Robert Darnton

A classic work of European history Meer

Darnton explores some fascinating territory in the genre of histoire du livre and tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. Meer

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre. Meer

The Writer’s Lot explores the working lives of eighteenth-century French authors—celebrities and unknowns—at a time when their example, if not often their ideas, changed the course of history. Meer