In this book, Roberts shows the modus operandi of the “sentimental savants,” “philosophers who immersed themselves in family feeling but retained his intellectual edge.” She explores how “married Enlightenment philosophers imagined social bonds and family love as nurturing and supporting their work.” These savants portrayed themselves as loving husbands and fathers (the picture of “idealized sentimental masculinity”), so they could “represent themselves as engaged members of society who provided a virtuous example for the public to follow.” Children gave them an opportunity to experiment with their theories. Family life became “a laboratory in which they could test new ideas and as a model of society writ small.” By putting the lives of French savants through a model of “collective biography,” Roberts provides compelling case studies in exploring the family home as “an experimental space provided an important new venue for social and scientific experiments.”

I read this book when Prof. Amy Stanley and Prof. Susan Pearson mentioned it in a Writing Feminist History seminary session. This book is exactly the kind of book I search for because apparently, it is quite difficult to find a book that puts the family home at the center of intellectual history. Working within the intersection of intellectual history, social and cultural history, and history of science and emotion, Roberts contributes to several streams of historiography. For Enlightenment history, Sentimental Savants echoes burgeoning works of historians that incorporate women, artisans, statesmen, and clerics as part of the Enlightenment movement. This makes Enlightenment look less like a cohesive set of beliefs and more like the ways people self-fashioned and imagined living the Enlightenment. On the history of emotions, this book looks at how eighteenth-century elites embraced the sentimental outburst of emotion as they sought “to break free from the strictures of court life.”Finally, Roberts engages with the discussion of scientific authority by showing how savants constructed their authority and reputation as experts through the expositions of their marriage and family lives.

I truly enjoy the book. It is clear and concise, and each chapter serves the argument well. For me, it is a first-book model that does not overwhelm the readers. Although I might not be into her model of presenting sources and narratives, her book is the closest one to what I want to do for my dissertation. Her note on the conclusion about savants as practical and pragmatic individuals appears as a finding, but my question is, what if we put this note as an underlying assumption? What kind of intellectual history can we write if we already see these savants as practical and pragmatic individuals before the story begins?