Lecture “Women, local lives and global horizons in times of the Enlightenment. Seeing the world through books and letters”, by Mònica Bolufer Peruga, Full Professor of Modern History at the University of València and principal investigator of the CIRGEN project: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment. Ideas, Networks, Agencies (funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon2020 programme, ERC-2017, AdG-787015).

14-12-2022 | 12:00 pm

ABSTRACT: The recent interest in the global and transnational dimensions of history in general, and of the Enlightenment in particular, has led to a fascination with what Jan de Vries has ironically called UCI (“unusually cosmopolitan individuals”). In other words, individuals with remarkable mobile trajectories, who crossed geographical, cultural, political, and religious borders and who left sources that allow us to reconstruct them. They are often male figures: soldiers, diplomats, explorers, scientists, imperial officials, traders, missionaries or intermediaries (passeurs, go-betweens, brokers), who have become a symbol of the curiosity of the Age of Enlightenment.

This lecture will interrogate the ways in which other individuals with more notoriously mobile lives, including many women from the same enlightened elites, can also learn about the world and broaden their intellectual and imaginary perspectives without physically leaving a much more enclosed territory. Through two case studies (that of the enlightened Minorcan Joana de Vigo, and that of the European and American women who were part of the epistolary networks of Francisco de Miranda, enlightened and Creole revolutionary), we will address reading and correspondence as ways of seeing the world, and we will also problematise the dichotomy between local lives and global horizons.

Cartell