Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In England between 1750 and 1770 more novels were written by female than by men during eleven of those twenty years, although the overall average for the century was more like 20 per cent. If the novel was the queen of the public sphere, there were plenty of other artistic genres that benefited from its development. Its musical equivalent was the symphony, for whose development the eighteenth century was of comparable importance. . . . The years around the middle of the eighteenth century marked the coming-of-age of the public sphere and the apparent triumph of the culture of reason. . . . Diderot’s restatement of Descartes’ methodology of systematic doubt in the preface can stand as the mature Enlightenment’s manifesto: ‘Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.’ . . . [But] their common axioms allow the identification of a single European Enlightenment. Not the least important was their common use of the metaphor of light. . . . Although this was an attractive metaphor, for it could be contrasted with the darkness of ignorance, prejudice and superstition . . ." Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 482-3, 486-9]