The Making of the Enlightenment Common Reader

This landmark study presents a richly evidenced challenge to inherited assumptions about Enlightenment culture and the people, institutions, and traditions that sustained it. Historians of the Enlightenment have long asked how books shaped the emergence of modern European culture, politics, and intellectual life. Yet the readers who encountered those books have often remained elusive, reconstructed through modern-day canons that privilege celebrated authors, as well as partial archives. Taking the "common reader" both as a historical problem and as an echo of Samuel Johnson's essays on reading beyond specialist authority, this study asks what books eighteenth-century Europeans actually consumed. Using large-scale digital bibliometric evidence from booksellers' archives, confiscation records, and private library catalogues, the authors offer a major reassessment of Enlightenment reading culture. Their comparative, transnational approach reveals a bookscape far more complex than the one supposedly dominated by Enlightenment authors, French philosophes or subversive texts. Focusing on specific reading communities, including women and provincial readers, it demonstrates that classical authors and religious books remained central to eighteenth-century libraries and to the formation of shared European reading cultures. By examining how publication infrastructures, censorship, commerce, canon-making, and book ownership shaped access to knowledge, Making the Enlightenment Common Reader provides a fresh account of the Enlightenment, and makes a significant intervention in debates about print culture and the circulation of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe. OA License: CC-BY-NC-ND Funding for this Open Access publication was provided by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the Talent Programme (Vici) project entitled Civic Fictions, with file number VI.C.221.015