Scholars in Action addresses the complexities of the culture of knowledge, focusing on the scholar, or savant, as its main actor. The book explores how, and to what end, savants in the 18th Century collated, produced, critiqued, propagated, diffused, and applied knowledge.
Investigating scholarsâ diverse practices of knowledge, the volumeâs six sections are organised around central scholarly activities: rising and advancing, reading and judging, perceiving and reacting, printing and communicating, observing and experimenting, as well as advising and serving.
Based on a wide range of sources and looking at a great variety of savants, an international group of 40 authors open up new perspectives on eighteenth-century scholars and scholarship.
"As a whole, this compilation has much to offer. Seeing as the contributors come from a wide range of academic interests (including historians of education, literature, medicine, politics, and science) this collection offers a multiplicity of interpretations and research sources that will appeal broadly to readers and researchers interested in the complexity and diversity of eighteenth-century scholars and scholarship." - Kristen Schranz, University of Toronto, in: Spontaneous Generations 9:1 (2018), 192-194
All interested in the Republic of Letters, the history of Enlightenment and the history of early modern knowledge, scholarship and science.