Coordination: Cristiana Lucas Silva and Paula Carreira

Presentation

With the end of the apollonian period of the Discoveries, from the XVII century onwards Portugal became a politically and culturally peripheral country, a situation that led to the formulation of discourses, in the Enlightenment, on the state of decadence and intellectual and scientific obscurity. Under the mantle of critical reason and the idea of progress that characterized the 18TH CENTURY, a small group of “intellectuals”, mostly diplomats and exiles, stood out. They were called “estrangeirados” (admirer, cultivator of what is foreign) because they had assimilated the (foreign) ideas that circulated in the great European cultural and scientific centres that they visited or where they settled, for professional, political or religious reasons.
Aside from the complex issue regarding the conceptual operability of “estrangeirados”, the role that they played as channels for the dissemination of new scientific ideas and in the development and/or implementation of reformist projects in Portugal cannot be denied.
However, for a better understanding of their action and thought, it is essential to further research their involvement in international political, scientific and cultural networks, the relationships established with other intellectuals (inside and outside Europe) and their contribution to scientific and technological innovation and its global dissemination.
Alongside the network of knowledge that was established from the outside in, it is also important to identify/interpret the intellectuals and works that, from Portugal, communicated and disseminated the ideas that characterised the Enlightenment period, thus contributing to a more global vision of this period of profound cultural transformation.

Objectives

• To draw a profile of “estrangeirados” in order to find a common denominator that allows them to be defined as a group or community.
• To study the knowledge circulation networks in the XVIII century, between centre and periphery.
• To deepen the knowledge about the Enlightenment in a global perspective.
• To disseminate the 18th century thought about Portuguese “intellectuals”.
• To scrutinize the impact of reformist proposals being forwarded by “estrangeirados” and the Portuguese cultural/academic elite.

Projects and initiatives

• Dicionário global do Século das Luzes em língua portuguesa.
• International Congress “Enlightenment as a global phenomenon: scientific revolution, dissemination and networks”.
• Study book Rethinking the concept of estrangeirado.
• Digital repertoire on images of the estrangeirado in the Portuguese culture.
• The construction of the other in Portugal: functionalities, inclusions and exclusions.
• The debate between Ancient and Modern: the reception of the classics in the Enlightenment.
• Digital platform of the Enlightenment.