ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment, in spite of all local and national variation, was a project to harmonize the cacophony of the world and to explore the paradoxes of human needs and passions. Helen Waddell, whose childhood had been spent in wandering between China, Japan and Ireland and who never knew the security of an established academic post, undoubtedly identified with these wanderers. In language of great beauty, Waddell managed to release her readers from the constraints of time while opening to them an unknown medieval world. Most readers, including academic reviewers, shared her essentialist assumptions, and few questioned the continuity of emotional impulses across centuries. Both used language to bring their scholarly knowledge to a broader public, assuming, rightly, that even the most difficult and distant periods and avocations (desert saints, or even fools) could be brought before the broad public with elan.
