II. Cultural History

The essay provides a commentary, by means of introduction, to the way the notion of “Cultural History” has been addressed in the edited collection Politics and Culture in 18th-Century Anglo-Italian Encounters: Entangled Histories (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). While the title of the book aims to define a rather comprehensive and broad thematic field, characterized by a variety of inspection routes, “Cultural History” addresses and explores the meanings, in particular, of the terms “Culture” and “Encounters” foregrounded in the title, and attempts to situate them diachronically within the theoretical frameworks of British scholarship on the history of culture, cultural studies, and against the backdrop of the long eighteenth century. The essay then moves on to discuss the ways the wider theme of the collection has been developed by individual contributors.