Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

Review"LWB Brockliss's study of Esprit-Claude-Francois Calvet (1728-1810), Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France, presents a very good picture of the life of a medical doctor and scholar. Brockliss's study is the result of extensive work in the archives that contain many details of Calvet's life and collections..."-- HISTORY: Reviews of New Books"The book differs from most studies of the Enlightenment in that its center is not the Paris salon and the philosophes who frequented it, but decentralized, epistolary community of stolid, upwardly mobile provincial scholars."--CHOICE"Brockliss's book has the virtue of making exhaustive use of [Calvet's large archive] to reconstruct his life. He is examined not only in his role as a man of letters in contact with other men of letters, but as a doctor, a natural historian, an antiquary and a cosmologist..."--Times Literary SupplementProduct DescriptionCalvet's Web is a study of the correspondence network of an Avignon physician in the period 1750-1810. Esprit Calvet was an antiquarian, natural historian, and bibliophile, and was at the centre of a circle of like-minded intellectuals from various backgrounds, chiefly based in the Rhone valley. Laurence Brockliss explores for the first time an important contribution to our understanding of the social construction of knowledge, and offers a new picture of the relationship between the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment.About the AuthorLaurence Brockliss is a Reader in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Author: Brockliss, Laurence

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 019924748X

ISBN-13: 9780199247486