Sophie Turner (Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia)
This paper explores the intersections of intellectual history, aesthetics, and linguistic mobility through the lens of Rococo book design and early Enlightenment thought in 18th-century Baltic-German libraries. It examines how French Enlightenment philosophy – embodied in the works of Voltaire and Rousseau – was appropriated, translated, and visually reframed through German typography and book design. Central to this analysis is the role of Rococo as a visual language: simultaneously ornamental and political, resisting authority while spreading across Europe. The paper considers how French decorative aesthetics entered Baltic spaces and were transformed through translation and ornamental and typographic adaptation, notably in the use of German gothic fonts. This visual and textual transformation shaped the reader’s experience, raising questions of affect, identity, and cultural translation. Drawing on affect theory, the paper investigates how typography and ornament – particularly the differences and conflicts between French and German styles (in both art and ideas) – influenced the journey of the reader and intellectual reception. The work of designers like Pierre-Simon Fournier and Baltic publishers of French works such as Hartknoch provides material case studies. Ultimately, the paper explores how Enlightenment ideas traveled not only through words but through form, framing, and style, shaping us as readers. It explores how the aesthetics of Rococo – far from frivolous – also engaged with questions of intellectual authority, and that this French style sometimes worked, but was more often at odds with, a German enlightenment vision which sought to adapt, transform and appropriate the French intellectual sphere for its own purposes.