Peter Cryle

As Peter Cryle and Lisa O’Connell point out in their excellent introduction to this collection of conference papers, ‘The Enlightenment is usually thought of as one of the great capital-letter moments in European history.’ But was its substance confined to the great works of Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant? Central to new readings of the Enlightenment is now the notion of ‘libertinism’. Once understood as the sexually free behaviour and attitudes of élite men, this collection is based instead on a wider, richer notion of, as the editors put it, ‘the vernacular, dissident freedoms of everyday life’. It was through unconventional sexual thought and behaviours, in particular, that the Enlightenment ‘vernacularised and dispersed itself’.