Abstract

Giuseppe Giarrizzo offer an original and documented reading of freemasonry in the eighteenth century as a page of European cultural history within the Enlightenment, whose geographical centres vary according to the Masonic orders and rites prevailing in the different periods. This is a doubly historical reading of the Enlightenment: from the Enlightenment as a specific historical identity that had been spent by the 1770s, to the Idea of Enlightenment that was to evolve in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the foundation of a humanistic German culture in Dilthey; to the French rationalism in Lanson; and to the search for an unlikely radical Enlightenment in the English-speaking area.