Citizens in the eighteenth-century republic of letters followed new codes of sociability and enjoyed a discursive equality where women who participated in Enlightenment debate were seen as a civilizing force, promoting the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the public sphere. Correspondence linked enlightened communities--Voltaire's vast network of correspondents, including Catherine the Great (who eventually bought Diderot's and Voltaire's book collections, which she added to the imperial library), made his estate at Ferney on the Swiss border a crossroads of enlightened Europe. But for many historians of the Enlightenment, the real achievements in spreading Enlightenment knowledge were linked to the production of inexpensive editions of books. As Robert Darnton has shown, ''underground'' printers, publishers, and booksellers who peddled the philosophes' banned books at great risk were crucial to the popularization of Enlightenment ideas.

Above ground, the translation of scientific and medical tracts played a particularly important role in promoting Enlightenment ideas of utility to a widespread public--the immense success of self-help health-care books such as William Buchan's Domestic Medicine, first published in London in 1769 but issued in multiple editions and translated into a number of foreign languages, is testimony to the success of this enterprise. The intended audience for such ''useful'' works and their wide distribution is a measure of the ambitions of the Enlightenment to include previously marginalized social groups in its goals to educate and improve. In Buchan's case it was the poor, but a similar point has been made about the pedagogic literature written for women, such as the Venetian writer Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), or by women, such as the Bolognese filosofesse and critic of Cartesian thought Laura Bassi or the French translator of Newton, Emilie Du Chatelet.

Enlightenment advocates stressed that science served moral as well as utilitarian ends, which was a message most effectively presented to the public in the form of ''popular'' writing. But the rhetoric of Enlightenment ''public science'' was also crucial to establishing the natural philosophers' social legitimacy by demonstrating that the improvements they were arguing for would serve the interests of the public. Therefore, ''science'' is often seen as the centerpiece to Enlightenment thought because, when placed alongside a number of other important implications of Enlightenment thought on society, science was considered the embodiment of reason and rationality, it spearheaded the assault on superstition and priestcraft, and it promised human progress and social improvement. These latter utopian dreams were a leitmotiv of the Enlightenment. Acquiring knowledge through enlightened pursuits, some believed, would conquer fear, perfect humanity, and even eliminate death. At least that is what Benjamin Franklin imagined, while lamenting that he was born a century too early to benefit. ''It is impossible to imagine the heights to which may be carried in a hundred years, the power of man over matter,'' he wrote to the English chemist and Presbyterian minister Joseph Priestley. ''All diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.'' . . .

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