Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment

B. Dolan

mar 2000 · Springer

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The explorations of eighteenth-century travellers to the 'European frontiers' were often geared to define the cultural, political, and historical boundaries of 'European civilization.' In an age when political revolutions shocked nations into reassessing what separated the civilised from the barbaric, how did literary travellers contemplate the characteristics of their continental neighbours? Focusing on the writings of British travellers, we see how a new view of Europe was created, one that juxtaposed the customs and living conditions of populations in an attempt to define 'modern' Europe against a 'yet unenlightened' Europe.

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BRIAN DOLAN is Research Lecturer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of East Anglia. After earning his PhD at the University of Cambridge he taught historiography of science at Umeå University in Sweden, and the history of the life sciences at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He has published on the history of scientific illustration, geology, and chemistry, and is the editor of Science Unbound: Geography, Space, and Discipline (1998).