The Enlightenment Group

Eighteenth-Century Worlds and the Enlightenment

November 21, 2025

Mount Royal University

It is acknowledged that what we call the Enlightenment did not spontaneously emerge in Europe. Instead, it is the result of intellectual and socio-economical transformations resulting from the confluence of ideas from Europe and  the rest of the world. Rather than using the term “global Enlightenment”, which suggests that the Enlightenment was a world phenomenon, it might be more apt to describe it as the intersection of a plurality of cosmogonies, cosmographies and epistemologies within the European context. Hence “Worlds of the Enlightenment.”  This  title refers to the various ways in which the “little anthill” (Voltaire, Micromégas), where Eighteenth-Century women and men dwelled, was perceived, felt, described, celebrated and abused by its inhabitants. For instance, society advocated the values epitomized in the French republican motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” while at the same time living off the slave trade.  Given this ambivalent nature of the Enlightenment, we may wonder at the capacity or the willingness of Eighteenth-Century Europeans to engage with epistemological differences. Thus, this conference wishes to explore to what extent did these contacts between various worlds actually contributed to the Enlightenment?

Program

9:15am-9:30am: social & welcome words

9:30am – 10:30am

Guy Obrecht (MRU): Rondo 'alla Turk': What is a Turkish tattoo doing in Mozart's Piano Sonata A Major K.331?

David Clemis (MRU): The Real and the Imagined Exotic in Enlightenment History and Historiography.

10:30am-10:45am: break

10:45am-11:45am

Aida Patient (MRU): Deluding Glasses and Experiments': Margaret Cavendish and Optical Instruments.

Martin Wagner (UofC): From Theodicy to Social Criticism: Towards an Interpretation of J.M.R. Lenz’s Poem “Song of a Shipwrecked European.” 

12pm-1pm: lunch

1pm-2pm

Diana Paterson (MRU): Influence of India on the Enlightenment.

Devika Vijayan (UofC): Humour, Conversion, and Cross-Cultural Worlds: Constanzo Beschi and Enlightenment encounters in South India.

2pm-2:15pm: break

2:15pm-3:15pm

Miao Li (UofC): Intersection of Worlds: Colonial Encounters in Eighteenth-Century French Visual Art.

Antoine Eche (MRU): “Naked philosophers” and “Canadian philosophy”: Reception of the ‘Indigenous critique’ from the Baron de Lahontan to the Abbé Prévost.

This event is supported by the Faculty of Arts Endeavour Fund.