Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

===Natural history===
[[File:Buffon 1707-1788.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon|Georges Buffon]] is best remembered for his {{lang|fr|Histoire naturelle}}, a 44 volume encyclopedia describing everything known about the natural world.]]
A genre that greatly rose in importance was that of scientific literature. Natural history in particular became increasingly popular among the upper classes. Works of natural history include [[René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur|René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur]]'s ''Histoire naturelle des insectes'' and [[Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty|Jacques Gautier d'Agoty]]'s ''La Myologie complète, ou description de tous les muscles du corps humain'' (1746). Outside [[Ancien Régime]] France, natural history was an important part of medicine and industry, encompassing the fields of botany, zoology, meteorology, hydrology, and mineralogy. Students in Enlightenment universities and academies were taught these subjects to prepare them for careers as diverse as medicine and theology. As shown by Matthew Daniel Eddy, natural history in this context was a very middle class pursuit and operated as a fertile trading zone for the interdisciplinary exchange of diverse scientific ideas.<ref name="Eddy2008">{{cite book |last=Eddy |first=Matthew Daniel |title=The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750–1800 |year=2008 |publisher=Ashgate |location=Aldershot |url=https://www.academia.edu/1112014}}</ref>

The target audience of natural history was French upper class, evidenced more by the specific discourse of the genre than by the generally high prices of its works. Naturalists catered to upper class desire for erudition: many texts had an explicit instructive purpose. However, natural history was often a political affair. As Emma Spary writes, the classifications used by naturalists "slipped between the natural world and the social&nbsp;... to establish not only the expertise of the naturalists over the natural, but also the dominance of the natural over the social."<ref>Emma Spary, "The 'Nature' of Enlightenment" in ''The Sciences in Enlightened Europe,'' William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Steven Schaffer, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 281–82.</ref> The idea of taste (''le goût'') was a social indicator: to truly be able to categorize nature, one had to have the proper taste, an ability of discretion shared by all members of the upper class. In this way, natural history spread many of the scientific developments of the time but also provided a new source of legitimacy for the dominant class.<ref>Spary, 289–93.</ref> From this basis, naturalists could then develop their own social ideals based on their scientific works.<ref>See Thomas Laqueur, ''Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud'' (1990).</ref>