This book challenges common historical misperceptions of both the history of the sciences in early modern France and the history of the French Enlightenment. By

A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the

Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton’s science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enl

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with

This book explores the French Enlightenment's use of cross-cultural comparisons - particularly the figures of the Chinese mandarin and American and Polynesian s