with Documents

The Scientific Revolution

Long recognized as more than the writings of a dozen or so philosophes, the Enlightenment created a new secular culture populated by the literate and the affluent. Enamoured of British institutions, Continental Europeans turned to the imported masonic lodges and found in them a new forum that was constitutionally constructed and logically egalitarian. Originating in the Middle Ages, when stone-masons joined together to preserve their professional secrets and to protect their wages, the English and Scottish lodges had by the eighteenth century discarded their guild origins and become an international phenomenon that gave men and eventually some women a place to vote, speak, discuss and debate. Margaret Jacob argues that the hundreds of masonic lodges founded in eighteenth-century Europe were among the most important enclaves in which modern civil society was formed. In France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain men and women freemasons sought to create a moral and social order based upon reason and virtue, and dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality. A forum where philosophers met with men of commerce, government, and the professions, the masonic lodge created new forms of self-government in microcosm, complete with constitutions and laws, elections, and representatives. This is the first comprehensive history of Enlightenment freemasonry, from the roots of the society's political philosophy and evolution in seventeenth-century England and Scotland to the French Revolution. Based on never-before-used archival sources, it will appeal to anyone interested in the birth of modernity in Europe or in the cultural milieu of the European Enlightenment.

Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Living the Enlightenment

W. W. Mijnhardt

In an era of intense religious conflict in Europe and ongoing exploration of the lands beyond Europe, Cï¿½rï¿½monies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-37) set a new agenda for thinking about faith and provided a lasting visual template for representing the world's religions. In the work's seven massive volumes, Jean Frederic Bernard and the renowned engraver Bernard Picart invited readers to view religions and their institutions as cultural practices. Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion approaches this much-cited but little-studied work from a variety of angles. Its fifteen scholarly essays examine Bernard and Picart's authorial and artistic strategies, the handling of religious difference in Cï¿½rï¿½monies et coutumes religieuses, and the cultural context that fostered the creation of one of the most influential works of comparative religion ever published.

Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion

University Lynn Hunt

Karen Halttunen

Jerrold Seigel

Richard Biernacki

Sonya O. Rose

William H. Sewell (Jr.)

Margaret R. Somers

A collection of engaging essays that look specifically at the effect of culturalism on history and sociology and propose new directions in the theory and practice of research.

New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture

Beyond the Cultural Turn

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people’s everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

The Secular Enlightenment

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs

This insightful work examines what happened to Newton's science as it was interpreted by his major followers. The authors also look at the scientific culture that Newton helped to create and the impact that his ideas had on the rapidly developing technology that led to the Industrial Revolution.

Margaret C. Jacob

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