"In an unusually diverse collection, Margaret Jacob presents the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment that forever changed the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day. Selections by some of the period's most important thinkers include pieces by Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wortley Montagu, Denis Diderot. New additions to the document collection include excerpts from Peter Bayle's Historical and critical dictionary as well as The indiscreet jewels, Diderot's novel set in the Congo but clearly aimed at the French court. Jacob covers the movement's lengthy evolution in a comprehensive introduction, which establishes the issues central to understanding the documents and provides important background on the political and social debates of the period."--

Margaret C. Jacob (PhD, Cornell University) is distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on science, religion, the Enlightenment, freemasonry, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Her first book, "The Newtonians and the English Revolution" (1976), won the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her most recent monograph is "Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe "(2006). She is currently at work on a book about the first knowledge economy.