Overview

A study of the experience of nature in the eighteenth century based on the life of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99). In The Alpine Enlightenment, historian Kathleen Kete takes us into the world of the Genevan geologist, physicist, inventor, and mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. During his prodigious climbs into the upper ranges of the Alps, Saussure focused intensely on the natural phenomena he encountered—glaciers, crevasses, changes in the weather, and shifts in the color of the sky—and he described what he saw, heard, and touched with great precision. Kete uses Saussure's evocative writings, which emphasized above all physical engagement with the earth, to uncover not just how people during the Enlightenment thought about nature, but more importantly how they experienced it. As Kete shows, Saussure thought with and through his body; he harnessed his senses to understand the forces that shaped the world around him. In so doing, he offered a vision of nature as worthy of respect independent of human needs, anticipating present-day concerns about the environment and our shared place within it.

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Reviews

“The Alpine Enlightenment is at once a study of a major Swiss savant’s hard-headed love affair with the Alps, a plea for the singularly respectful view of nature that he embodied, and a vivid evocation of the Swiss milieu from which he came. The author makes a powerful case for seeing Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s view of nature as scrupulously empirical and based on tangible bodily experience, vividly explaining how his life in Geneva and in the mountains fashioned his understanding of the natural world.” * John Brewer, California Institute of Technology * “In this innovative and exciting environmental biography, Kete places Saussure in an expanding set of contexts from family and home, through the urban milieu of his native Geneva and the trans-European sociability of Enlightenment science, to the mountain on the horizon. The Alpine Enlightenment is a sensitive study that shows how Saussure’s own alertness to his bodily, sensorial, emotional, and aesthetic relationship with the Alps led him to a new and personally engaged sense of humanity’s relationship to nature.” * Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London *

Author Information

Kathleen Kete is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., ’58/H’95 Professor of European History at Trinity College in Connecticut.  

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