The essays in this volume share a common concern with investigating Enlightenment categories of historical understanding and determining how these categories helped shape Enlightenment culture. The contributors address the question of how eighteenth-century writers make sense of the past?how they interpret it, give it meaning and form, and deploy it for their own practical, aesthetic, and ideological purposes.

Contributors and contents:

Frank Palmeri, Conjectural History and the Origins of Sociology

Stuart Peterfreund, From the Forbidden to the Familiar: The Way of Natural Theology Leading up to and beyond the Long Eighteenth Century

Tony C. Brown, The Barrows of History

Shane Agin, Sex Education in the Enlightened Nation

Suzanne R. Pucci, Snapshots of Family Intimacy in the French Eighteenth Century: The Case of Paul et Virginie

Ana Hontanilla, Images of Barbaric Spain in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Writing

Mark R. Malin, The Good, the Bad, and the Sentimental Savage: Native Americans in Representative Novels from the Spanish Enlightenment

Simon During, Church, State, and Modernization: English Literature as Gentlemanly Knowledge after 1688

Julia Rudolph, "That Blunderbuss of Law?: Giles Jacob, Abridgement, and Print Culture

Anne H. Stevens, Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction and Literary Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Jennifer Thorn, ?All beautiful in woe?: Gender, Nation, and Phillis Wheatley's Niobe

Hilary Englert, "This Rhapsodical Work?: Object-Narrators and the Figure of Sterne