The central idea of this book is that since the Renaissance and through the 17th and 18th centuries, a certain number of artists, scholars and members of the liberal professions struggled to construe themselves as "intellectual personae" endowed with distinct features that placed them in a distinct social rank. They did so individually and collectively, through theoretical writings and through practice, openly claiming for social recognition or more silently trying to attain it through their actions.
I have borrowed the notion of “intellectual personae” from Lorrain Daston and Otto Sibum who in the introduction to a special issue of Science in Context spoke of a persona as “a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognized physiognomy”. But while Daston and Sibum were primarily interested in the cultural aspects of this phenomenon, as they considered the fashioning of the scientific personae within the context of the history of science, I would rather focus on its socio-economic and political features within the context of the history of the Ancien regime, i. e. a hierarchical society, strongly characterized by ascribed status.
By intellectual personae I thus refer to people exercising very different activities – as I said artists, scholars, lawyers, medicine doctors – and yet sharing a common feature: they were all exercising “intellectual” or “cultivated” professions and providing “cultural” services or goods. And they all pretended that this special quality of their activities placed them in a separate rank: if they did not belong to the titled nobility, they certainly were not members of the laboring ranks of the society
