Plot, Fable, and the Novel: Intrigue and Early English Fiction

“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>

The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature. Tina Skouen. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+234.

151 that much of his criticism of his subjects is prompted by his political and religious prejudices.’’ The scope of the volume necessarily limits the depth of the discussion of selected texts, and, although a vast landscape is to be surveyed in limited space, several examples recur: we are told twice of Johnson’s complaint that Sprat’s life of Cowley was ‘‘a funeral oration rather than a history ’’; and twice that Aubrey describes Barrow ‘‘as pale as the candle he studied by.’’ As these instances suggest, the mode of this study is often descriptive and anecdotal , yielding information about the content of these texts, but not probing beyond the initial parameters of the discussion . One would like to hear more— but does not—about a potentially promising idea: that these seventeenth-century biographies are the prelude to the novel. In the interesting and persuasive account of Roger North’s lives of his brothers, Mr. Pritchard writes that his ‘‘phrasing and sentence structure are often marked by a certain awkwardness or oddity, which no doubt helps account for his dissatisfaction with his writing ’’—a puzzling conclusion given Mr. Pritchard’s argument that the selfesteem of the Norths was often at variance with their achievements, and belied by the vivid passages of prose he quotes but does not analyze. Given Mr. Pritchard ’s assertion of the importance of family history in seventeenth-century biography, he pays surprisingly little attention to the remarkable contribution that women made to this genre: Ann Fanshawe, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Halkett, Lucy Hutchinson and, most of all, Anne Clifford, whose monumental family history surely rivals ‘‘The Lives of the Berkeleys.’’ The rather slender Selected Bibliography and the Index, which includes proper names but none of the concepts that one might expect to find, may suggest something about the conception of this project, that it has not fully or imaginatively engaged with other critical approaches. It calmly categorizes rather than taking us to fresh understanding . Sharon Seelig Smith College TIMOTHY FEIST. The Stationers’ Voice: The English Almanac Trade in the Early Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005. Pp. vii ⫹ 129. $24. Mr. Feist begins by making a case for examining only the eighteen bookalmanac titles published in 1712 held in the University of Texas collection at the Harry Ransom Center. They were the only almanacs he could easily check; there were, he says, only nineteen titles published that year at any rate; and analysis of a limited body of evidence can be tremendously productive. His strategy is plausible. He spends chapters providing a history of the almanac trade in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, explaining the structure of the Stationers’ Company and how it controlled its English Stock monopolies, recounting the cases of various almanac printers, and so on, but the reader catches only fleeting glimpses of his 1712 sample until the penultimate chapter, when their content is lengthily discussed . The book has flaws. The third sentence of the Introduction dubiously suggests that late seventeenth-century booksellers and printers were responsible for ‘‘instigating that chaotic jumble of political, scientific, and theological ideas which worried the young polem- 152 icist,’’ Defoe, who is quoted earlier. While they may have sympathized with those ideas, booksellers and printers are not generally regarded as their main intellectual source; they were the businessmen and women who produced and sold them. Occasionally Mr. Feist does not follow through on his research. He might have looked at Maureen Bell’s— among others’—work, before exhorting his readers to discover women in the booktrade among these well-known Stationers’ Company records. On-line searching of the ODNB would soon have shown that it is not accurate to say that ‘‘aside from Heptinstall’s devotion to him, nothing can be discovered of Pead,’’ for he turns out to be the relatively famous preacher Deuell Peade (d. 1727). His discussion of piecework printing fails to note that the practice was not confined to almanacs in the eighteenth century, but has a welldocumented history across most genres, and not just ‘‘as insurance against piracy .’’ He makes intriguing conjectures, such as that the Stationers’ Company was able to control Elinor James’s output by giving her husband lucrative...

British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

The entire literature concerned with the philosophy and methodology of history during the three centuries preceding 1800 can be schematically divided into two groups, although in individual works the two aspects were often fused and difficult to differentiate, especially in the eighteenth century when these two branches met. The first tendency was educational or pedagogical, the second and ancillary. One branch stemmed from the antique tradition of didactic history, clearly the product of classical influences such as rhetoric and Stoicism. and emphasized the utilitarian role of history in the private and public sphere. This so-called exemplar history' stressed the efficacy of historical examples as opposed to philosophical principles. In the various artes historicae of the sixteenth century, those essays describing the ways or means of studying or writing history, this was the emphasis which we meet almost exclusively. We can also say pedagogical in the strict sense of the word, insofar as these considerations about the role of history were to be found in larger educational treatises from Vives until the end of the eighteenth century Rollin, La Chalotais, or Condillac, to mention only a few later writers.2 The second branch was a younger one, beginning in the seventeenth century. This variety was a product of such influences as Cartesianism and the monastic tradition of erudite research; it dealt with questions of historical epistemology and logic, and contained, for example, debates on historical pyrrhonism. Seen from this viewpoint, critical may be broadly interpreted to include, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historical dictionaries and catalogues, and, in the eighteenth century, historical journals. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as we shall see, maintained an intense interest in the question of historical pyrrhonism. Yet all but a minority of the historical treaties produced at this time were essentially in nature, and logic came in second place. Any speculations about historical doubt derived generally from didactic motivations, rather than from philosophical or pyrrhonistic detachment. We may say that in the eighteenth century there developed a diversification of concerns. Questions of method, problems, or criticism became more defined and multiplied. Old elements of historical theory underwent adaptation in order to meet new social and political needs. This is clearly noticeable in the role of history in the programs or in the introductions and contents of the historical catechisms. At the same time, there was a fusion of research and his-

Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age Mortality in Western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Flinn has shown, was characterized by great instability: periods of mortality alternating with periods of relatively low mortality. The frequent crises were caused by famine, epidemic disease, and war, sometimes working in combination, sometimes not. After about 1650 or 1700, these great crises became progressively less frequent and mortality moved slowly and unevenly toward its present state of stability, with little fluctuation in crude death rates from year to year.' Famine, the most important cause of these early modern mortality crises, disappeared from much of Western Europe by the early eighteenth century. Southern England suffered its last major food crisis-which reached famine proportions in certain regions-in 1597. Northern England experienced another wrenching famine in 1623 and a slight one in I649 but weathered the harvest failures of the i69os without widespread starvation. A few parishes in the English Midlands were struck by famine from 1727 to 1728, but thereafter England has been free of famine. Scotland had terrible famines in 1623 and again in the i69os but then managed to avert widespread starvation after harvest failures. France was especially subject to famine in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with terrible crises falling in 16301631, 1649-1652, 1661-I662, 1693-I694, and 1709-1710. After 1710, most of France was famine-free until 1795, when the dislocations of war and the confusion of the government again brought starvation to the poor. Germany, Scandinavia, and Switzerland suffered famine from 1770 to 1772 and many parts of Europe experienced yet another food crisis in i816. Ireland, of course, was devastated by famine as late as the I84os.2

So Abraham Cowley, in his ode ‘To the Royal Society’, romantically figures Francis Bacon’s reformation of natural philosophy as the overthrow of the tyranny of scholastic learning. During the seventeenth century, the authority of the ancients had been challenged by new experimental and empirical methodologies far removed from the ‘Magick’ in Cowley’s paradoxical metaphor. Despite the ode’s claims, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the new natural philosophy had not yet established supremacy: many rival narratives of nature competed for cultural acceptance. This book examines the ways in which Jonathan Swift, writing at this time of great transition, engaged with developments in knowledge of the external observable world, and with the culture of scientific discovery and practice, including the textual transmission of ideas. More particularly, the study focuses upon the theological, political and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considers what they tell us about Swift’s literary strategies and the growth of his often satiric imagination.

Reading the Popes: The <i>Liber pontificalis</i> and Its Editors

118BOOK REVIEWS out, the inquisitions in the Venetian state were not so mild or inactive in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as historians have believed. This excellent study includes documents. Paul E Grendler University ofToronto (Emeritus) I Religiosi a Corte: Teología, política e diplomazia in Antico regime. (Atti del seminario di studi Georgetown University a Villa "Le Balze," Fiesole, 20 ottobre 1995.) Edited by Flavio Rurale. [Europa delle Corti; Biblioteca del Cinquecento, 85.] (Rome: Bulzoni Editore. 1998. Pp. 353. Lire 48.000 paperback .) This volume is a collection of nine essays presented in October, 1995, at a conference in Fiesole, Italy. The essays focus on the "varied and complex social and political relations and transversal alliances" that characterize ecclesiastics at the courts of Catholic Europe in the ancien régime,with emphasis on Spain. The essays reveal an intermingling of theology and politics, evident in both theory and practice: in the theoretical realm in the sacralization of the king and the divine origin of his sovereignty, eventually leading to politics emancipated from theology in Hobbes and Spinoza; and in the daily practice of government where the civil Catholic authority "functioned alongside the priestly power of bishopjudges , inquisitors, theologians, and confessors" (p. 14). In the introduction, Rurale,who has published extensively on the theme, provides an insightful, well-referenced essay defining the roles of the "the religious at court." m these courts of the princes, the roles of the Religious (clerics of Regular Orders) and secular administrators intermingled, and their legitimacy and power depended on the ability of each group to gam close proximity to the princes—the major patrons of the orders—and their favorites. Further, Rurale shows how the blurring of the categories of clergy and laity—owing to shared mentalities, values, and lifestyles of nobles and prelates at court—render the designation "Church and State" inadequate and outmoded in describing political strategies and motivations during the period. Neither the Church and its orders, nor the state and its bureaucracy, represented monolithic centers of power; instead, both exhibited a plurality of jurisdictions , disagreements, and factions. Conflict and compromise characterized relations between and among various groups such as the Roman Curia and the bishops, the bishops and the Regulars, and the old and new orders. This reduces to cliché the tendency to associate papal interests with strategies of a single religious order. For example, the presumed homogeneity in the intervention of the Regulars—usually the case of the Jesuits—as though they were a unified troupe of the Pope after the Tridentine censure, fails to take into account the often-conflicting ideas and motivations of the Curia, superiors (Case Generalizie ), sovereigns, and individuals at court. BOOK REVIEWS119 The essays in this volume describe the relations, intrigues, and conflicts in selected cases of heretofore "neglected places of power and protagonists of political action." For example, Gianvittorio Signorotto shows in his essay that in the seventeenth century Regulars—usually Capuchins chosen for their poverty, religious devotion, and impartiality—served as legates representing the political interests of the patriciate of Milan at the court of Spain. Further, these religious effectively sought relief from the disastrous effects of war, pestilence, and famine on the populace; and the presence of these legates at court served to assuage the concerns of the monarchy, notably in the case of Philip TV, who viewed the crises in his realm as a sign of God's disapproval. Other topics covered in the essays include the Neapolitan court in the midsixteenth century (Carlos José Hernando Sánchez); transformation and crisis in the Company ofJesus during the last thirty years of the sixteenth century (José Martínez MiMn); the role of Diego de Chaves, confessor of Philip II (Carlos Javier de Carlos Morales); the adept influence of Luis de Aliaga III,the Inquisitor General and confessor of Philip III (Bernardo J. García Garcia); the missions and politics of Regular Orders in the Antilles during the seventeenth century (Giovanni Pizzorusso); and the Jesuits in French North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Matteo Sanfilippo). Finally,this volume abounds with references and notes,and it concludes with a helpful index of names. The sound scholarship in these essays...

A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania

Affective Profit

From Exemplarity to Suspicion. The Genevan Church between the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

The rise of Lagos, which became the principal port of the ‘Slave Coast’ at the end of the eighteenth century, can only be understood by reference to the interaction between the European Atlantic trade and the indigenous canoe-borne trade along the coastal lagoons. European traders in the sixteenth century used the Lagos channel and the lagoon to approach the Ijebu kingdom, where slaves and cloth were purchased, but this trade lapsed in the seventeenth century. The Lagos settlement originated as a fishing hamlet, but was occupied as a military base by Benin around the end of the sixteenth century. Benin expansion to the west may have been designed to prevent European trade with Ijebu, in the interests of a Benin monopoly. Lagos remained formally subject to Benin until the nineteenth century, but the decline of Benin power in the eighteenth century left it effectively independent. European sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attest trade in cloth and slaves passing along the lagoons through Lagos to Allada and Whydah in the west. Although this pattern of trade has been assumed to date back to pre-European times, it was more probably a consequence of the European presence, and more specifically of the westward drift of European interest along the coast from Benin after the sixteenth century. European traders began to show an active interest in the lagoon trade to the east of Allada in the early eighteenth century, and again began to explore the possibility of using the Lagos channel to bapproach the inland lagoons. Lagos developed as an Atlantic port from the 1760s, exporting slaves and Ijebu cloth, but its importance was limited by its remoteness from any major source of slaves. Its emergence as a major port in the late eighteenth century was due to the disruption of slave shipments from ports further west by military pressure from Dahomey, which led to the diversion of slave supplies eastward along the lagoons for shipment from Lagos.

A new form of entertainment on the market: the novels of amorous intrigue In the seventeenth century, first on the Continent and then in England, a modest new form of print entertainment appeared, but it seems to have taken its readers by storm. It was called ‘the novel’, and was viewed by contemporaries like Aphra Behn, William Congreve and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz as a symptom of a ‘novel’ turn in modern taste. This novel was short (compared to romance), written in prose rather than poetry, usually took sex and/or love as its topic and was usually set in the present rather than in some earlier ancient or legendary era. The most successful English writers of novels between 1683 and 1740 were Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood. Their success came from their development of a specific type of novel, the novel of amorous intrigue, designed to appeal to readers in the burgeoning English market in printed books. But these novels of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century have been an embarrassment to most of the English literary history of the novel written since the late eighteenth century. Intent upon legitimatising the novel as a form of literature, literary histories of the novel written in the many years between Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance (1785) and Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) have laboured to efface the centrality of the enormously popular novels of amorous intrigue. By doing so, most literary history has obscured the productive symbiosis between this early type of English fiction, and those narratives written by the three canonical authors usually installed in the position of the fathers of the English novel: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.