This collection addresses Anglo-Italian influences, correspondences and relationships through the lens of an expansive notion of eighteenth-century political history, explored in its fecund dialogue with cultural history. Its multifaceted approach fleshes out the idea of the Enlightenment community of people linking and sharing different forms and structures of knowledge into a comprehensive picture of the Age of Reason. This book probes fields of great relevance for the cultural interpretation of historical experience, and composes a lively, and as yet unexplored, map of an interconnected European world. Anglo-Italian encounters are explored here primarily through the interweaving of political and cultural history, adding a valuable cog to contemporary insight into the cosmopolitan nature of Enlightenment Europe. The essays here range in scope from the public economy and international trade to finance, moral philosophy, the ethics and politics of translation, travel, the cosmopolitan impact of Italian music and taste, and the art of gardening.

Friendship, an acquired relationship primarily based on choice rather than birth, lay at the heart of Enlightenment preoccupations with sociability and the formation of the private sphere. In Brotherly Love, Kenneth Loiselle argues that Freemasonry is an ideal arena in which to explore the changing nature of male friendship in Enlightenment France. Freemasonry was the largest and most diverse voluntary organization in the decades before the French Revolution. At least fifty thousand Frenchmen joined lodges, the memberships of which ranged across the social spectrum from skilled artisans to the highest ranks of the nobility. Loiselle argues that men were attracted to Freemasonry because it enabled them to cultivate enduring friendships that were egalitarian and grounded in emotion. Drawing on scores of archives, including private letters, rituals, the minutes of lodge meetings, and the speeches of many Freemasons, Loiselle reveals the thought processes of the visionaries who founded this movement, the ways in which its members maintained friendships both within and beyond the lodge, and the seemingly paradoxical place women occupied within this friendship community. Masonic friendship endured into the tumultuous revolutionary era, although the revolutionary leadership suppressed most of the lodges by 1794. Loiselle not only examines the place of friendship in eighteenth-century society and culture but also contributes to the history of emotions and masculinity, and the essential debate over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

The Paper War and the Development of Anglo-American Nationalisms, 1800-1825 offers fresh insight into the evolution of British and American nationalisms, the maturation of apologetics for slavery, and the early development of anti-Americanism, from approximately 1800 to 1830.

Gesa Stedman's ambitious new study is a comprehensive account of cross-channel cultural exchanges between seventeenth-century France and England, and includes discussion of a wide range of sources and topics. Literary texts, garden design, fashion, music, dance, food, the book market, and the theatre as well as key historical figures feature in the book. Importantly, Stedman concentrates on the connection between actual, material transfer and its symbolic representation in both visual and textual sources, investigating material exchange processes in order to shed light on the connection between actual and symbolic exchange. Individual chapters discuss exchanges instigated by mediators such as Henrietta Maria and Charles II, and textual and visual representations of cultural exchange with France in poetry, restoration comedies, fashion discourse, and in literary devices and characters. Well-written and accessible, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England provides needed insight into the field of cultural exchange, and will be of interest to both literary scholars and cultural historians.

The English republican tradition and eighteenth-century France offers the first full account of the role played by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republican ideas in eighteenth-century France. Challenging some of the dominant accounts of the republican tradition, it revises conventional understandings of what republicanism meant in both Britain and France during the eighteenth century, offering a distinctive trajectory as regards ancient and modern constructions and highlighting variety rather than homogeneity within the tradition. Hammersley thus offers a new and fascinating perspective on both the legacy of the English republican tradition and the origins and thought of the French Revolution. The book focuses on a series of case studies, featuring such colourful and influential characters as John Toland, Viscount Bolingbroke, John Wilkes and the Comte de Mirabeau. This book will thus be of value to all those interested in the fields of intellectual history and the history of political thought, seventeenth and eighteenth-century British history, eighteenth-century French history and French Revolution studies.