Linda E. Merians, ed. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1996. Pp. viii, 269. $39.95. ISBN 0-8131-1989-8.

Affective Profit

Reviewed by: The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France Andrea Rusnock Linda E. Merians, ed. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. viii + 269 pp. Ill. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paperbound). This volume includes fifteen essays on syphilis and gonorrhea in the eighteenth century; the first eight are historical, the remaining seven literary. Together, they form a rich, multilayered picture of contemporary views, understandings, and management of venereal disease in France and Britain. Several themes stand out: first, the increasing tendency to condemn women for the spread of the secret malady; second, the growing importance of a nationalist discourse that stressed the need for a growing, healthy population and hence mandated state medical surveillance and intervention; and third, the gradual change in therapy from heroic salivation treatments to more moderate regimens. The secret malady affected women in more ways than physical. Sexually promiscuous men often boasted of their bouts of clap as a mark of honor, and little shame attended the husband who infected his wife. Women were not treated as tolerantly and were increasingly blamed for the spread of infection (see the essay by Betty Rizzo). While episodes of venereal disease among aristocratic [End Page 118] men continued to be viewed casually, over the course of the eighteenth century venereal disease became a symbol of corruption and decay, especially of women. Restoration dramas that made satiric use of the clap and pox were replaced by moralistic representations that usually linked women with the destruction wrought by venereal disease—for example, Hogarth’s prints and Rétif de la Bretonne’s novel Le paysan perverti (see the essays by Rose A. Zimbardo, Leon Guilhamet, April London, and Diane Fourny). As several of the authors point out, prostitution and venereal disease were not necessarily linked during the seventeenth century; they only became so over the course of the eighteenth. Kathryn Norberg develops this theme in her essay “From Courtesan to Prostitute,” marking the last third of the eighteenth century as the critical period in France for this transformation in public perception. Beginning with Rétif de la Bretonne’s Le pornographe, ou les idées d’un honnête homme sur un projet de règlement pour les prostituées (Paris, 1767), calls for the regulation of prostitution to combat growing fears about depopulation cemented the association of prostitution, venereal disease, moral corruption, and declining population, and hence legitimated state regulation. Women, especially prostitutes, became the objects of police surveillance. Many of the essays contain detailed accounts of the grueling mercury treatments for syphilis (see the essays by Susan P. Conner, Philip K. Wilson, and Mary Margaret Stewart). The unpleasantness of the accepted therapy contributed to a proliferation of alternative medicines such as John Burrows’s vegetable remedy, and (later in the century) to the efforts to moderate mercury therapies frequently undertaken in institutions founded to care specifically for individuals suffering from syphilis, such as the London Lock Hospital and the Paris Hospice des Vénériens (see the essays by Susan P. Conner and Linda E. Merians). Although venereal disease was the secret malady, the public demand for writings on the topic seemed insatiable. As the essays by Roy Porter, Marie E. McAllister, and Linda E. Merians show, the rhetorical strategies adopted by physicians who wrote about venereal disease were practically indistinguishable from those of quacks. There is much to commend in this volume, but it suffers from the common ill attending similar collections of essays—namely, the absence of an integrated, comparative narrative linking the separate articles. A more lengthy, detailed introduction, and perhaps a conclusion, would help the reader negotiate the changing status and treatment of venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain and France, and would signal the differences between the two countries. Andrea Rusnock Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by: The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Al Coppola John O'Brien Al Coppola. The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Oxford, 2016. Pp. x + 265. $82.00. Francis Bacon tried to warn us. In his New Organon (1620), he argues (in a translation from the Latin by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne) that "All the philosophies that men have learned or devised are, in our opinion, so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds." Bacon is famously calling for a new philosophy based in reality rather than illusion. The empirical science that the Royal Society would institutionalize later in the seventeenth century seemed to fulfill Bacon's hopes by putting reality ahead of the "Idols of the Theater" and "fairytale theories" that had dominated natural philosophy since the ancient world. Or did it? Mr. Coppola's witty, engaging, and well-researched book, which takes the quotation from Bacon as its epigraph, demonstrates how fully the empiricist natural philosophy of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained indebted to the figure of the theater. He also demonstrates how routinely the theater of the period turned to science as a topic, staging, often satirically, the careers of virtuosi, virtuosa, and scientists of all sorts in plays like (among others) Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676), D'Urfey's Madame Fickle (1677), Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687), the Gay, Arbuthnot, and Pope collaboration Three Hours After Marriage (1717), Centlivre's The Basset Table (1705) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), and the Doctor Faustus pantomimes that premiered in both of the London patent houses in 1723. Setting the theater and the new science in dialogue with one another, Mr. Coppola makes intelligible how fully a new understanding of spectatorship itself, one that would become normative by the middle of the century, came to be shared by the worlds of science and the stage. Mr. Coppola structures Theater of Experiment like a main piece performance from the theater of the period, with prologue, five chapters in the place of acts, and an epilogue. The book gives tribute on the page to its argument that the success of the modern empiricist science that emerged to answer Bacon's call constituted what Mr. Coppola calls a "culture of spectacle." Knowledge production depends on a new belief in seeing for one's self, a belief that drove transformational change in all modes of public performance, scientific and theatrical. In the book's prologue and epilogue, he frames these changes through efficient invocations of one of the period's most popular and characteristic theatrical subgenres, the rehearsal play. Inaugurated in the early 1670s with the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, the play became a durable framework for satire, resorted to by (among others) Behn's Emperor of the Moon and Fielding's Pasquin and The Historical Register for the Year 1736. While the play most obviously satirizes the theater itself, Mr. Coppola argues persuasively in his prologue that Rehearsal was also a way of ridiculing the culture's growing faith in the power of empiricism itself, what he calls the "Bayesification" of a culture in which the sheer accumulation of new facts is its own vehicle of persuasion. For Buckingham and his collaborators, the foolish playwright Bayes and the performances he orchestrated were less the central targets than a symptom of a generalized overinvestment in the power of things to convey truth that the theater and the [End Page 83] new empirical science shared. The epilogue returns to the rehearsal frame via Fielding's two rehearsal pieces of the mid-1730s, a point at which "the thrall of reflexive empiricism" that Buckingham had focalized in the figure of the playwright had now thoroughly infected the spectators themselves. The five central chapters offer case studies that typically attend to pairs or clusters of texts that exemplify an aspect of this culture of spectacle and identify problems. For example, Mr. Coppola pairs Shadwell's widely known Virtuoso with the much less familiar Madame Fickle by D'Urfey, which he argues persuasively is "a point-by...

Our Fellow Creatures: Who Were They? Who Are They?

The desire to smooth out and explain away the inconsistencies in British classicism was evident more recently in Giles Worsley's book, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age, of 1995, in which the late seventeenth century becomes an 'interlude' in his version of British classicism. Besides the search for respectable precedents to validate 'native' architecture many historians have gone one step further and attempted to create a coherent classical tradition within England. With regard to architectural practice the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Britain has traditionally been seen as a transitional period between the medieval and the modern. It was the time at which the building process changed from being a locally organized craft-based activity into a commercial industry. This introduction aims to outline the main themes in the text and the historiography which it addresses.

Reviewed by: Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical by Roger Mathew Grant Alexander Creighton Roger Mathew Grant, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 192; 1 illus. $30.00 paper. Roger Mathew Grant’s Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical dives into a problem that has been debated in music philosophy since before the eighteenth century: How does music affect us? Does it complement emotions we are already experiencing, or does it have the power to shape how we feel? Do our minds translate what we hear into particular affects, or are our bodies attuned to musical vibrations? Grant does not offer yet another “definitive” answer to these questions. Instead, he traces how conversations around these questions evolved over the eighteenth century, anticipating the evolution of present-day affect theory discourse. Grant weaves together a substantial archive of European music theories, once referred to as Affektenlehre (theory of affects), which theorized relationships between musical conventions and corresponding emotions. That these theories often contradicted one another has caused them to be written off as unworthy of academic study. Part of Grant’s project is to show that, despite the contradictions, these documents shared certain overarching principles that limn key developments in early music theory. Thus, music and musical treatises from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries trace a “mimetic Affektenlehre,” wherein music’s formal conventions were understood to encode particular emotions. The end of the century, by contrast, sees the rise of an “attunement Affektenlehre,” according to which musical sounds resonate directly with the human body, no longer relying on a principle of mimesis. The progression from mimesis to attunement, Grant argues, mirrors the ways in which contemporary affect theory has distanced itself from the object, focusing instead on affect as a transcendent mode. Readers of Grant’s work will recognize in Peculiar Attunements a methodological principle that also informs his first book, Beating Time and Measure Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014): the weaving together of a capacious and at times recalcitrant archive in order to trace the transformation of a concept over time. In Beating Time and Measuring Music, this methodology [End Page 1019] underwrites Grant’s successful efforts to fill in a gap in the history of music theory. As the eighteenth century inaugurated new ways of measuring and understanding time, musical meters proliferated even as overarching theories of rhythm were almost nonexistent. By gathering together and identifying the underlying principles behind these various systems for measuring time, Grant shows how the concept of “the beat” was, over the course of the eighteenth century, divided into multiple different senses. Peculiar Attunements is similar in its archival reach, yet instead attending primarily to “knowledge left unarticulated or barely written” (Beating Time, 8), Grant picks up on a once-prominent line of music history that has been forgotten—but that, in his reckoning, needs to be remembered. “The Affektenlehre was bigger and messier than we had previously thought, and it is now more pertinent to our contemporary discourse than we could ever have imagined” (3). Across four chapters, Grant leads his reader through an evolving discussion about music and affect whose contours resemble present-day affect theory. Chapter 1 details the mimetic Affektenlehre, an “unstable consensus among theorists” that musical conventions and codes could “evoke specific affects in audiences” (29). This notion takes shape with the coalescence of predictable plots, formal structures, and musical conventions that emerged in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century serious opera. The practice of alternating between recitative and aria, for instance, became a template that allowed composers to foreground characters’ emotional responses to events in the plot. The rise of conventional forms, Grant argues, made it possible for composers to externalize emotional responses, linking those responses to particular harmonies, rhythms, and melodic lines. Typical of Grant’s work is his ability to toggle between carefully chosen examples (a musical close reading opens each chapter) and the general principles that they illustrate. For instance, he engages with the tradition of the operatic lament by showing how Dido’s famous lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), “When I am laid...

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, musicians were largely dependent for their livelihoods upon either the goodwill of royal or noble patronage or regular employment by a municipality or the Church. A gradual emancipation subsequently took place, due to the growth of public concerts and operatic performances, and substantial developments in music printing and publishing. The first public opera house was opened only in 1637 and the first public concerts did not take place until the late seventeenth century. The earliest and most consistent patron of music was the Church, although at first it was concerned more with composition – and with vocal rather than instrumental music. Most of the royal and aristocratic families kept a musical establishment as part of their state and were therefore of vital importance to musicians. The enormous development of instrumental forms and styles during the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost entirely associated with court and aristocratic support. There were, for example, over three hundred states and courts in Germany; these provided musicians with more opportunities for employment than in France, where there were few, or in England, where there was only one. As with the violin, Italy was undoubtedly the birthplace of the cello; and it was employed increasingly as a solo instrument during the seventeenth century. The first known executant and composer for the instrument was Domenico Gabrielli from Bologna. His contemporary Petronio Franceschini, employed at San Petronio, Bologna, encouraged composers to write specifically for the cello, and he was also one of the founders of the Accademia Filarmonica.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

By investigating research from a number of sources, this paper seeks to provide evidence that opera can be used to communicate political opinions and that it, in fact, has been used to do so in the past. Operas from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England are the main focus. After a brief explanation of the origins of opera and its arrival in England, the methods and motivations of composers who included political propaganda in their works are discussed. A summary of the political state of England is included to provide background for the dissection of Handel’s Arianna in Creta and Porpora’s Arianna in Nasso which are used to supply specific examples of politics’ role in opera. In light of the history of opera, the methods and intentions of composers, and the political status of Great Britain during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the analysis of these two operas suggests their integration of political propaganda. The author concludes that not every opera is a vehicle for propaganda but that every opera should be carefully evaluated to determine if there is political intent.

The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment

Consilium Interrumpitur:Understanding the Interrupted Work of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) Kenneth L. Parker (bio) Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. By John W. O'Malley. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. 320 pages. Hardcover, $24.95. ISBN 9780674979987. Revered and Reviled: A Re-Examination of Vatican Council I. By John R. Quinn. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2017. vi + 117 pages. Hardcover, $49.10. ISBN: 0824523296. Australian Catholic Bishops and the First Vatican Council 1869–1870: An Historical Reflection. By Peter Price. Northcote, Victoria, Australia: Morning Star Publishing, 2017. 208 pages. Paperback, $35.66 AUD. ISBN: 0995416176. Vatican I and Vatican II: Councils in the Living Tradition. By Kristen M. Colberg. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2016. xiv + 162 pages. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN: 9780814683149. The impact of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) permeates contemporary Roman Catholic life and culture, though few know the historical context of the Council or appreciate its perduring influence. Though disrupted by war after only eight months, never to reconvene, its definition of papal sovereignty and infallibility has shaped Roman Catholic understandings of ecclesiology and has been a point of contention inside and outside the Church ever since. As the sesquicentenary remembrance of the Council approaches, four books have been published, between 2016 and 2018, offering opportunities to inform gaps [End Page 72] in our knowledge and correct impressions that have circulated for 150 years. This review article opens with an overview of how the Council came to be and the impact of its reception. Attention then turns to the four texts under review, with consideration given to whether they represent continuity or change from prior approaches to the subject. The concluding portion of this essay reflects on the way these works reinforce John Henry Newman's enduring relevance in the study of the First Vatican Council and our reception of it in the twenty-first century. historical overview An impressive pontifical ceremony opened the First Vatican Council on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (8 December 1869), and the final conciliar vote on, and papal promulgation of, Pastor Æternus marked the last act of the Council (18 July 1870). The following day, 19 July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War erupted, French troops withdrew from Rome, and Italian nationalists gained control of the city two months later. Bishops fled Rome, and Pius IX prorogued the Council. It never reassembled. The pope declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican as the last territorial vestiges of his temporal power were annexed by the unified Italian nation, and Rome became its capital. Historians have noted the irony of the pope's supreme spiritual authority being defined in the Council as his temporal power ended.1 Yet this watershed moment in Roman Catholic history had been more than two centuries in the making. The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved a period of defensive retrenchment for the papacy in the North Atlantic region. Nation after nation in western Europe negotiated, and received, concordats from the papacy that limited the authority of popes and gave governments discretion in shaping the ecclesial life of their subjects, particularly in the selection of bishops.2 These centuries witnessed the rise of ideologies that reflected evolving conciliar principles with roots in the fifteenth century. Gallicanism, Febronianism, cisalpinism, and Josephinism, as well as a striking form of Irish gallicanism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,3 all asserted the integrity of local, national churches and the authority of their local ordinary or bishop, and favored [End Page 73] limitations on the universal jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome. While these various forms of conciliar ecclesiology honored the pope as the center of unity and the arbiter of disputes, they affirmed the collective apostolic authority of bishops when gathered in council. Even when scattered throughout the world, episcopal consensus carried weight that popes must not ignore.4 As temporal rulers, popes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled with circumstances that forced them to choose alliances with religious foes against Catholic rulers in order to ensure the preservation of the papacy's temporal interests. These conflicts of interest eroded trust in...

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

The study presents the history of the emergence, development and decline of the frontline towns concentrated in the area of the Hirskyi Tikych River. The research focuses on Buzivka, Buky, Vorone, Zelenyi Rih, Zubrykha, Okhmativ, Sokolivka and Monastyryshche. Natural factors and the branching of the Black Way determined the concentration of settlements in the river area. The study of the frontline towns is relevant due to the peculiarities of urban processes in Central Ukraine and is important for the development of historical and architectural reference plans. The research aims to determine the spatial features of the city centre in the cities of the right-bank Ukraine frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the course of the study, the methods of analysis (for literary sources), comparative analysis (for the cartography of different times), and a set of field studies were used. The studied towns had an optimal defensive perimeter dominated by a Ukrainian wooden church, and a key element of the spatial image was a residential wooden house. It is determined that the cities of the frontier had political and cultural conflicts with the centre of the state, which caused the loss of the role of settlements and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century. Based on historical cartography, source material, and the preserved ancient street network, the urban planning features of the town centres are localised and identified. The frontier towns concentrated in the area of the Gorny Tikich River were economically and culturally united and were characterised by rational planning. Improvements in the town centres of the frontier towns are linked to the political and economic intentions of magnates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The spatial layout of the town centre was centred around a Ukrainian wooden church, except Monastyryshche, which also had a wooden church in the town centre. The main building element was the Ukrainian wooden house, which defined the spatial and cultural image of the settlement. Due to the uncertain political boundaries and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century, the frontier towns lost their significance. In the nineteenth century, except for Monastyryshche, all settlements declined economically and administratively. The practical value of the study lies in the fact that the results can be used in the development of historical and architectural reference plans, revitalisation projects for the centres of historic towns, downtown regeneration projects, and the commemoration of lost important monuments. The research materials can be used in a course on the history of urban planning and architecture of Ukraine, as well as in the development of tourist and recreational routes

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" Anne F. Widmayer University of Michigan In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson coins the term "cognitive mapping" to express the need for individuals in a postmodern society to position themselves in regard to seemingly chaotic social and political structures. A cognitive map enables "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (51). An individual's cognitive map can provide a reassuringly stable physical definition of self in a rapidly changing society, such as that of the twentieth century, or that of England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison's use of the trope of landscape and landscape gardening in his "Pleasures ofthe Imagination," I will argue, serves as a cognitive map of the social , political, and cultural attributes of the landed aristocracy that the primarily merchant class readers of the Spectator were attempting to acquire. The rage for landscape painting and landscape gardening was in full force during June and July of 1712, when the Spectator published Addison's essays on the sublime. As Edward Malins notes, the types of landscape gardening most favored during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in England were closely tied to the origins of the monarchs on the throne at the time. Thus, following the Restoration of Charles II, who had spent most of his life at the French court at Versailles, the French taste for geometric parterres featuring magnificent fountains and separated by radiating walkways was in vogue throughout England (5-6). William and Mary brought with them the even more formal Dutch style of landscape gardening. Closely clipped hedges, fantastical topiary, and groves of trees planted in the quincunx layout, affording ordered prospects from any point of view, were modeled at Hampton Court for the rest of the country (14-15). Under Anne, the native Englishwoman, the finicky attention paid to the royal gardens waned, and she is said to have "parsimoniously neglected [them]" (15), though she was careful to root out the distinctly Dutch box parterres upon the death of William (Clifford 98). Landscape gardening in England was never a politically neutral pursuit, for the previous style was quickly discarded in favor of the present monarch's taste. 19 20Rocky Mountain Review Painting manuals during the eighteenth century mirror the importance royal and aristocratic taste in landscapes had upon landscape painting. William Salmon's widely influential Polygraphice, which went through eight editions from 1672 to 1701, instructs a gentleman-painter to create landscapes that, like the French and Dutch parterres favored by Charles II and William and Mary, are meant to be viewed from above: "Make your Landskip to shoot (as it were) away, one part lower than another, making the nearest hill or place highest, and those that are farther off, to shoot away under that, that the Landskip may appear to be taken from the top of an hill" (35). Jonathan Richardson, the most important portrait painter of the early eighteenth century after Sir Godfrey Kneller's death, in his Theory ofPainting (1715) describes the pleasure a gentleman derives from simultaneously appreciating a painting and his own highly cultivated taste in approving it: "The pleasure that painting, as a dumb art, gives us, is like what we have from musick. . . in both we are delighted in observing the skill of the artist in proportion to it, and our own judgment to discover it. It is this. . . which gives us so much pleasure at the sight of natural pictures, a prospect, a fine sky, a garden, &c. . . ." (3). The aristocratic taste of the viewer is mapped upon the physical, whether it be a painting, a prospect, or a garden. As Addison notes in his earlier essay on taste, Number 409, natural aristocratic taste must be educated in order to be useful: "But notwithstanding this Faculty [taste] must in some measure be born with us, there are several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it, and without which it will be very uncertain, and of little use to the Person that possesses it." Late in the century, William...