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Margaret Jacob

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Margaret Jacob has written extensively on Newtonian mechanics and the early Industrial Revolution, as well as the Enlightenment. Her most recent book is The Secular Enlightenment, Princeton 2019.

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Wellesley College

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Linnaeus University

University of Haifa

Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

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Pacifica Graduate Institute

Lorenzo Verderame

Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma

University of Florida

Drake University

Thomás A S Haddad

Universidade de São Paulo

Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès

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Papers by Margaret Jacob

Freemasonry and the Enlightenment

BRILL eBooks, 2014

Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during... more Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy that would be one set of characteristics. Benjamin Franklin's Freemasonry warrants further consideration for what it can tell one about the role of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment and vice-versa. Indeed there are a host of major themes emerging out of Franklin's relationship to Freemasonry. Freemasonry played a significant and complex role in the development and transmission of intellectual currents in Enlightenment thought as well as in the revolutionary creation of democratic republics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, and other European locales before the middle of the eighteenth century, women were welcomed as members of lodges, sometimes in the same lodges as men. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin; democratic republics; enlightenment naturalism; European locales; Freemasonry

The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England. Hillel Schwartz

Isis, Sep 1, 1982

JACOB SOLL. Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 2002. $49.50

The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 2006

Telling the Truth about History

Contemporary Sociology, 1996

The Secular Enlightenment

Princeton University Press eBooks, Feb 19, 2019

This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in ... more This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. The book reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. It takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.

Technical Knowledge and the Mental Universe of Manchester’s Early Cotton Manufacturers

Canadian journal of history, Aug 1, 2001

Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors expl... more Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors explore the role of mechanical and technical knowledge in the making of the industrial revolution in cotton. Traditionally, science — understood in eighteenth-century Britain to be largely, although not exclusively, the science of mechanics — has been seen to have little to do with spinning machines and power weaving. But the steam engine required a degree of technical knowledge which the leaders in Manchester cotton manufacturing possessed. Furthermore, this study of Manchester in the period from 1790 to 1820 focuses on the urban setting as a locus of innovation and the chapel life of Unitarians as providing a site for the inculcation of religious values compatible with an ethic for both entrepreneurs and workers. The article contributes to the growing (and often neo-Weberian) cultural history of the first Industrial Revolution. M’Connell and Kennedy led the Manchester cotton industry for over two decades and they stamped their values and knowledge base into the community through their avid participation in scientific societies and chapel life. Their manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Deansgale, Manchester form the core of this article.

Barbara J. Shapiro. <italic>Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature</italic>. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1983. Pp. x, 347. $35.00

The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 1984

Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press From the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1993

Steven Shapin. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. (Science and its Conceptual Foundations.) Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. xxxi, 483. $29.95. ISBN 0-226-75018-3

Albion, 1995

The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists

The Journal of American History, Sep 1, 1998

The Saints Embalmed. Scientists, Latitudinarians, and Society: A Review Essay

Albion, 1992

Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity: In Our Plague Year

International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020

Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and moderni... more Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and modernity. It asks if science is simply a social construction, how can we put so much faith in it to help solve the current crisis brought about by COVID-19? If we turn away from the Enlightenment and its values, how can we deploy liberal solutions to work in our current predicament and preserve what is progressive within modernity?

Clandestine philosophy: new studies on subversive manuscripts in early modern Europe, 1620−1823

Intellectual History Review, 2020

The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists

The European Legacy, 2014

In Praise of Ordinary People

In Praise of Ordinary People, 2013

A Women’s Scientific Society in the West

Isis, Jun 1, 2003

The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women's Society for Natural Knowledge), formally establis... more The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women's Society for Natural Knowledge), formally established by and for women, met regularly from 1785 to 1881 and sporadically until 1887. It challenges our stereotypes both of women and the physical sciences during the eighteenth century and of the intellectual interests open to women in the early European republics. This essay aims not simply to identify the society and its members but to describe their pursuits and consider what their story adds to the history of Western science. What does this society's existence tell us about the relationship between women and early science in general and about science and society in the Dutch setting in particular? Science and gender look rather different when observed through the activities of the immensely prosperous women of Middelburg, citizens of one of the most highly literate Western countries. The elite lives of the first-generation members of the women's society also offer us a glimpse into the early domestication of science, a process vital to its acceptance and assimilation. FEW OUTSIDE THE NETHERLANDS know about the existence of the scientific society described in this essay or about the late eighteenth-century lives of the women who belonged to it. In the international literature on women and science we find no sustained discussion of what was-as far as we now know-the first women's scientific

History and Memory

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1995

... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of t... more ... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of this kind of history motivated by the desire to substitute explanation for narration, but at ... to pure narrative: the possibility of a rational interpretation of history, the recognition of certain regularities in ...

The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2001

In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological and anal erotic letters.... more In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological and anal erotic letters. 1 Gregory was the youngest son of the then-famous perfecter of the steam engine, James Watt, and his second wife, Annie. The twentythree year old Gregory's naughty, irreverent exchange occurred with the engineer William Creighton, employed by Boulton and Watt since 1795. 2 Although young men have probably composed scatological and erotic ditties at many times and places throughout history, the correspondence between Watt and Creighton is exceptional in many respects. The letters are unusually explicit and even on occasion illustrated, the erotic and scatological content is interwoven with scientific and literary discussions, and the letter writers, in particular Watt, lead us into the heart of British romantic and radical circles. We will argue here that these letters afford a fascinating look at British male affect and sociability in the period of the French Revolution and they refocus the discussion of male sexuality and sensibility in unexpected ways.

Telling the Truth About History

The Annals of Iowa, Jul 1, 1995

La verdad sobre la historia: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob ; traducción de Oscar Luis Molina S

Freemasonry and the Enlightenment

BRILL eBooks, 2014

Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during... more Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy that would be one set of characteristics. Benjamin Franklin's Freemasonry warrants further consideration for what it can tell one about the role of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment and vice-versa. Indeed there are a host of major themes emerging out of Franklin's relationship to Freemasonry. Freemasonry played a significant and complex role in the development and transmission of intellectual currents in Enlightenment thought as well as in the revolutionary creation of democratic republics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, and other European locales before the middle of the eighteenth century, women were welcomed as members of lodges, sometimes in the same lodges as men. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin; democratic republics; enlightenment naturalism; European locales; Freemasonry

The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England. Hillel Schwartz

Isis, Sep 1, 1982

JACOB SOLL. Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 2002. $49.50

The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 2006

Telling the Truth about History

Contemporary Sociology, 1996

The Secular Enlightenment

Princeton University Press eBooks, Feb 19, 2019

This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in ... more This is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. The book reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. It takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.

Technical Knowledge and the Mental Universe of Manchester’s Early Cotton Manufacturers

Canadian journal of history, Aug 1, 2001

Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors expl... more Through the reinterpretation of evidence long available but still underutilized, the authors explore the role of mechanical and technical knowledge in the making of the industrial revolution in cotton. Traditionally, science — understood in eighteenth-century Britain to be largely, although not exclusively, the science of mechanics — has been seen to have little to do with spinning machines and power weaving. But the steam engine required a degree of technical knowledge which the leaders in Manchester cotton manufacturing possessed. Furthermore, this study of Manchester in the period from 1790 to 1820 focuses on the urban setting as a locus of innovation and the chapel life of Unitarians as providing a site for the inculcation of religious values compatible with an ethic for both entrepreneurs and workers. The article contributes to the growing (and often neo-Weberian) cultural history of the first Industrial Revolution. M’Connell and Kennedy led the Manchester cotton industry for over two decades and they stamped their values and knowledge base into the community through their avid participation in scientific societies and chapel life. Their manuscripts at the John Rylands Library, Deansgale, Manchester form the core of this article.

Barbara J. Shapiro. <italic>Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature</italic>. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1983. Pp. x, 347. $35.00

The American Historical Review, Jun 1, 1984

Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press From the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1993

Steven Shapin. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. (Science and its Conceptual Foundations.) Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. xxxi, 483. $29.95. ISBN 0-226-75018-3

Albion, 1995

The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists

The Journal of American History, Sep 1, 1998

The Saints Embalmed. Scientists, Latitudinarians, and Society: A Review Essay

Albion, 1992

Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity: In Our Plague Year

International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 2020

Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and moderni... more Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and modernity. It asks if science is simply a social construction, how can we put so much faith in it to help solve the current crisis brought about by COVID-19? If we turn away from the Enlightenment and its values, how can we deploy liberal solutions to work in our current predicament and preserve what is progressive within modernity?

Clandestine philosophy: new studies on subversive manuscripts in early modern Europe, 1620−1823

Intellectual History Review, 2020

The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists

The European Legacy, 2014

In Praise of Ordinary People

In Praise of Ordinary People, 2013

A Women’s Scientific Society in the West

Isis, Jun 1, 2003

The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women's Society for Natural Knowledge), formally establis... more The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women's Society for Natural Knowledge), formally established by and for women, met regularly from 1785 to 1881 and sporadically until 1887. It challenges our stereotypes both of women and the physical sciences during the eighteenth century and of the intellectual interests open to women in the early European republics. This essay aims not simply to identify the society and its members but to describe their pursuits and consider what their story adds to the history of Western science. What does this society's existence tell us about the relationship between women and early science in general and about science and society in the Dutch setting in particular? Science and gender look rather different when observed through the activities of the immensely prosperous women of Middelburg, citizens of one of the most highly literate Western countries. The elite lives of the first-generation members of the women's society also offer us a glimpse into the early domestication of science, a process vital to its acceptance and assimilation. FEW OUTSIDE THE NETHERLANDS know about the existence of the scientific society described in this essay or about the late eighteenth-century lives of the women who belonged to it. In the international literature on women and science we find no sustained discussion of what was-as far as we now know-the first women's scientific

History and Memory

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1995

... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of t... more ... As for the present, it is, in corollary fashion, either the blessed age of prog-ress ... of this kind of history motivated by the desire to substitute explanation for narration, but at ... to pure narrative: the possibility of a rational interpretation of history, the recognition of certain regularities in ...

The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2001

In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological and anal erotic letters.... more In the year 1800, Gregory Watt received a remarkable set of scatological and anal erotic letters. 1 Gregory was the youngest son of the then-famous perfecter of the steam engine, James Watt, and his second wife, Annie. The twentythree year old Gregory's naughty, irreverent exchange occurred with the engineer William Creighton, employed by Boulton and Watt since 1795. 2 Although young men have probably composed scatological and erotic ditties at many times and places throughout history, the correspondence between Watt and Creighton is exceptional in many respects. The letters are unusually explicit and even on occasion illustrated, the erotic and scatological content is interwoven with scientific and literary discussions, and the letter writers, in particular Watt, lead us into the heart of British romantic and radical circles. We will argue here that these letters afford a fascinating look at British male affect and sociability in the period of the French Revolution and they refocus the discussion of male sexuality and sensibility in unexpected ways.

Telling the Truth About History

The Annals of Iowa, Jul 1, 1995

La verdad sobre la historia: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob ; traducción de Oscar Luis Molina S

The Enlightenment as Lived: Late Eighteenth Century European Masonic Reformers

by REHMLAC+ Revista de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería and Margaret Jacob

In the late 18th century, during a key moment of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of natio... more In the late 18th century, during a key moment of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of nation-states and their respective civil societies, Western Europe underwent a process of intellectual and political transformation. Therefore, my thesis demonstrates how Freemasonry played a particular role in this and how it foreshadowed the role that it would have on the political life of the next century (19th), especially in Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America. We can see the role of Freemasonry in the adoption of secular reforms visible in the political and intellectual history of European Freemasonry since the 1770’s. This research serves as an example of the analysis of change in Freemasonry towards a proposal to concrete actions in search of the transformation of the state. Some of the works used to create this thesis include works from Gotthold Lessing, the Comte de Mirabeau, Herder, Frederick Schlegel, Lord Ramsay, and the cases of the national organizations of grand lodges in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and the United States.