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'Public science' - a complex mixture of experimental demonstrations and philosophical consumption - emerged in the eighteenth century to take the new sciences from limited academic circles to a broad and increasingly enthusiastic audience. Lecture courses proliferated as itinerant showmen, instrument-makers and entrepreneurs exploited increasingly dramatic effects (electricity was exemplary) to entice audiences and teach morals of natural theology and public utility through experimental demonstrations. By the late century, lectures and displays in colleges, laboratories and cabinets de physiques, along with pleasing experiments in books of rational recreations and a busy trade in demonstration instruments, had helped to make natural philosophy entertaining, fashionable and authoritative. Enlightenment, as the contributors to this volume ably demonstrate, was as much a dramatic experience as an intellectual adventure.
Gathering papers from a conference held in the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in Paris in 2003, Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment offers a variety of perspectives on the culture of public lectures and experimental shows in Britain, France, Germany and Italy in the eighteenth century, with a focus on experimental physics, chemistry and anatomy. Although several of the authors have since published detailed monographs on the themes presented here, the volume provides a valuable addition to the literature on public science, whose contours and concerns are succinctly evoked in the editors' introduction. Here, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel rightly point...