Tuesday, April 5, 2005 | 8:12 a.m.
It had been a fruitful discussion.
The chair welcomed the scholars to the "pretentiously titled" round-table called "What Has the Enlightenment to do With the Twenty-First Century?"
Professors read their papers and dialogue ensued.
They hypothesized: "The Bush Administration on foreign policy is not Hobbesian, but is Kantian."
They questioned: "Where is our counter-enlightenment today, or are we just confused?"
They mourned: "The bad news today is that Paul Wolfowitz might be president of the World Bank."
The 18th century and its sociopolitical philosophies filled the stuffy room Thursday at Alexis Park, where ideas and summations were tossed back and forth in heightened conversation.
It was the first day of the annual three-day convention for the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies. Still to come were talks on alcohol in 18th-century Ireland, the afterlife of pre-modernity, and visual and fictional space in the long 18th century (1660-1830).
High notes included lectures on French dentists, British teeth and, well, hair powder.
Scholars discussed anything from women and gambling in the 18th century to "Cynics, Misanthropes and Other Enemies of the Social."
They questioned cross-Atlantic representations of women and whether science fiction existed before Frankenstein.
They dissected elements of elements.
"The 18th century is a fascinating period," Bryon Wells, executive director for ASECS, said Thursday morning as members were still arriving. "As more people become interested, we unearth more. We keep finding more things to talk about, (to) do research on. Theres a lot of archival work going on where people are finding new manuscripts."
Defined as an interdisciplinary society to advance the learning of the 18th century and all of its facets, the group ventures into varying topics, large and small, from what was worn while walking in London to Mozart's unfinished symphony.
It offers fellowships and meets annually to further examine the century that gave birth to the American and French revolutions and the industrial revolution, replaced fear and superstition with nature and reason, and bore a new group of thinkers and individual rights.
For a while, Wells said, "It was seen as an easily definable time. What has emerged from recent scholarship in the last 20 years is that the Age of Enlightenment was really a very, very complex heterogeneous period."
At the "Women and Crime" forum, discussion centered on gallows pamphlets on female criminals and their hangings, "lewd" women who passed as men, and the famous case of Mary Blandy, who poisoned her father at the request of her lover.
One group looked at British popular culture, including satire, stereotypes and popular theater, and how late-18th century bare-knuckle boxing defined Britain's "manly" national character -- as opposed to the delicate French.
"Bare-fist fighting was illegal and ran the risk of falling foul of the magistrates," said John Whale, from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
"But (the fights) were patronized by a wide cross-section of people, including aristocracy."
The scholars dipped into discourse on varying topics to help grow their perspective on a particular period.
"I work on a crazy lady in the 18th century who walks on the edge," said French scholar Megan Conway from Louisiana State University, Shreveport. Conway specializes in early feminist Olympe de Gouges, and sat in on the discussion on Mary Blandy.
At the forum "Habits, Good and Bad," Chloe Wigston Smith, from the University of Virginia, discussed the change of shoes during the 18th century with Wanda Creaser, who had discussed the exercise habits of satirist Jonathan Swift.
Creaser, a Swift scholar at Arizona State University, began to study Swift's exercise habits after reading several biographies of the Irish author and journalist that only allude to his having Meniere's disease.
"I thought, 'Well, he had a serious illness. How did it affect his life?' " Creaser said. "Any in-depth work mentioned it, but not how it affected him.
"He used walking and habitual exercise to remedy his illness. The idea that you were supposed to take care of your body, this is a somewhat new concept in this period ... Exercise had been recommended since Hippocrates' time, (but during the 18th century) the general public becomes more aware of medicine and medical treatment."
Such microscopic study of 18th-century life, Wells said, "is not an academic pursuit that has an end in itself. Understanding new things helps us to understand history, where we come from.
"For a number of years, the 18th century was studied as an established canon of work -- Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Richardson, Swift, Stern, Pope. The expanded interest in the 18th century really began to take off in the post-World War II period. A new generation of scholars emerged at that time."
Technology is also helping push 18th-century history forward. Thompson Gale, a database company in Michigan, has created Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the largest online historical archive that includes documents from the British Library and other institutions.
In its 33 million pages of material, scholars can fine-tune searches. Digitized documents allow viewers to see any details, such as scrawled marks.
"It's pretty rich. There are (institutions) that can't afford to send their students to London, to the bowels of English libraries," said Thomson Gale account executive Dawn Marie Devine. "I'm having professionals tell me it's revolutionizing the way they teach and research, saying, 'I've been able to find obscure literature on Voltaire.' "
Sally O'Driscoll of Fairfield University in Connecticut praises the new technology.
"Documents are becoming more accessible and it's changing things," O'Driscoll said. "It's going to revolutionize 18th-century popularity."
But progress is measured by more than technology.
"People are thinking differently about sexuality, feminism," O'Driscoll said. "They're looking at things that they never thought about. It's making it more relevant to how we got here today.
"Before, you didn't realize the subtext."
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