Admin Table of Contents
What were Enlightenment gatherings called?
salons
From their circles radiated the ideas of the Enlightenment. The buzz of Enlightenment ideas was most intense in the mansions of several wealthy women of Paris. There, in their large drawing rooms, these hostesses held regular social gatherings called salons.
What role did Parisian salons play in the Enlightenment?
A main purpose of the salons of Paris for the salonnières during the Enlightenment was to “satisfy the self-determined educational needs of the women who started them” (Goodman, 42). For the salonnières, the salon was a socially acceptable substitute for the formal education denied to them.
What was happening in France during the Enlightenment?
The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon.
Who was at the center of the Enlightenment?
The freethinking writers of the period sought to evaluate and understand life by way of scientific observation and critical reasoning rather than through uncritically accepting religion, tradition, and social conventions. At the center of the Enlightenment were the philosophes, a group of intellectual deists who lived in Paris.
What did women do during the Age of Enlightenment?
Throughout the Age of the Enlightenment women found ways to combine the new intellectual movements evolving in the public sphere with their appointed place in the domestic private sphere. For example, women during this period frequently participated in the salon culture.
What did the Enlightenment bring to the world?
The change that the Enlightenment brought to the world, gave women the lifeline they needed to pull away from their domesticated roles as housekeepers, wives, and mothers. “Above all, perhaps, the rationalists of the eighteenth century aroused the social conscience of mankind and stimulated the humanitarianism.”
What was the cultural approach to the Age of Enlightenment?
In contrast to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th and 18th centuries, the cultural (or social) approach examines the changes that occurred in European society and culture.