Cloistered women, freed musicians: the musician nuns of the Royal Monastery of São Bento da Avé-Maria in Porto (Portugal)

Of all the symbolic constituents in The Sleep (or Dream) of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueno de la razon produce monstruos), Francisco Goya's most famous aquatint etching from his Caprichos serie...

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTES

As long as there has been a concept of there has been a critique of culture. In the eighteenth century in Europe, when the term began to come into general use, there was an Enlightenment critique of culture fashioned by the philosophes and directed against the alleged extravagance and superficiality of aristocratic on the one hand, and the simplemindedness of folk or peasant on the other. In the Romantic era that followed, a different critique of culture emerged - this one aimed at the supposedly overly-rationalistic and utilitarian philistine culture of the middle or lower middle class. Later in the nineteenth century, Marx and his followers developed another type of Kulturkritik focused on what happens to culture itself within modern capitalistic societies, i.e., on how cultural objects and values, by getting caught up in the market, become commodified, reified, and alienated both from the people who create them and the people who consume them. In each of these instances - to go no further with examples - there was always a basis or from which to make judgments about and particularly to make judgments about whether any specific form of culture should be considered good or bad, beneficial or harmful. For Enlightenment critics, reason was that basis. If cultural expressions seemed reasonable or rational, they were deemed good, but if they appeared to be irrational, they were labeled bad and rejected out of hand. For the Romantics coming a few decades later, authenticity or genuineness was the main yardstick of evaluating the worth of cultural objects or values, while for orthodox Marxists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ground of evaluation was class relations. If a given culture produced mostly false consciousness, and thereby drew individuals wittingly or unwittingly into a bourgeois status quo, it was declared sterile or retrograde; but if it produced true consciousness in the working class, and as a consequence helped advance the hopedfor proletarian revolution, it was said to be progressive and considered worthy of support. There has also existed alongside these other types of critique a critique of culture, even though it has generally been less noticed or commented upon. The religious critique of culture - which in the West has largely taken the form of a Christian critique1 - also makes judgments from certain presuppositions, but these presuppositions are, not surprisingly, quite unlike those that accompany the various secular critiques, thus making the religious critique unique from the very beginning. For example, undergirding the Christian critique of culture are a number of metaphysical and theological assumptions that are entirely foreign to the secular critiques just mentioned. Among these are the notion that there is an afterlife created by God for human beings; that men and women are placed here on earth for one principle reason, to gain salvation in this afterlife; and that, this being so, everything we might do or think here below pales in comparison to this single overriding end - an end that involves, after all, how one spends the whole of eternity. When assumptions such as these are present, even implicitly, in a cultural critique, then those cultural objects or practices that encourage spiritual development, nourish one's faith, or promote higher salvific ends would naturally be evaluated affirmatively, while those cultural activities or forms of expression that impede these same ends would be regarded negatively. Given the particular premises of the Christian-religious approach to it seems that one likely result would be a mode of analysis and evaluation that is not only different than that of the secular critiques, but which also produces conclusions that are different than those arrived at by non-religious cultural critics. This indeed appears to be the case. …

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

Reviews and Short Notes

book reviews477 century Ireland.We are fortunate in having Patrick Fagan's edition. His footnotes provide valuable biographical information on the correspondents as well as cross references to related documents in the collection. Moreover, he includes a very comprehensive index at the end ofVolume II. Thomas F. Moriarty Elms College Chicopee, Massachusetts The Diocese of Killaloe. Volume I: In the Eighteenth Century; Volume II: 1800-1850; Volume III: 1850-1904. By Ignatius Murphy. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1991, 1992, 1995.Pp. 373,488, 527.) These three volumes by Ignatius Murphy on the history ofthe Diocese ofKiIlaloe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not only a very significant contribution to knowledge, but they will long remain a rich resource for all who will venture to research and write about the modern Irish Church. The Diocese of Killaloe (pronounced likeWaterloo) extends in a broad band across the middle ofIreland from the Atlantic coast eastwards to include virtually all of County Clare, the northern third ofTipperary, and a large part of King's County. In the eighteenth century, Killaloe was one of the twenty-six dioceses that constituted the Irish Church, and while it was one ofthe largest in terms ofarea and population, it was among the poorest in regard to wealth and resources. The diocese was mainly rural, containing a considerable amount of mountain and bog and only a half-dozen towns of any importance, ff Killaloe was representative of anything, therefore, in the Irish Church in the eighteenth century, it was its poverty.This continued to be the case for the greater part of the nineteenth century, and especially in the western reaches of the dioceses.These three volumes , then, are a true witness not only to the courage but to the endurance of the Catholics of Killaloe between 1700 and 1900. The recent and untimely death of the author of these volumes at the age of fifty-five in 1993 was both a sad and a serious loss for Irish historical scholarship .When Monsignor Murphy initially conceived his history of the Diocese of Killaloe, he structured it in terms of two volumes—one on the eighteenth century and the other on the nineteenth century, and he published his first volume in late 1991.The enormous amount of material available for the volume on the nineteenth century, however, had resulted in a manuscript of twenty-five chapters , compared to the ten that had comprised his very substantial first volume. Monsignor Murphy then decided to divide his manuscript into two volumes, breaking his narrative at 1850, and in late 1992 he published his second volume , 1800-1850, which consisted of the first eleven of these twenty-five chapters . By that time, however, he had learned that he was seriously ill, and set to work to prepare his third volume, 1850-1904, for publication. He proposed to revise the remaining fourteen chapters, and then write a concluding chapter 478book reviews that would serve to sum the significance ofhis work on the nineteenth century. He was only able, unfortunately, to revise the first two chapters before his death, and never wrote the concluding chapter.The diocesan publication committee , which had been formed to see the third volume through the press, wisely decided, in consultation with Monsignor Murphy before his death, to publish the fourteen chapters as they then stood, and the third volume was finally published in 1995. The first of these volumes, on the eighteenth century, is undoubtedly Monsignor Murphy's masterpiece. It is in terms ofits conceptual framework and the great learning that informs it, a model of what an artful and thoughtful historical presentation ought to be. After a graceful prologue, which sets the scene, Monsignor Murphy opens his eighteenth century in 1697 with the passing of the first ofthe penal laws affecting the Church in the banishing of all those secular clergy, bishops, deans, and vicars general, exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Ireland and all the regular clergy without exception, and closes it in 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic wars. During that extended eighteenth century,the Irish Church, and its microcosm in the Diocese ofKillaloe, emerged from the darkness of a severe persecution into the light of a...

Susan Dalton. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Pp. 206 + ix. $70.00 cloth. Alessa Johns. Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pp. 212 + xi. $34.95 cloth. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pp. 242 + vii. $36.00 cloth. A critical rethinking of the ubiquitous terms "public" and "private" in the eighteenth-century context informs the three books under review here. Susan Dalton, Alessa Johns, and Patricia Meyer Spacks explicitly address the influence of Habermas' 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (translated, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) on the entire field of eighteenth-century studies. In their nuanced readings of eighteenth-century literary and cultural production, Dalton, Johns, and Spacks question the prevalent interpretation of Habermas as establishing a strict binary opposition between the public and the private and, perhaps even more importantly, an equation of the private with the domestic and the public with the political. While Habermas has coined these terms and injected them into the critical discourse about the eighteenth century, the strict demarcation of supposedly separate spheres is more a product of Strukturwandel's subsequent reception than of Habermas' theory itself, prompted by critics' desire to establish some kind of coherent categorization for the complex nature of eighteenth-century life and letters. Habermas himself discusses the intersections of the public and private spheres and explores the arising ambivalences. He argues that the opposition between the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (51) and the "public sphere" was, above all, a discursive construct because the intimate/domestic sphere formed part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy. Even though the domestic was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the accelerating division of labor and family life in the eighteenth century, both were connected not only to each other, but also to what Habermas calls the "public sphere in the world of letters" and "the public sphere in the political realm" (51). While the ideological construction of these separate spheres affected reality to some extent and women became increasingly equated with the domestic in the discourse of the time, an analysis of this reality also shows how porous and connected these areas were. Habermas' discussion of these intersections serves as the starting point for the studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture by Dalton, Johns, and Spacks. They explore the space which Habermas himself highlights but which has often been overlooked: the third space where public and private aspects meet in complex and ambivalent ways. The authors' well-reasoned and compelling analyses of these intersections [End Page 394] in British, French, German, and Italian writings underline the complexity of eighteenth-century textual production by men and women. In Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Susan Dalton looks with a historian's eye at the correspondence of four French and Italian salon women, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini. Dalton explores the communities formed by social networking and polite sociability in the eighteenth-century republic of letters and investigates salon women's engagement with the political and philosophical debates of their time. Her argument perceptively unravels the ambivalence that characterizes these elite women's theoretical writings and their practical applications. Yet, rather than classifying these ambivalent moments as contradictions, Dalton disentangles these women's strategic negotiation of gender discourses. This mediation allowed them to express their political views at the same time that it enabled them to echo discourses of propriety and...

Reviewed by: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, and: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright JoEllen Mary DeLucia Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 516; 16 b/w illus. $155.00 cloth. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020) Pp. 541; 14 illus. $155.00 cloth. Defining the Gothic has been a perennial problem. Is it a literary genre, an aesthetic, or a style? As a historical marker, does it refer to the liberty-loving Goths of pre-Roman Britain, a medieval chivalric culture, or is it a negative definition of modernity? During the long eighteenth-century, Gothic was used as an adjective to describe architecture, political values, and, later, literary texts; in the nineteenth century, the term largely disappeared. In the twentieth century, Victorian studies adapted the Gothic as a “retrospective construct” (II:15)—a category used to group everything from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the Kelmscott Press’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer under the same umbrella. The Gothic’s search for a clear referent has had the sometimes frustrating but also liberating effect of evacuating the term of any clear meaning. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, the editors of the first two volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, argue that instead of linking the Gothic to a historical period, discipline, or set of formal characteristics, we should understand it as a “mode.” Mode in these volumes means something close to a method or approach, an active means of both interrogating dominant histories and writing “counter-history” (I: 6). The discontinuities and the unevenness in the application of the term Gothic make the case for it as an approach or process. As Robert Miles argues, the Gothic might best be understood as “a temporal contrast . . . between the premodern world of ghosts (timeless, circular, repetitious, with porous boundaries between the self and other, this world and the next), and the empty, chronometric, homogenous time of modernity” (I: 449); or, as Tom Duggett persuasively suggests, “a zeitgeist term—a word in the process of becoming, through contestation and self-contradiction” (II: 105). One of the great strengths of Townshend and Wright’s turn to mode instead of form is that they are able to develop a truly interdisciplinary collection of essays, putting literature, history, art, architecture, and drama into conversation with one another. At the same time, the constraints of the linear history demanded by the form of a three-volume Cambridge History, with separate volumes dedicated to the long eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and a yet to be published volume on the twentieth century, work against the Gothic mode itself. As I read, I sometimes wished that the essays were grouped in a non-linear fashion, interrogating instead of replicating progressive historical form. Despite these formal constraints, the collected essays provide a fascinating interdisciplinary and transnational look at the Gothic, which almost always begins its story with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764); those in eighteenth-century studies would find these volumes most useful as a means of building a counternarrative of our period’s influence, one that contests the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of the neo-Classical and Enlightenment impulses that still dominate understandings of the eighteenth century; in addition, the collection would aid eighteenth centuryists in responding to recent calls to think and teach beyond the traditional boundaries of period and [End Page 1012] discipline and track the echoes of issues central to the eighteenth century across periods and national traditions. With the third volume yet to be released, this review only considers the first two volumes, which are dedicated to the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they include an impressive forty-one essays from forty-two scholars writing from different disciplinary and national perspectives. In keeping with the Gothic mode, the essays are best read...

Playing on the Map:An Educational Game from the Age of Revolutions Emily Bruce (bio) and Elise Klarenbeek (bio) The use of games as an instructional tool might seem characteristic of pedagogy today. Yet the years around 1800 actually offer important clues to understanding the emergence of play as part of an idealized education in the modern world. As a proto-example of today's "edutainment," our object lesson is at once remarkable and ordinary. The German geography board game The Journey from Prague to Vienna (Die Reise von Prag nach Wien) was produced sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Its spatial orientation, colorful narration, and, it turns out, gameplay itself reveal much about how middle-class German-speaking children were situated socially and politically in the world. Children playing The Journey from Prague to Vienna likely drew on their experience of other games.1 Board games have existed in some fashion for thousands of years around the world, but during the late eighteenth century in Europe they began to be marketed for children's use in particular.2 At the same time, geography emerged as the quintessential topic for board games. In 1752, John Jefferys released A Journey through Europe, or the Play of Geography, which, like The Journey from Prague to Vienna, took players on a tour of distinctive features such as might be noted in the long-standing genre of travel narratives.3 But the form of a game may have more directly elicited players' desires, as Koca Mehmet Kentel argues: "Through playing those games, travelling to distant parts of the world, learning to look at 'things' of the world as legitimate objects to acquire . . . children were made to orient themselves within an imperial horizon, to take it as a mundane experience."4 This fantasy of consumption fed the ideology of domesticity as much as it did imperial knowledge production. Since board game scholarship has often focused on England, our early German-language example is especially intriguing.5 The very different political contexts of Britain and the shifting borders of Central Europe before German [End Page 9] unification at this time are also salient. But the most important difference between The Journey from Prague to Vienna and the English games by Jefferys, John Wallis, and others is that the latter group provided key geographic facts as an integral part of the game.6 By contrast, German children playing The Journey from Prague to Vienna were expected to supply their own geography answers based on their education. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The German geography board game The Journey from Prague to Vienna (Die Reise von Prag nach Wien). [End Page 10] It is not a coincidence that this game dealt with geography.7 The standard European approach to geographical education in the eighteenth century was purely descriptive and students learned through rigid, memorization-driven instruction. However, the early nineteenth century saw developments in pedagogic philosophy and shifts in geographic epistemology that, by the middle of the century, began to produce a modern form of geographical education. Factors that contributed to changes in geographical thought include the map-scrambling Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of colonial knowledge production, and intensifying travel activities in a world of improved roads, ships, and postal networks. These led to new, distinctive features of children's geographical education: growing concern for child readers' amusement, an association of learning about the world with the family and the home, the orientation of children as explorers and armchair travelers, an increased emphasis on map reading and the use of atlases in schools, and the influence of nationalism and colonial ambitions. The new geographical pedagogy developing in the years around 1800 was marked by a move toward method and away from topical classification, the specialization of learning based on students' age and, most importantly, an emphasis on individual experience and observation.8 The format of a board game thus afforded Enlightenment pedagogues an ideal, amusing instrument for encouraging children to problem-solve, read maps, and engage with the world. The first copy of The Journey from Prague to Vienna that we encountered (the only extant, according to WorldCat) is held in...

Notes on Contributors

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Keeping Faith with Literature