Margaret C. Jacob is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on science, religion, freemasonry, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. A past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow, Jacob has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her first book, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (1976), won the Gottschalk prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, of which she was president from 1997 to 1998. Her most recent book is Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997).

In an unusually diverse collection, Margaret Jacob presents the eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment that forever changed the political, religious, and educational landscape of the day. Selections by some of the period’s most important thinkers include pieces by Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wortley Montagu, Denis Diderot, and Moses Mendelssohn. She covers the movement’s lengthy evolution in a comprehensive introduction, which establishes the issues central to understanding the documents and provides important background on the political and social debates of the period. All documents are preceded by headnotes, and the volume includes a chronology, 14 illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.