"Gottsched's efforts to involve women in this process have been noted, but in Amazons and Apprentices, Katherine Goodman examines for the first time the Gottsched circle's initiatives regarding intellectual women in the context of the broader discourse of which they were an important part. She presents an array of voices and texts from the years 1715 to 1740, including dictionaries, moral weeklies, letters, translations, and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

The Lessing Yearbook, the official publication of the Lessing Society, is a valuable source of information on German culture, literature, and thought of the eighteenth century. Articles are in German or English. Essays in this volume explore a wide variety of subjects pertaining to class and gender, identity formation, and art in Lessing's work, as well as Lessing's philosphy on music and poetry.

Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with da Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of da Silva’s life together with the Baniwas’ society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls “a nexus of religious power and knowledge” in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance-leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. By exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans acquire the knowledge and power of the deities in several stages of instruction and practice. This volume is the first mapping of the sacred geography (“mythscape”) of the Northern Arawak–speaking people of the northwest Amazon, demonstrating direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.

Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics offers a fresh account of philosophical developments in German philosophy in the first half of the 18th century. At the centre of this book is Wolff's seminal text on metaphysics, the Deutsche Metaphysik of 1719, a text that modernized and advanced German philosophy but also provoked a vigorous intellectual controversy which informed and animated German thought through the decades until Kant's later philosophical revolution. Corey W. Dyck draws extensively on the wider intellectual context and Wolff's own early philosophical and scientific writings to provide a new and comprehensive account of Wolff's metaphysics, with particular emphasis on Wolff's views on the human soul and God. Dyck explores the impact of Wolff's text, beginning with a widely-neglected aspect of Wolff's reception in Germany, namely, the striking uptake of his philosophy among women intellectuals and Wolff's hostile reception by his Pietist colleagues. In the concluding chapters, a number of key metaphysical debates in the aftermath of the controversy between Wolff and the Pietists are considered. The reader is shown how these two opposed intellectual systems served as the indispensable frame for metaphysical inquiry-inspiring and shaping discussion among German thinkers-in the first half of the 18th century. In the end, this all points to the rich philosophical vein exposed through the opening of the fracture between Wolffianism and Pietism, and takes a step towards giving Wolff-but also his Pietist critics and the philosophers who took up positions between them-their rightful place at the beginning of the history of classical German metaphysics.

During the eighteenth century, elite women participated in the philosophical, scientific, and political controversies that resulted in the overthrow of monarchy, the reconceptualisation of marriage, and the emergence of modern, democratic institutions. In this comprehensive study, Karen Green outlines and discusses the ideas and arguments of these women, exploring the development of their distinctive and contrasting political positions, and their engagement with the works of political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville and Rousseau. Her exploration ranges across Europe from England through France, Italy, Germany and Russia, and discusses thinkers including Mary Astell, Emilie Du Châtelet, Luise Kulmus-Gottsched and Elisabetta Caminer Turra. This study demonstrates the depth of women's contributions to eighteenth-century political debates, recovering their historical significance and deepening our understanding of this period in intellectual history. It will provide an essential resource for readers in political philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and women's studies.

This collection of nine essays investigates the consumption of music during the long eighteenth century, providing insights into the activities of composers, performers, patrons, publishers, theorists, impresarios, and critics. The successful sale and distribution of music has always depended on a physical and social infrastructure. Though the existence of that infrastructure may be clear, its organization and participants are among the least preserved and thus least understood elements of historical musical culture. Who bought music and how did those consumers know what music was available? Where was it sold and by whom? How did the consumption of music affect its composition? How was consumers' musical taste shaped and by whom? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this collection of nine essays investigates such questions from a variety of perspectives, each informed by parallels betweenthe consumption of music and that of dance, visual art, literature, and philosophy in France, the Austro-German lands, and the United States. Chapters relate the activities of composers, performers, patrons, publishers, theorists, impresarios, and critics, exploring consumers' tastes, publishers' promotional strategies, celebrity culture, and the wider communities that were fundamental to these and many more aspects of musical culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Glenda Goodman; Roger Mathew Grant; Emily H. Green; Marie Sumner Lott; Catherine Mayes; Peter Mondelli, Rupert Ridgewell, Patrick Wood Uribe, Steven Zohn Emily H. Green is assistant professor of music at George Mason University. Catherine Mayes is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Utah.

The Enlightenment was based on the use of reason, common sense, and "natural law," and was paralleled by an emphasis on feelings and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. Progressive thinkers in England, France, and later in Germany began to assail the absolutism of the state and the orthodoxy of the Church; in Germany the line led from Leibniz, Thomasius, and Wolff to Lessing and Kant, and eventually to the rise of an educated upper middle class. Literary developments encompassed the emergence of a national theater, literature, and a common literary language. This became possible in part because of advances in literacy and education, especially among bourgeois women, and the reorganization of book production and the book market. This major new reference work provides a fresh look at the major literary figures, works, and cultural developments from around 1700 up to the late Enlightenment. They trace the 18th-century literary revival in German-speaking countries: from occasional and learned literature under the influence of French Neoclassicism to the establishment of a new German drama, religious epic and secular poetry, and the sentimentalist novel of self-fashioning. The volume includes the new, stimulating works of women, a chapter on music and literature, chapters on literary developments in Switzerland and in Austria, and a chapter on reactions to the Enlightenment from the 19th century to the present. The recent revaluing of cultural and social phenomena affecting literary texts informs the presentations in the individual chapters and allows for the inclusion of hitherto neglected but important texts such as essays, travelogues, philosophical texts, and letters. Contributors: Kai Hammermeister, Katherine Goodman, Helga Brandes, Rosmarie Zeller, Kevin Hilliard, Francis Lamport, Sarah Colvin, Anna Richards, Franz M. Eybl, W. Daniel Wilson, Robert Holub. Barbara Becker-Cantarino is Research Professor in German at the Ohio State University.