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David Bodanis. Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du C hate let, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006.373 pages. $24.95 hardcover.
If we had the space, I would run the subtitle by you again: all of that stuff is in this book, because David Bodanis finds that the story of du Chatelet and Voltaire is "the most vivid way I know to illustrate the subtle, often barely seen cultural shifts of the early Enlightenment" (p. 9). The pitch is for readers who are looking for literary high romance and who wish to know something about the Enlightenment besides. This was an era, a movement, an attitude toward the use of reason comprising several generations of intellectuals, the first generation reading one another and subsequent generations reading both their predecessors and one another. For these writers, reason was the highest human function and if followed would eventually ensure the fulfillment and happiness of humankind. It represented salvation from the blindness of instinct and the darkness of superstition.
For some commentators today, the "early" Enlightenment means the seventeenth century. You begin with Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Locke, and Spinoza, privileging Spinoza. In the...