Dbq Practice The Enlightenment

11.4 - Long Essay LEQ Practice the Enlightenment

Prompt: Describe and analyze the influence of the Enlightenment on both elite culture and popular culture in the eighteenth century.

Throughout the centuries, Europe has been an ever changing and evolving culture that shifts and morphs to fit the mold of the social normalities present at the time. Whether it be the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the World Wars, Europe has frequently changed as a society and culture throughout the ages. In particular, one of the most prevalent and enormous culture shifts was that of the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement that emphasized reason and individualism, rather than the previous

To begin with, the Enlightenment brought many changes to the cultural regularities that were enjoyed by the people of Europe for centuries, one of which was the implementation of a newly reformed secular “print-culture” that changed the ways of social connectivity in Europe forever. Even so, this new print-culture fueled the a culture who hosted discussion salons where they gathered to gossip about the Enlightenment and the Philosophes’s new ideas. In these salons, women discussed the many ideas of the famous Philosophes and helped them to gain political popularity and respect from their constituents, all while women gained merely the right to learning literacy, rather than earning equal rights in society. When the Gutenberg Printing Press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire during the fifteenth century, the culture of Europe gradually changed over time. Flash forward three hundred years and the emergence of a secular print-culture

When the Enlightenment struck Europe, people began to think more intellectually and rationally, rather than religiously and traditionally. Because of this, the Scientific Revolution was sparked in Europe. The Scientific was the emergence of modern technology, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. This newfound perspective of nature as a scientific remnant changed the ideas of society significantly. People began to believe that nature was a rational result from scientific excursions, rather than the creation by a divine figure; this meant that religion was tampered with by science because everything in the universe should be logical and rational, rather than the result of a divine figure and beliefs from the Scripture. Although religion and the papacy had ruled Europe for centuries, the Scientific Revolution threatened the stability and authority of the Church because even though many Philosophes claimed that science and religion could coexist as equals, many government authorities patronized the Philosophes and their Enlightenment ideals to overpower the rule of the Church with secular authority. Whereas the Church encouraged people to work towards the religious benefit of the afterlife, the