This volume brings together work presented at the 2023 meeting of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS), held in Montreal from October 19 to 21, 2023. It was the Society’s first fully in-person event since 2019. We decided not to offer the option of hybrid participation because we did not want to dilute the vitality that gathering live presents: the hallway chats; the airing of afterthoughts with others, perhaps even the day after hearing stimulating new work; the chances to make new contacts and even friends, to see new books on the display tables, and to continue the conversations after hours over drinks and dinners. The vibrant sociability that we value, like the eighteenth-century thinkers we study, was a logical extension of our theme: “Matters and Materials of Life.” Our call for papers deliberately cast a wide net, as we sought to attract work on the resources that eighteenth-century treatments of bios could provide for the ongoing rethinking of climate, politics, selfhood, and communication in the determination of whose lives matter and whose are undervalued and underrepresented. Our conference brought together 153 participants, including established and emerging scholars and students, who shared their most recent research into the ways life was conceptualized in the age of empire and experiment, the materials with which it was represented, and their lasting consequences. We were especially attentive to encouraging our presenters to reorient the legacies of the Enlightenment towards urgent problems facing humanities scholars today. Consequently, our panels, roundtables, and conversations addressed, among others, the following questions: Whose lives mattered in the age of empire? What kinds of representation were lives and deaths granted or denied? In what ways did the human scale of measurement affect the shape of knowledge, thought, and feeling, and the forms used for their expression? How were the categories of celebrity, health, truth, and experience inflected by matters of race, gender, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and age in the contexts of global discovery and conquest? How did the changing values associated with “the life well-lived” or “the good death” inform identity categories and their embodiment, on the one hand, and the structures of social, political, and economic power, on the other? How were the limits of human life conceived and established? How do we experience the consequences to this day? These questions stimulated participants to explore how matters and materials of life in the eighteenth century continue to shape our world. Our program included an important innovation. We expanded the number of plenary talks, adding to the traditional one in French and one in English an inaugural Indigenous studies plenary. We did so in acknowledgement of the critical need to incorporate Indigenous people, materials, and methodologies into the scholarship of eighteenth-century studies in Canada. In her plenary address, included in this issue of Lumen, “‘Aute Life’: Indigenous Living, Indigenous Dyeing,” Alice Te Punga Somerville both reflected on and instantiated the ongoing work of defining Indigenous methods of interpretation that reach beyond specific geographical locations, even as they honour and describe their points of origin. The plant from which aute, the fabric, is made have circumnavigated the South Pacific islands, sometimes transported by people, including Te Punga Somerville’s ancestors, and sometimes by the wind. Te Punga Somerville thus materialized in both fabric and language a highly textured aspect of Indigenous life that invites extrapolation to other geographies, climates, and lives, both plant and human. As she acknowledged in the talk, though it is absent from the written version, her title, “Aute Life,” is an allusion to Thug Life, and by thus appropriating Tupac’s acronym, The Hate U Gave us …
