Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

Anna Maria Rao

Giugno 1, 2005

Journal Article

Anna Maria Rao

Journal Article

10.1080/13545710500111280

1354-571X

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.

2014-10-10 14:12:37

Giugno 1, 2005

2

Taylor and Francis+NEJM

142-167

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

Enlightenment and reform

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545710500111280

10

Snapshot