The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

First Published in 2004. The ideas of the Enlightenment and belligerent royal officials critically influenced the French Revolution, but how did an entire generation learn about such ideas prior to the Revolution? Jack R. Censer’s achievement in this volume is to marshal a vast literature in order to provide a coherent and original interpretation of the role of the French Press in the dissemination of social and political ideas in the years leading up to the Revolution. Censer also explores the relationship between journalists and government officials and unearths a range of sophisticated censorship techniques employed by the government to keep Bad News off the front pages. In a field dominated by specialized studies but few generalizations, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment provides a bold synthesis regarding the periodical press from mid-century to the Revolution.

The ambition is of this volume to study the role censorship played in the intellectual culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how it was implemented, and how it affected the development philosophy and literary writing. It contains contributions by intellectual historians, philosophers and literary theorists. The first section studies how Enlightenment thinkers were submitted to censorship, in particular the German Spinozists, Pierre Bayle, and the French Encylopedists. The second section on the institutional aspects of censorship contains an analysis of the breakdown of censorship in England around 1640 and a discussion of the impact of censorship on philosophy in the Netherlands. The final section studies the stand three Enlightenment thinkers, namely John Toland, Denis Diderot, and G. W. Leibniz, took on the issue of censorship.

Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century Reformations to the dawn of the Atlantic Revolutionary era. Generated in competition for a changing readership and forged in dialog and conflict, dynamic and diverse notions of what it meant to be enlightened constituted a broader culture of enlightening from which the more familiar strains of the Enlightenment emerged, often ironically and accidentally, from originally religious impulses and theological questioning. By adapting, for the first time, methodological insights from the scholarship of historical entanglement (l'histoire croisée) to the study of the Enlightenment, this book provides a new interpretation of the European republic of letters from the late 1600s through the 1700s by focusing on the lived experience of the long-neglected Catholic theologian, historian, and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, Abbé Claude Yvon. The ambivalent historical memory of Yvon, as well as the eclectic and global array of his sources and endeavors, Burson argues, can serve as a gauge for evaluating historical transformations in the surprisingly diverse ways in which eighteenth-century individuals spoke about enlightening human reason, religion, and society. Ultimately, Burson provocatively claims that even the most radical fruits of the Enlightenment can be understood as the unintended offspring of a revolution in theology and the cultural history of religious experience.

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. It surveys the diversity of views about the structure and nature of the movement, pointing toward the possibilities for further research. The volume presents a series of comprehensive treatments on the process and interpretation of Catholic Enlightenment in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Malta, Italy and the Habsburg territories. An introductory overview explores the varied meanings of Catholic Enlightenment and situates them in a series of intellectual and social contexts. The topics covered in this book are crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place not only of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, but also for the social and religious history of modern Europe. Contributors include: Jeffrey D. Burson, Richard Butterwick, Frans Ciappara, Harm Klueting, Ulrich L. Lehner, Michael Printy, Mario Rosa, Evergton Sales Souza, and Andrea J. Smidt.

The Story of Civilization, Volume IX: A history of civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with special emphasis on the conflict between religion and philosophy. This is the ninth volume of the classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning series.