The Age of Enlightenment

Catalog description

An in-depth exploration of the protean culture and new knowledges of eighteenth-century Europe. Through primary sources and select historiography, this course reconstructs: the rising literacy rate and proliferation of print culture; the culture of literary and art salons; the appeal of the exotic and the idea of the noble savage; meditations on happiness and pleasure; the problem of luxury and the discovery of the market as well as the new sciences of the mind, of language and of progress.