Historical culture and political reform in the Italian Enlightenment

For centuriesthe society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied on the strong connectionbetween past, present, and future and on a belief in the unstoppable continuityof time. What happened during the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutionsclaimed to cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a newera? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political bodies withallegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a source of legitimacy forreshaping European politics. The love for antiquities forged a common languageof political communication within a burgeoning public sphere.

To understandwhy this happened, Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking placein the Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period, governmentstried to establish regional “national cultures” through erudite scholarship,with the intent of creating new administrative and political centralizationwithin individual Italian states. Meanwhile, other sectors of local societiesused the tools of antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on thesepolitical reforms.

Ultimately, thisbook proposes a localized way of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presentingtimeless knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions whichwere linked to restricted political arenas and regional public opinion.