Eighteenth Century History

Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Remarks on the Swedish Case

by Jani Marjanen

'Horace Walpole, Leland and Clara Reeve: Anglo-Saxon Histories and the Eighteenth-century Whig Historical Novel', conference paper, BSECS 2009

by Fiona Price

A longer and more detailed version of this paper is available as “‘Ancient Liberties’: Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole, and Clara Reeve.” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2011): 19-38.

Abstract: Taking Walter Scott’s novels as paradigmatic, Georg Lukács defines the historical novel as a genre that... more Abstract: Taking Walter Scott’s novels as paradigmatic, Georg Lukács defines the historical novel as a genre that figures history as abrupt change or progress, a theory which, this essay argues, fails to allow for the alternative political fictions available in eighteenth-century Britain. When the impact of the Glorious Revolution on the fictions of Leland, Walpole and Reeve is acknowledged, it becomes evident that the notion of inherited liberties was as important to Whig thinkers as the narrative of historical progress. This realisation allows fuller understanding of how these ‘gothic’ works function as historical novels.

Book review - "The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls, and Beratlı in the Eighteenth Century"

by Mathieu Grenet

review of Maurits H. van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls, and Beratlı in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005).
in Cahiers de la Méditerranée, forthcoming (2012)
UNPUBLISHED PAPER - PLEASE DO NOT COPY OR QUOTE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION

'The mere relation of the sufferings of others': Joseph Highmore, History Painting and the Foundling Hospital

by Jacqueline Riding

published in Art History, the journal of the Association of Art Historians (online March 2012, hardcopy June 2012)

The history paintings of the English artist Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) have received limited critical analysis within... more The history paintings of the English artist Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) have received limited critical analysis within art historical scholarship both past and present. Portrait painting dominated his professional practice from 1715 to 1762 and yet, as this article will contend, the study and production of history painting was both a significant intellectual pursuit and an important creative strand within his artistic output. This article will begin by exploring the role of history painting within Highmore’s art practice and career. It will then focus on the context, purpose and creation of the three extant examples of Highmore’s history painting: 'The Good Samaritan', 'Hagar and Ishmael' and an oil on canvas ‘sketch’ known as 'The Angel of Mercy'. All three reflect ideas surrounding charity in mid-Georgian Britain and further, have direct or indirect associations with one charitable institution in particular: London’s Foundling Hospital. The analysis presented here will reveal an artist employing and adapting the tools of traditional Western history painting as a means of engaging with and reflecting these contemporary contexts and issues.

Evidence for the Undead

by Leo Ruickbie

in Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan (eds), The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming)

Academic analysis of the role of medical investigation in the 18th century vampire epidemic. Academic analysis of the role of medical investigation in the 18th century vampire epidemic.

Compte rendu d’ouvrage Arlette, FARGE, Un ruban et des larmes. Un procès en adultère au XVIIIe siècle,, Éditions des Busclats, 2011, 77 p.

by Simon Laporte

Arlette Farge nous livre dans cet ouvrage une étude de cas assez peu banale, et c’est sans nul doute ce qui a pu... more Arlette Farge nous livre dans cet ouvrage une étude de cas assez peu banale, et c’est sans nul doute ce qui a pu décider l’historienne à en restituer l’étrangeté tout en conservant, et nous pouvons lui en être reconnaissants, tout le mystère attaché à ce témoignage d’un procès en adultère dans les dernières décennies de l’Ancien Régime.

Interacting with Images: Female Accomplishment, Fashionability and the Embellishment of Prints 1750-1820

by Serena Dyer

Dressing the Elite: Fashion, Intimacy and Business in Eighteenth-Century London and Yorkshire

by Serena Dyer

Between 1783 and 1785 Mrs Ann Charlton, a society milliner of Holles Street, London, kept up a regular and detailed... more Between 1783 and 1785 Mrs Ann Charlton, a society milliner of Holles Street, London, kept up a regular and detailed correspondence with her client, Lady Sabine Winn of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. This abundant collection of both written passages and sumptuous fabric and ribbon samples, provides a unique and unprecedented insight into fashion dissemination amongst the provincial elite, the centrality of sociability and the season to the London fashion trade and the complex relationship between female client and supplier. The correspondence contains fashion news, pecuniary bargaining, offers of gifts, and discussion of personal health, combining intimate and personal details with the formalities of a professional relationship. These two vocabularies are continually at variance within the text of the letters, the consequence of a relationship which both transcends and abides by social boundaries. Neither friend nor servant, this singularly feminine association, maintained beyond Lady Sabine’s move north, demonstrates both the mercantile methodology of an eighteenth-century businesswoman and the continued reliance of the provincial elite on London traders. Mrs Charlton’s other clients included the infamous Countess of Strathmore, for whom she gave evidence at the trial of her husband. Her statement, which substantiated claims of domestic abuse, both physical and mental, as well as declaring the existence of unpaid bills, again merges the deeply personal with the pragmatism of business. The unrivalled depth of the previously untapped evidence provided by Mrs Ann Charlton facilitates a crucial step in developing our understanding of both women in business and networks of fashion consumption amongst the eighteenth-century elite.

‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht!’: August the Strong, the eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century German historical novel

by Madeleine Brook

published in 'German Life and Letters' 65/2 (April 2012)

The Nordic Turn in German literature

by Gauti Kristmannsson

Edinburgh German Yearbook 1 Cultural Exchange in German Literature. Ritstj. Eleoma Joshua and Robert Vilain. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. 63-73

Thronfolge als Problem. Zur Bedeutung der Pragmatischen Sanktion von 1713 für das Dramma per musica

by Rainer Kleinertz

in: Maria Theresias Kulturwelt. Geschichte, Religiosität, Literatur, Oper, Ballettkultur, Architektur, Malerei, Kunsttischlerei, Porzellan und Zuckerbäckerei im Zeitalter Maria Theresias, ed. Pierre Béhar, Marie-Thérèse Mourey, Herbert Schneider, Hildesheim, Olms, 2011 (Documenta austriaca – Literatur und Kultur in den Ländern der ehemaligen Donaumonarchie 2), pp. 77–90

'Another and the Same': Nature and Human Beings in Erasmus Darwin's Doctrines of Love and Imagination

by Maurizio Valsania

C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, eds., The Genious of Erasmus Darwin, Ashgate 2005

Francis Dashwood, Portraiture, and the Origins of the Hellfire Club

by Jason Kelly

blog post

The Monks of Medmenham Abbey, more popularly known as the Hellfire Club, were one of thousands of associational groups... more The Monks of Medmenham Abbey, more popularly known as the Hellfire Club, were one of thousands of associational groups that formed in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth century.  During the 1750s and early 1760s, they met at the estate of Sir Francis Dashwood, a baronet whose family derived their wealth from trading silks in the Levant.  Dashwood took numerous grand tours in the 1720s and 1730s, travelling to France and Italy, but also to Russia and the Ottoman Empire.  He was well known for his interest in architecture and politics, as well as women and wine.  And, like many of his fellow Britons, he had a particular fondness for masquerade, which found itself expressed through a penchant for dressing up as priests, monks, and popes.

Response to Shelton

by Helen King

Social History of Medicine 25 (2012): 232-238

This article responds to Mr Shelton's comments on my piece 'History without historians?' While the first piece... more This article responds to Mr Shelton's comments on my piece 'History without historians?' While the first piece reflected on the reception of his work on William Smellie, in which Shelton alleged that 'murder-to-order' of pregnant subjects was carried out to make possible the illustrations published by Smellie, this response takes up the comments made by Mr Shelton about his own ways of carrying out historical research.

Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy: Jacobite Allegory and the Aesthetics of the Patch-Work Subject

by Rivka Swenson

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 38.1 (2005): 55-80.

"A Soldier is Her Darling Character": Susanna Centlivre, Desire, Difference, and Disguise

by Rivka Swenson

Journal of Narrative Theory 37.1 (2007) 65-86

Revising the Scottish Plot in Tobias Smollett's _Roderick Random_

by Rivka Swenson

New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: "Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared": Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley.

Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela

by Rivka Swenson

The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 51.1-2, Spring-Summer 2010

Abstract:

Eliza Haywood's 1741 novel narrativizes the object-centered discourse of the visual field as... more Abstract:

Eliza Haywood's 1741 novel narrativizes the object-centered discourse of the visual field as described by contemporary optical theory. In eighteenth-century visual theory, the "object" of the gaze is not the one who is seen but the one who sees. Such a notion seems counter-intuitive; we have naturalized the theory of the dominant/male gaze. Anti-Pamela explores, first, the gendered implications that attended assumptions about vulnerable "subjects" and empowered "objects," and, second, the material (as well as symbolic) limits to the kind of empowerment that intromittist theories about vision and ontology seemed to promise to women in real social spaces. This essay makes a twofold contribution. First, it fashions a fresh theoretical lens from optical philosophy; as theorized by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries, the dialectics of the visual field, informed by the empirically generated nexus of seeing, knowing, and being, exceeds modern equations between sight and agency. Second, this essay focuses in on a particular text, Anti-Pamela, to show how this novel's attention to the nature of visual exchange is informed by contemporary optical theory and popular (as well as urban / material) contexts. Anti-Pamela explores the empirical and narrative implications—and the symbolic and gendered / material limitations—of the theory that the seen object occupies a primary, causal status in its ability to transform the seeing subject's ontology.

Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay: With a New Translation of Diderot's' Letter on the Blind'and La Mothe Le Vayer's' Of a Man Born Blind'

by Kate Tunstall

History without historians? Medical history and the internet AND Response to Shelton

by Helen King

In Social History of Medicine: online version published June 2011, print version in vol. 25 (2012): 212-221; see also my further 'Response to Shelton' invited by the journal editors, addressing the comments raised by Mr Shelton in his response to my article.

Recent claims that the eighteenth-century men-midwives William Smellie and William Hunter had women murdered to order,... more Recent claims that the eighteenth-century men-midwives William Smellie and William Hunter had women murdered to order, to provide the illustrations for their impressive atlases of obstetrics, raise fresh questions about how medical history is generated, presented and evaluated in the media and, in particular, on the internet. This paper traces the generation and subsequent reception of what, for some people, has now become a ‘historical fact’, in order to illustrate how attempts by medical historians to engage with policy and with the public exist alongside a shift towards the deprofessionalisation of history.