Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

Working through an official system of academies, as well as through a more informal institution known as the Little Academy (Petite Académie), Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert controlled a wide-ranging propaganda of absolutism or, in the language of the time, a memorialising of the monarch’s gloire. This chapter investigates the strategy and mechanisms by which Colbert and his collaborators deployed the arts as an instrument of the state. It explores the ways in which Molière’s comedies and comedy-ballets developed out of an established system of courtly propaganda in the court ballet of the 1650s and 1660s, and examines changes instituted by Colbert in the 1660s. Finally, it examines Molière’s ambivalent response to the absolutist enterprise as expressed through these changes.

No less important a structural development than the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics was the self-conscious emancipation of theology from philosophy, largely achieved by making philology and historical scholarship – rather than philosophy – the primary handmaidens to the discipline. This did not happen at the hands of a small band of liberal outsiders (‘Erasmians’, ‘latitudinarians’, etc.), but within the theological mainstream. In the Catholic world, all major locales (starting with the Spanish Netherlands, and culminating in France) witnessed a self-conscious shift from ‘scholastic’ to ‘positive’ theological method. By the second half of the seventeenth century, a similar development had occurred in all the major areas of the Reformed world. Crucially, this shift should not be taken for a form of ‘fideism’, even if its conceptual resources sometimes seem to imply it. At the basic epistemological level, conceptions of theological truth remained broadly the same as they had been since c.1300: divine mysteries could be above reason, but could not contradict it; the truths of natural theology could be proved rationally. But within this broadly continuous framework a huge methodological shift took place, one that significantly curtailed the cultural authority of apriorist philosophy. Calls for the separation of philosophy and theology usually worked to the detriment of the former.

This chapter charts the way in which the study of nature was made increasingly less philosophical between 1500 and 1700. At the start of the period, natural philosophy was largely conducted as a form of ‘metaphysical physics’. The erosion of this approach was driven by three factors: 1) the impact of humanist critique; 2) The colonisation of natural philosophy by physicians; 3) The colonisation of natural philosophy by mixed mathematicians. Despite a spirited fightback from the metaphysicians, by the middle of the seventeenth century the anti-metaphysical physicians and mixed-mathematicians – often operating in tandem – had won. A major concomitant of this is that the idea that most of seventeenth-century natural philosophy was grounded in ontological mechanism is wrong. To the extent that natural philosophers were mechanists, they were operational mechanists, who modelled nature on machines but refused to commit to an ontological reductionism, and often directly opposed it. In this and other respect, Descartes and his followers, far from being representative of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, were outliers.

In contemporary societies, policy and planning initiatives driven by state-appointed institutions seek to manage and promote specific, prestigious, standardized varieties of language. Within the framework of language ideologies and standardization, this chapter analyses academies and similar organizations charged with promoting the Spanish language and seeks to identify contemporary patterns of normativity, with a particular focus on the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Language Academy, or RAE). The evolving nature of contemporary media, particularly social media, requires scholarship to address how these outputs constitute a form of status planning and how the interface between the digital world and language standardization works. Building on previous work on ‘Standard’ or ‘Panhispanic’ Spanish, I consider how the RAE has embraced and harnessed technological advances and explore how these latest changes are employed as a way of promoting Spanish globally. A wider discussion on the role of academies as ‘language mavens’ and ‘verbal hygienists’ follows. By critiquing the missions, activities, publications and practices carried out in these state-appointed institutions, we can understand how language management goals are achieved and how digital discourse disseminates, legitimates and reinforces the authority of both the institutions and also the state that appoints them.

Chapter 1 traces the transformation of the art market across the revolutionary era, drawing on recent scholarship to consider how the French Revolution changed the availability of artworks and the cultural meanings attached to their preservation. These processes are observed through the writings of Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain, whose manuscripts and publications documented the demise of the old regime of curiosity he knew in his youth. The introduction argues that the eclipse of corporate institutions and the attack on the privileged orders changed the meaning of collecting by opening the title of amateur to much wider social constituency whilst nonetheless retaining the idea that the correct exercise of taste was even more important in the disorderly new circumstances. The chapter traces the emergence of dealers in art and curiosities across post-revolutionary Paris and argues that the revamped category of the amateur was simultaneously dependent upon but hostile to these new commercial forces.

This chapter describes the educational institutions of post-Reformation England and the conflicted role music, theater, and dance played in English life and educational schema. According to English conduct books and prescriptive literature, music and dance were necessary skills for accomplished gentlemen and gentlewomen to possess; they might also be useful for students at charity schools, who sought socio-economic improvement through marriage or the procurement of apprenticeships. Yet, as many scholars have noted, there was also a strong suspicion and overt antipathy toward music-making, playacting, and dancing – some religious thinkers believed that these activities could lead to lasciviousness, decadence, and effeminacy. Others expressed concern that female students might develop inappropriate relationships with their music and dance teachers.