The Age of Enlightenment meets the electronic era in the Library’s newest subscription database, Electronic Enlightenment. Electronic Enlightenment provides online access to thousands of 17th to mid-19th century correspondences by Enlightenment intellectuals, offering a compelling glimpse into what is described as “the first global social network.”
Electronic Enlightenment includes over 60,000 historical letters from close to 7,500 historical figures. Rather than being a collection of isolated texts, Electronic Enlightenment’s contents form a “network of interconnected documents” that enable researchers to learn about the personal relationships that existed between prominent thinkers of the time.
Sample letters include:
Electronic Enlightenment’s contents are searchable by keyword and users have the ability to limit by language, writer, recipient, date, and location. Letters are also discoverable by browsing letters by decade, person, and location. When browsing by people researchers can further browse by surname, nationality, or occupation.
The database encourages serendipitous and unexpected findings. One interesting example that a uWaterloo librarian unearthed recently while browsing the occupation “hoaxer” is James Sibbald, a Scottish man who corresponded with Jeremy Bentham and is remarked to have written "about the properties of the ‘trottel plant’, a mythical root vegetable from Labrador that was sown in the autumn, grew over the winter and was harvested in the spring. The name was probably taken from the German Trottel (meaning ‘idiot’).”
The content included in Electronic Enlightenment is provided by publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Walter de Gruyter, Edinburgh University Press, John Hopkins University, Oxford University Press, University of Toronto Press, and more.
This database is accessible via Primo and the Library’s Research Databases page. It is limited to three users at a time.
For more information, contact:
Liaison Librarian for History, Independent Studies, and Political Science
Ext. 35417
University of Waterloo Library
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4883
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