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
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...
- Research Article
- 10.1111/j.1468-229x.1971.tb02014.x
- Feb 1, 1971
- History
ANCIENT: La Tyrannie Dans la Grèce antique. By Claude Mossé ANCIENT: Histoire des Doctrines Politiques en Grèce. By Claude Mossé ANCIENT: Roman Colonisation under the Republic. By E. T. Salmon ANCIENT: Roman Archaeology and Art: Essays and Studies by Sir Ian Richmond. Edited by Peter Salway ANCIENT: The title of Dr. J. J. Wilkes' ANCIENT: Constantine. By R. MacMullen MEDIEVAL: The Carolingian Renaissance and the idea of Kingship. By Walter Ullmann MEDIEVAL: The Twelfth Century Renaissance. By Christopher Brooke MEDIEVAL: The Reign of Stephen, 1135–54: Anarchy in England. By H. A. Cronne MEDIEVAL: The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–94. By John Julius Norwich MEDIEVAL: Frederick Barbarossa. By Marcel Pacaut (translated by Arnold J. Pomerans) MEDIEVAL: The Original Statutes of Cambridge University. The text and its History. By M. B. Hackett MEDIEVAL: England 1200–1640. By G. R. Elton MEDIEVAL: Die Bündisse der Bodenseestädte bis Zum Jahre 1390. Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte Des Einungswesens, Der Landfriedenswahrung und der Rechtsstellung der Reichsstädte. By Jörg Füchtner MEDIEVAL: The Muqaddimah MEDIEVAL: The Last Byzantine Renaissance. By Steven Runciman MEDIEVAL: The Great Schism 1378: The Disintegration of the Papacy. By J. Holland Smith MEDIEVAL: The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century. By Jerah Johnson and William Percy. (The Development of Western Civilization, edited by Edward W. Fox.) MEDIEVAL: English Gascony 1399–1453: A Study of War, Government and Politics During The Later Stages of the Hundred Years War. By M. G. A. Vale MEDIEVAL: The Hylle Cartulary. Edited by Robert W. Dunning MEDIEVAL: Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450. By A. J. Black MEDIEVAL: Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Quibert of Nogent (New York: Harper and Row EARLY MODERN: Scholars and Gentlemen. Universities and Society in Pre‐Industrial Britain 1500–1700. By Hugh Kearney EARLY MODERN: Edward vi: The Young King. The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset. By W. K. Jordan EARLY MODERN: Mary Queen of Scots. By Antonia Fraser EARLY MODERN: The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. By Gordon Donaldson EARLY MODERN: John Stubbs's Gaping Gulf with Letters and other Relevant Documents. Edited by Lloyd E. Berry EARLY MODERN: The Great Debasement: Currency and the Economy in Mid‐Tudor England By J. D. Gould EARLY MODERN: The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660–1688, and its Consequences. By Jennifer Levin EARLY MODERN: The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism. By C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas EARLY MODERN: The Family Life of Ralph Josselin. A Seventeenth‐Century Clergyman. An Essay in Historical Anthropology. By Alan Macfarlane THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Il Cameralismo E L'Assolutismo Tedesco. By Pierangelo Schiera THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Tsardom of Moscow 1547–1682. By George Vernadsky THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917. Compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1783. By Alan W. Fisher THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis: The Imperial Russian Government and Pugachev's Revolt, 1773–1775. By John T. Alexander THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: An Eighteenth‐Century Shopkeeper: Abraham Dent of Kirby Stephen. by T. S. Willan THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The British Establishment 1760–1784. By Alan Valentine THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics. By Ian R. Christie THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Jacques Godechot's account of the Taking of the Bastille THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Maria Theresa and the House of Austria. By C. A. Macartney THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The First European Revolution, 1776–1815. By Norman Hampson THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Robert Zapperi's critical edition of Emmanuel Sieyes's qu'est ce que le Tiers état THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Talleyrand: Statesman‐Priest. By Louis S. Greenbaum THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Jacobin Legacy. The Democratic Movement under the Directory. By Isser Woloch THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Police and the People. French Popular Protest 1789–1820. By Richard Cobb THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Europe 1780–1830. By Franklin L. Ford THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Spinning Mule. By Harold Catling THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadẑić, 1787–1864: Literacy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia. By Duncan Wilson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Insurrectionists. By W. J. Fishman THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Essays in European Economic History 1789–1914. Edited by F. Crouzet, W. H. Chaloner and W. M. Stern THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Industrialisation in Nineteenth Century Europe. By Tom Kemp THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Studies in Railway Expansion and the Capital Market in England, 1825–1873. By Seymour Broadbridge THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Constitutional Bureaucracy. By Henry Parris THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Treasury Control of the Civil Service, 1854–74. By Maurice Wright THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: P. T. Marsh's The Victorian Church in Decline THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A Discourse on the Studies of the University. By Adam Sedgwick, with introduction by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Chartism. A New Organisation of the People. By William Lovett and John Collins, with introduction by Asa Briggs THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Medical and Legal Aspects of Sanitary Reform. By Alexander P. Stewart and Edward Jenkins, with introduction by M. W. Flinn THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. By Andrew Mearns, edited with an introduction by Anthony S. Wohl THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Czech Revolution of 1848. By Stanley Z. Pech THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Studies in the Government and Control of Education since 1860. Edited by D. C. A. Bradshaw THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Education of the People. By Mary Sturt THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I. By Walter Mckenzie Pintner THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Gladstone and Kruger. Liberal Government and Colonial ‘Home rule’, 1880–1885. By D. M. Schreuder THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Entente Cordiale: The Origins and Negotiations of the Anglo‐French Agreements of 8 April 1904. By P. J. V. Rolo THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Milner's Young Men: The ‘Kindergarten’ in Edwardian England. By Walter Nimocks THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The central theme of the Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898–1914 by Zara S. Steiner THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Origins of the First World War. By L. C. F. Turner THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: First Sea Lord. An Authorized Biography of Admiral Lord Fisher. By Richard Hough THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Ireland and Anglo‐American Relations, 1899–1921. By Alan J. Ward THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War 1904–1914. By Samuel R. Williamson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Hankey, Man of Secrets, Volume One: 1877–1918. By S. W. Roskill THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Empire to Welfare State: English History, 1906–1967. By T. O. Lloyd THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Courtaulds—An Economic and Social History. By D. C. Coleman THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Soviet Achievement. By J. P. Nettl THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Impact of The Russian Revolution. 1917–1967. Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Irish Convention, 1917–18. By R. B. McDowell THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911–1928. Edited by Trevor Wilson THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Communism and the British Trade Unions 1924–1933: A Study of The National Minority Movement. By Roderick Martin THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The British Economy, 1870–1939. By Derek H. Aldcroft and Harry W. Richardson THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Abc of Communism. By N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky; introduction by E. H. Carr THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Trial of Bukharin. By George Katkov THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Lenin's Last Struggle. By Moshe Lewin THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic. By Hsi‐huey Liang THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MacDonald Versus Henderson: The Foreign Policy of the Second Labour Government. By David Carlton THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The latest two volumes of Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 (Edited by W. N. Medlicott, Douglas Dakin and M. E. Lambert. London: H.M.S.O.) deal wi
- Research Article
- 10.5406/24736031.49.1.01
- Jan 1, 2023
- Journal of Mormon History
Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History
- Research Article
- 10.1111/j.1468-229x.1971.tb02024.x
- Jun 1, 1971
- History
ANCIENT: Edessa ‘the Blessed City’. By J. B. Segal ANCIENT: Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of st. Augustine. By R. A. Markus ANCIENT: Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps. By George Galavaris MEDIEVAL: Life in Anglo‐Saxon England. By R. I. Page MEDIEVAL: The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. By A. P. Vlasto MEDIEVAL: It is a pleasure to welcome a new edition of Cecily Clark's edition of the Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154 MEDIEVAL: The Age of Chivalry. Manners and Morals 1000–1450. By C. T. Wood MEDIEVAL: The Knight and Chivalry. By Richard Barber MEDIEVAL: Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum s. Francisci. The Writings of leo, Rufino and Angelo Companions of st. Francis. Edited and translated by Rosalind B. Brooke MEDIEVAL: Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. By Thomas F. Glick MEDIEVAL: English Historical Documents: vol. iv, 1327–1485. Edited by A. R. Myers MEDIEVAL: Bernardo Giustiniani. A Venetian of the Quattrocento. By Patricia H. Labalme MEDIEVAL: The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. By Roberto Weiss MEDIEVAL: The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580. By D. S. Chambers MEDIEVAL: The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance. By Robert S. Lopez MEDIEVAL: Geoffrey Trease's the Condottieri EARLY MODERN: The Foundations of the Modern World 1300–1775. By L. Gottschalk, L. C. Mackinney and E. H. Pritchard EARLY MODERN: Monastic Iconography in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. By Joan Evans EARLY MODERN: Tudor Royal Proclamations. Edited by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin EARLY MODERN: Theatre of the World. By Frances A. Yates EARLY MODERN: La Plume, la Faucille et le Marteau: Institutions et Societe en France du Moyen age a la Revolution. By Roland Mousnier EARLY MODERN: The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640. By Davis Bitton EARLY MODERN: Les Oeconomies Royales de Sully, Volume 1, 1572–1594. Edited by David Buisseret and Bernard Barbiche EARLY MODERN: Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century. By Alan Everitt EARLY MODERN: Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy. Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth‐Century France. By Brian C. Armstrong EARLY MODERN: God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. By Christopher Hill EARLY MODERN: Donald Veall takes a good subject in the Popular Movement for law Reform, 1640–1660 EARLY MODERN: Michael Landon also begins his the triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678–1689 EARLY MODERN: Robert Harley, Puritan Politician. By Angus McInnes EARLY MODERN: New Cambridge Modern History Volume vi: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1715/25. Edited by J. S. Bromley EARLY MODERN: The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited with an Introduction by W. E. Minchinton EARLY MODERN: Britain After the Glorious Revolution 1689–1715. By Geoffrey Holmes and others THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648–1789. By E. N. Williams THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Anglo‐American Political Relations, 1675–1775. Edited by Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Muscovite and Mandarin. Russia's Trade with China and its Setting, 1727–1805. By C. M. Foust THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Philosopher king. the humanist pope benedict xiv. By Renée Haynes THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The British Empire Before the American Revolution. vol. xv. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the History of the British Empire, 1748–1776. By Lawrence Henry Gipson THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: In his study of Shipping and the American war 1775–83 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Parkers at Saltram, 1769–89. Everyday life in an Eighteenth‐Century House. By Ronald Fletcher THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The French Revolution. By François Furot and Denis Richot THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Biography is not a medium much used by present teachers of modern European history and Madame Roland and the age of Revolution by Gita May THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Napoleon and Paris. By Maurice Guerrini. Translated by Margery Weiner THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Power in the Industrial Revolution. By Richard L. Hills THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Textile Industry. By W. English THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Systèmes Agraires et Progrès Agricole: l'Assolement Triennal en Russie aux xviii e ‐xix e Siecles. By M. Confino THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The First Industrial Nation. An Economic History of Britain 1700–1914. By Peter Mathias THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy 1801–1825. By Patricia K. Grimsted THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Bureaucracy and Church Reform. the Organizational Response of the Church of England to Social Change 1800–1965. By Kenneth A. Thompson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau. By Michael D. Biddiss THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Marx Before Marxism. By David McLellan THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Baines's Account of the Woollen Manufacture of England. With a new Introduction by K. G. Ponting THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Victorian Crisis of Faith: Six Lectures. Edited by Anthony Symondson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Popular Movements, C. 1830–1850. Edited by J. T. Ward THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Pauper Press. A Study of Working‐Class Radicalism of the 1830s. By Patricia Hollis THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The war of the Unstamped. The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836. By J. H. Wiener THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Free Trade: Theory and Practice from Adam Smith to Keynes. By N. McCord THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Dietary Surveys of Dr. Edward Smith. By T. C. Barker, D. J. Oddy and John Yudkin THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Red Shirt and the Cross of Savoy: The Story of Italy's Risorgimento (1748‐1871). By George Martin THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Social Foundations of German Unification 1858–1871, Ideas and Institutions. By Theodore S. Hamerow THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Victorian Underworld. By Kellow Chesney THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Cosmopolitanism and the National State. By Friedrich Meinecke; translated by Robert B. Kimber THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Administration of Imperialism: Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office. By Robert V. Kubicek THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Sir John Brunner: Radical Plutocrat, 1842–1919. By Stephen E. Koss THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow. vol. 4. 1917: Year of Decision; vol. 5. 1918–1919: Victory and Aftermath. By Arthur J. Marder THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Russian Search for Peace February‐October 1917. By R. A. Wade THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Making of the Soviet State Apparatus. By Olga A. Narkiewicz THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Politics of Decontrol of Industry: Britain and the United States. By Susan Armitage THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: British Social Policy 1914–1939. By Bentley B. Gilbert THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1940. Edited by John Harey THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: American Aid to France 1938–40. By John McVickar Haight THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The Resistance Versus Vichy. By Peter Novick THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: De Gaulle's Foreign Policy 1944–1946. By A. W. De Porte THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Europe Since Hitler. By Walter Laqueur THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: The European Renaissance Since 1945. By Maurice Crouzet THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: France since 1918. By Herbert Tint THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Wars, Plots and Scandals in Post‐War France. By Philip M. Williams THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: French Politicians and Elections 1951–1969. By Philip M. Williams AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800. By Walter Rodney AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720. By Kwame Yeboa Daaku AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870. By John Peterson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: West African Countries and Peoples. By James Africanus Horton with an introduction by George Shepperson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Pre‐Colonial African Trade. Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa Before 1900. Edited by Richard Gray and David Birmingham AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. vol. i: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870–1914. Edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Reluctant Rebellion. The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal. By Shula Marks AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: The Administration of Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths. By I. F. Nicolson AFRIC
- Research Article
- 10.5325/style.56.3.0317
- Aug 1, 2022
- Style
The Evasion of Literary History
- Research Article
1
- 10.1162/afar_a_00538
- Aug 1, 2020
- African Arts
Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals
- Research Article
1
- 10.5406/15549399.54.4.035
- Dec 1, 2021
- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According to the pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged that Joseph Smith claimed to have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad Stowell claimed that he used seer stones to see lost, stolen, and hidden things and to seek treasure.1 An additional disorderly person hearing followed in 1829 in Lyons, New York. In 1830, a disorderly person charge brought Joseph Smith back to court in Bainbridge, New York. In the same year, a final disorderly person charge took him to court in Colesville, New York.2 Since these events, there has been a vigorous discussion over whether Smith's implication in these practices should disqualify his prophetic claims. This framing of the charges has sometimes overshadowed the legal debates.3Previous attempts to understand these legal events have assumed that these cases were built upon early examples of anti-fraud legislation.4 The basis of this interpretation is the use of the word "pretended" and allegations of "juggling," or sleight-of-hand, which appear in both New York's 1813 disorderly person statute and the accounts of Joseph Smith's court proceedings. However, reading these cases in terms of fraud may result from a cultural misunderstanding between modern researchers and their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Dan Vogel noted that Justice Neeley, who oversaw the 1826 case, was interested in allegedly pretended powers not economic deception.5This article proposes that Joseph Smith's early trials were about "pretended witchcraft and magic"6 and the related thoughtcrime of "pretended religion," categories of crime generated during the Enlightenment to categorize unorthodox religious traditions as witchcraft while negating their claims to miraculous or supernatural powers. Smith's defense that he really was a seer was irrelevant because the legal system categorized the spiritual practice of treasure seeking as pretended witchcraft and magic.To understand Joseph Smith's interactions with New York's 1813 disorderly person statute, historians must evaluate the historical and cultural trends associated with the legislative precedent that contributed to the 1813 statute. This comparative method has been a standard in witchcraft studies for decades.7 Throughout the analysis of these laws and charges, I use evidence from Joseph Smith's life outside the courtroom to demonstrate that fear of witchcraft motivated these charges while expressions of that fear were suppressed in the later narratives of these legal persecutions. Evidence outside the courtroom demonstrates that the conspiracies and persecutions endured by Joseph Smith were echoes of the witchcraft belief exemplified more than a century earlier in Salem, Massachusetts.The New York disorderly persons statue belongs to a specific legislative history aimed at magic and witchcraft. Legislation aimed at policing treasure seeking, the use of seer stones, and finding lost and stolen items through a gift from God or other supernatural means was meant to curb the influence of "the cunning-folk."8 Cunning-folk were folk-Christian healers whom religious authorities conflated with "diabolical witches" in early modern Europe, an imaginary category of people who were alleged to renounce their baptism and swear loyalty to the devil and his war on Christendom.9 Folk-Christian beliefs covered a range of magical practices. The King Henry Witchcraft Act of 1542 marked the earliest Anglophone legislation aimed at curbing treasure seeking. Queen Elizabeth's Witchcraft Act of 1563 repealed and replaced King Henry's Act and was subsequently superseded by the King James Witchcraft Act of 1604.10 All three intended to control the diabolical witch, but their language reveals their intent to penalize the cunning-folks' spiritual practices. This was also true of other acts passed throughout the British Isles.11 In 1692, the Massachusetts colony passed a witchcraft act based on the King James Act of 1604, explicitly targeted cunning-folk practices, including treasure seeking.12 This was the cornerstone upon which all Anglophone witchcraft legislation was founded, including the pretended witchcraft legislation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.The cultural conversation around demonology informed this legislation's development. Early modern demonologies began in a Roman Catholic environment obsessed with controlling heresy.13 These works fused ideas from the Bible, Patristic writings of the early church, the Lives of Saints, Greco-Roman literature, and classical poetry to construct a historical foundation of the "witch" stereotype. This stereotype combined with diabolized depictions of popular fairy belief, folk-Christianity deemed superstitious by religious authorities, heresy, and popular concerns about maleficium. Continental believers' demonologies targeted the folk-Christian observances of the cunning-folk as examples of superstition and a living tradition of witchcraft.14 This tool could be abused against a wide variety of people regardless of the content of their beliefs and practices. For example, demonologist Nicholas Rémy claimed that a woman whose practices were completely orthodox could still be guilty of witchcraft, that witches were guilty of imitating Elijah and Elisha, and that witches were guilty of using religion to mask their alleged diabolism.15 Thus folk-Christian practices were easily distorted into diabolical witchcraft by religious and legal authorities.English demonologies appeared in the decades after the English Reformation when religious leaders led "a Henrician assault on popular religion."16 Fear of cunning-folk carried over to North America, where Cotton Mather attributed the rise of witchcraft in New England to the arrival of Quakers, cunning-folk, and Native American shamans.17 When Richard Boulton wrote one of the last significant believers' demonologies in England, paraphrasing Exodus 22:18, he asserted, "wise Women are not fit to live," without elaboration.18 He fully expected his eighteenth-century audience to understand that the cunning-folk were the witches targeted in English demonology and anti-witchcraft law. At the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, Ezra Stiles would preach a sermon conflating cunning-folk activities and Native American spiritual practices with witchcraft. He did so to "lay this whole Iniquity open, that all the remains of it might be rooted out."19 Concerns over the diabolical witch and the cunning-folk would continue in the Anglophone world into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20Belief in the "diabolical witch" was the orthodox position between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were also detractors. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued that the devil took advantage of imbalances in the humor of black bile to produce a mental illness (melancholy). He argued that the devil did so to generate illusions that deceived people into believing that witches were real and that magic was efficacious.21 Weyer still targeted cunning-folk practices and conflated them with necromancy, but he denied their efficacy. English skeptic Reginald Scott argued that the sorcerers of the Bible, the religious authorities of the pagan world, Catholic priests, and cunning-folk—whom he called "cozening witches"—all utilized sleight of hand and deception, not actual demonic powers, to lead people into idolatry or to deceive them.22 These skeptical demonologists described the beliefs and practices of pagan religions, Catholicism, Christian enthusiasts, and the cunning-folk as false prophecy, legerdemain, juggling, and pretended powers. They remained a vocal but marginalized position within demonology throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the eighteenth century, skeptical demonology replaced believing demonology as the dominant view, and unorthodox spiritual practices came to be defined as pretended by those in power. In the Anglophone world, this included the practices of cunning-folk, gypsies, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples. However, it also included the beliefs and practices of charismatic Christians pejoratively labeled "enthusiasts." For example, Reverend Francis Hutchinson cited the beliefs and practices of radical Protestants known as the French Prophets as pretended. In his book on this religious minority, he consistently defined charismatic Christian claims to spiritual power as enthusiasm, pretended, legerdemain, and juggling.23 The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended diabolical witchcraft as a legal category in England and Scotland and made "pretended" the legal standard in Enlightenment England.24The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 developed within a broader legal environment that had produced similar statutes throughout Europe.25 The first of these was the French Edict of 1692, which reclassified witchcraft into crimes like poisoning, sacrilege, and pretended powers. Notably, a similar law produced in the same environment defined Protestantism as a pretended religion and penalized Protestant leaders for advocating pretended religion.26 In colonial America, the state used anti-vagrancy legislation to control religious deviants like Jesuits, Quakers, and Enthusiasts by labeling them vagabonds and disorderly persons, then penalizing them for breaking vagrancy law.27Skeptical witchcraft legislation continued to be developed in the American colonies and then the United States into the nineteenth century.28 When New York drafted the 1813 disorderly person statute, it continued this trend by utilizing the language of early European witchcraft legislation. The relevant portion of the law addresses vagrancy and defines a disorderly person as "all jugglers [those who cheat or deceive by sleight of hand or tricks of extraordinary dexterity], and . . . all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found."29 This statute had much in common with the anti-vagrancy and pretended witchcraft legislation of the Anglophone world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a product of a larger legal environment that employed the King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 as a model.30 This model preemptively defined religious and spiritual unorthodoxy as pretended witchcraft, magic, or religion. By categorizing people's beliefs and practices as pretended this legislation allowed the state to discriminate against unorthodox spiritual traditions by deliberately conflating them with criminal deception.Legislation based on skeptical demonology continued in nineteenth-century England with the 1824 Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.31 This act criminalized "every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Means, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose."32 According to Owen Davies, the clause was "widely used in prosecuting rural cunning-folk."33 Throughout the British Empire and its former colonies, the government used anti-vagrancy legislation and skeptical witchcraft legislation to categorize people's genuine beliefs and religious practices as "pretended" as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.34Besides Joseph Smith, only one other well-known example of disorderly person prosecution for treasure seeking in early America employs the word "pretended" to describe alleged supernatural gifts—the disorderly person charges against Dr. Luman Walters.35 Walters's case is only known due to newspaper articles discussing a documented case in New Hampshire.36 Because the notes from Luman Walters's trial are not available, it is impossible to explore how the court used "pretended" in disorderly person trials in the nineteenth century. But through Walters's alleged conviction in New York we can see how this legislation was used to penalize Walters for cunning-folk practices.37 Later allegations that Walters was a necromancer reveal the underlying religious bias which conflated cunning-folk with witches.38Although it is tempting to read "pretended" as fraud, there is reason to be cautious. According to Lynne Hume, in Anglophone witchcraft legislation "'pretends to exercise' means something else. The presumption is that people are not able to do these things and therefore whoever says they can is acting in a fraudulent manner."39 In previous generations, legal authorities and religious authorities superseded the cunning-folks' beliefs and practices by presuming that the cunning-folk were diabolical witches. After the Enlightenment, the same psychological process allowed Anglophone legal authorities to recategorize genuine belief and practices as pretended witchcraft. In both cases the legal system deliberately conflated unorthodox spiritual traditions with another crime to enable the policing of unorthodox spirituality. This tells us more about the beliefs of those in power than it does about the traditions these legal categories were designed to punish.Despite legal skepticism, belief in diabolical witchcraft continued into Joseph Smith's lifetime and beyond.40 The nineteenth-century repeal of Ireland's 1586 witchcraft statute inspired the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Antipas, which conflated Catholicism and Dissenters with witchcraft and urged Parliament to restrict both groups' religious activities. The pamphlet would have had a broad audience. As Andrew Sneddon has explained, "for the vast majority of those placed lower down the social ladder, especially those living in small, close-knit rural areas, the existence of the malefic witch continued to be regarded as a threat to their property and persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for North America."41The diabolical witch doctrine still had its believers in Joseph Smith's early nineteenth-century environment, although the law no longer recognized diabolical witchcraft as a reality. Smith's critic Alexander Campbell argued for a synthesized demonology that allowed for pretended necromancy and diabolical necromancy to coexist as two different kinds of witchcraft.42 Campbell's use of necromancy charges in witchcraft allegations was a standard pattern within the Second Great Awakening.43 Likewise, treasure seeking became a primary target of witchcraft fear and belief during this period.44 People who feared cunning-folk, alleged false-prophets, Catholics, Atheists, non-white spiritual practices, and religious movements like the Quakers, the Shakers, and the Wilkensonians saw the practices they feared most as both pretended and diabolical, often describing these groups as practicing necromancy.45 In the early nineteenth-century environment of legal skepticism and the common suppressed belief that diabolical witches existed, one would expect to find the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft used to label Joseph Smith's folk-Christian practices of treasure seeking in 1826 as well as charismatic expressions of Christian belief in 1830.When Joseph Smith, a young treasure seeker, had his first visionary experience, local religious leaders reacted negatively in ways that Smith family members considered surprising.46 At the age of fourteen, an unnamed assailant fired a bullet at Joseph Smith as he returned home.47 In 1823, Joseph Smith experienced an envisioned visitation of an angel, who declared that Smith would be a prophet and uncover a buried scripture. Within a year of this experience, rumors began to circulate that someone had disinterred and dissected his older brother Alvin's body.48 Dan Vogel and Michael Quinn believe that these were allegations of utilizing part of Alvin's body to acquire the golden plates. These rumors portrayed the act of acquiring the golden plates as a form of necromancy.49 These allegations may have been an initial, failed, attempt to charge Joseph Smith with a crime. As William Morain points out, "violating a grave" was "a felony offense for which, in 1824, he could have been incarcerated in the New York state prison for five years."50 A year later, in 1825, Josiah Stowell heard about Joseph Smith's gift for using his seer stone, perhaps tied to rumors of Joseph's 1823 vision of an angel who led him to the gold plates. Josiah Stowell requested that Joseph reside at his home as a farmworker who would aid Stowell in his treasure seeking. Joseph's parents agreed, perhaps to remove him from a dangerous environment. However, trouble followed Joseph Smith Jr. to Bainbridge, New York. In 1826, Stowell's nephew took Joseph Smith to court as a disorderly person.51Allegations of witchcraft continued after the trials as well, with some ascribed to Joseph's life in the 1820s. In 1834, testimonies ascribed to Smith's neighbors appeared in the anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed.52 The affidavits in this book describe Smith's activities through the paradigms of pretended and diabolical witchcraft. In one of these affidavits, discussing a period between the 1826 and 1830 hearings, Sophia Lewis, who also served as Emma Smith's midwife, reported that Joseph and Emma's child died horribly deformed at birth. Her affidavit is notable because the diabolical witch's doctrine and folklore viewed deformed births and stillbirth as evidence of witchcraft.53 Shortly after Alvin's death, Emma Smith returned to her parents' Methodist church in Harmony. When Joseph Smith attempted to attend, it sparked a controversy that included church members' allegations of necromancy and other witchcraft practices. In the 1879 remembrances of these events, Emma's relatives made it clear that those involved in this controversy believed Joseph Smith "was a conjurer" and "a sorcerer," clarifying that these were forms of "witchcraft."54 This same Methodist congregation later threatened violence against Joseph Smith, which forced him to move to the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York.55Beginning in 1830, Joseph Smith's restorationism utilized the example of the Christian curses used by Old Testament Prophets, as well as Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Joseph instructed his missionaries and followers to employ ritualized dusting of feet and clothing as a testament against those who persecuted them and rejected their message. This practice continued into the 1890s and would have provided ample material for those who believed that Joseph Smith and his followers were witches.56 Allegations of witchcraft continued in February 1831 with Alexander Campbell's publication of "Delusions," an anti-Mormon article in his periodical the Millennial Harbinger.57 In this article, Campbell uses familiar skeptical tropes and employs demonology to compare Joseph Smith and Mormonism with false prophecy, enthusiasm, and witchcraft. He directly compared Joseph Smith to Simon Magus and Elymas, the sorcerers of the Bible.58 Campbell leaves no room for equivocation: "I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith."59 During the same year, mobs pursued Joseph Smith's followers as they left New York for Ohio.60 In 1832, Campbell's was as a In anti-witchcraft violence can be in the that Joseph Smith and in this Joseph Smith that these which he as a to their As a of a by Smith may have of Joseph Smith to Simon they Joseph Smith, the attempted to his to therefore or Joseph the it . . . us his They attempted to a of into his Joseph claimed that the not to but they would . . . All were and one man on and body with his like a Smith had to the from his to more The easily use of has In the nineteenth century, the was believed to be a means of a witch's powers and was a common of anti-witchcraft of witchcraft belief continued later into Joseph Smith's life. In 1834, the would the affidavits in his Mormonism This like a of skeptical and believers' describing Smith's alleged folk-Christian activities through the pretended and diabolical witchcraft As late as Smith of Campbell's continued witchcraft The year, Joseph Smith's last treasure ended with a that his to the more and of this For there are more than one for in this This treasure took in Salem, that the that had followed Smith to this in could be through a of early American witchcraft belief and In Smith's Joseph of to He claimed that Smith, the of had two who of when they the of the false and to their and are that they were not left to the power of the devil and Smith, to their with a crime so would appear that many of Smith's him of witchcraft and magic throughout his early life and to the by and there are three of in witchcraft The first and most of court and of The is These that the these often the beliefs and of the historians of witchcraft these by controlling for allegations of into these accounts by their The category are In Joseph Smith's 1826, and 1830 disorderly person only the court into the category of do not have the trial notes or sources, only of the used to the 1826 pretrial are known as the and the The only in articles to the pretrial The first of these articles appeared in with in and The is by William as a of his alleged as at the 1826 was in for the 1830 there are accounts by Joseph Smith, his and other a in witchcraft An additional related to the 1830 disorderly person cases is a ascribed to Justice of the George who oversaw the disorderly person of As with all sources, these accounts should be read events they describe may not took in They may also or of these As in all accounts of witch we must for the of in of Joseph Smith's alleged accounts of the 1826 disorderly person pretrial evidence that they into the larger pattern of In the there is evidence about Joseph his and his folk-Christian The Joseph Smith as a a for cunning-folk who compared to Old Testament The addresses the cunning-folk practice of utilizing seer also that these were Stowell and as believed As an the claims that Josiah Stowell's and two . . . or to of Joseph Smith's of his seer stones folk-Christian practices. claims that after a vision of a stone, Joseph Smith to find his seer stone, and the significant about how he the after he found This is when one the writings of a modern Dutch In his book on his folk-Christian practices, provided a for the of miraculous stones to God and for upon the This a larger pattern of Joseph Smith his other seer stones, as by This may be a of Joseph his first seer The also the powers within a folk-Christian that when Joseph had the stone, one of the of an an earlier of Joseph Smith's alleged as a seer as an According to this Joseph Smith Sr. his alleged gift and many of his finding hidden and stolen and that he that both he and his were that this power that God had so him should be used only in of or its in and with a he his to his was to this power. He that the of would some the of the and enable him to see testimonies of Smith's powers were a in the The was Josiah who the testimonies of Joseph Sr. and Joseph examples of the Joseph Smith's Stowell many other not to that Smith the he and many to his The then that Justice Stowell's belief in Joseph Smith's alleged as a treasure I believe says I believe it is not a of I it to be claims Joseph Smith his treasure that the treasure not be by by after with and they to the by These are a of the folk-Christian utilized by treasure of which Joseph Smith Sr. is believed to have According to both the and these were to a placed on the treasure by the person who buried When their attempts to acquire the treasure the at the folk-Christian for the treasure a against the devil over the of seeking from some five feet in had been without a of war against this of was and they that the of or of some mental was the of their between folk-Christian and for Joseph Smith's and depictions of these practices as When demonologists argue against of cunning-folk beliefs and practices, they described the common that practices were by the Christian would then attempt to by that folk-Christian practices were forms of false an with the For those who believed demonologists than evidence of folk-Christian was evidence of the is on this of the 1826 it Joseph Smith's seer use and treasure seeking, it does not a of power he ascribed these to that would us to compare his alleged practices to the In of these it Joseph Smith's and activities
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Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
- Research Article
1
- 10.5204/mcj.459
- May 2, 2012
- M/C Journal
Café Space, Communication, Creativity, and Materialism
- Research Article
- 10.7916/d8r78cs5
- Mar 23, 2015
- Current Musicology
The well-known horse-racing ballad "Skewball" (hereafter, SB) has a well-established oral tradition in Ireland, with versions documented throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latest is a 1979 field recording of Derry folksinger and storyteller, Eddie Butcher (Shields 2011:58-9). (1) The ballad was also assimilated into African-American oral tradition, in which it was reconstructed and renamed "Stewball" (Lomax 1994:68-71; Scarborough 1925:61-4), and was still being documented in American folk tradition as late as the 1930s (Flanders 1939:172-4). In common with countless other folk songs, SB was appropriated by broadside (2) printers and subsequently enjoyed widespread public appeal throughout England in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, its popularity waning with the later decline of the broadside as a medium of ballad transmission and distribution. A comparative analysis of oral and broadside versions reveals clear differences between the two narratives. I argue that these variations were quite deliberate in origin, being a direct result of interpolations and excisions made by broadside ballad printers to the original oral narrative. By drawing comparisons between versions of SB collected from both oral and broadside sources, this paper will demonstrate that as a consequence of significant social and cultural advancements in the nineteenth century, SB was deliberately revised with the aim of enhancing its appeal and relevance to an increasingly literate middle class audience. Historical Context The narrative recounted in SB centres on a historically documented horse race held in Kildare, Ireland on March 30, 1752 (Heber 1753:106). (3) The race in question was a two-horse challenge between Sir Ralph Gore's Grey Mare (Pick 1803:504)--the clear favorite--and Arthur Mervin's Skewball (Pick 1803:91; Harewood 1835:309), a far lesser-known racehorse (if not completely unknown in Ireland), in which the latter unexpectedly triumphs to great acclaim. Unsurprisingly, the narrative of SB has changed considerably over time. Such variation is to be expected from a ballad that was based on eighteenth-century events in Ireland, enjoyed widespread popular appeal as a nineteenth-century English broadside printing, became established in African-American slave culture and later appeared as a work song among African-American prisoners, (4) and ultimately became popularised on both sides of the Atlantic in the folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are, however, key narrative features that are common to all documented oral and broadside versions of the ballad, (5) namely: (i) A two-horse challenge for a considerable purse is arranged to be held on "the plains of Kildare" between Sir Ralph Gore and Arthur Mervin, both of whom were well-known figures in eighteenth-century Irish horse racing circles, and served as presidents of the Irish Jockey Club in the late 1750s (Carpenter 1998:312). (6) (ii) Although fleeting comparative references are periodically made to other racehorses, only two are mentioned as participating in the contest related in the ballad. The race favorite is a grey mare owned by Gore and is referred to variously in the ballads as either Grey Mare, Maid Sportly, or Miss Portly/Portsley/ Sportl(e)y /Sportsly/Sprightly, or in later versions as Miss Grizzle. (7) The lesser-known challenger--a skewbald gelding--is owned by Marvin and known as Skewball8 throughout all documented versions (iii) Upon hearing of the challenge and the wager that has been put down, the skewbald--the clear second favorite in the contest--instructs his master to place a considerable bet as he is assured of victory. Despite the established reputation of the favorite, Skewball wins easily to both the surprise and delight of the assembled crowd. Despite both oral and broadside versions of SB sharing the overall subject matter and common structure shown above, a comparative analysis of the two genres reveals some striking differences. …
- Research Article
- 10.1086/653696
- Aug 1, 2010
- Modern Philology
<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.
- Research Article
6
- 10.1080/04353684.1965.11879290
- Oct 1, 1965
- Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography
Until the eighteenth century in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, one general pattern of landholdings and settlement predominated. Land was organized either as single large grazing farms or tacks, or in a form of communal openfield agriculture comprising restricted infield and outfield, and predominant common pasture. The associated settlement was clustered in clachans.1 Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to a lesser extent in the present century, various changes have taken place in this landscape. The pattern has become essentially one of enclosed fields, often with regular lines, and settlement throughout the region is now predominantly dispersed, with only occasional relict or adventitious clusters. Only in a few areas, near the fringes of the Lowlands, do non-agricultural villages form a significant part of the landscape. The nature of the enclosure, moreover, differs considerably from one area of the Highlands to another. In the Inner Hebrides and along the southern fringes of the Highland seaboard, single small holdings and single farms of varying sizes are the predominant elements; crofting townships are few and far between. On the seaboard of the West Highland mainland, large grazing farms alternate with crofting townships. But in the Outer Hebrides, crofting townships of several types form the most important element in the landholdings pattern.2 These internal differences within the broad West Highland region are rarely the result of purely physical factors. More usually the different patterns have been the result of individual initiative. Scotland's Enclosure Acts3 enabled any landlord to enclose lands without the need to obtain an enabling Act of Parliament as was required of his English counterpart. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such initiative by individual landlords gave rise to various social, technical and agrarian changes. In turn, the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the introduction of changing policies of land settlement and other agrarian changes which have been instigated both by private individuals and by Government bodies. The different changes have resulted through time in the present pattern of landholdings and settlement, not only according to the different ideas of the various landlords, but lso to the degree of isolation from, or accessibility to, the centres of these ideas, the timing of the changes, and to the length of period over which changes took place. In the Inner Hebrides, the Clyde Islands and the Lowlands (Fig. 1) the impact of the Agricultural Revolution was felt much earlier than elsewhere in Highland Scotland. The changeover in these areas from common to individual farming, together with a drift of population from the land to the villages, occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was at a time when pressure of population on resources was less than it was when changes subsequently affected the West Highland mainland and many of the islands. In Islay in the Inner Hebrides, for example, migration to the rising industrial centres of Lowland Scotland had been taking place gradually from the eighteenth century onwards. This migration aided the enlightened policy of the major landlord, Campbell of Shawfield, and his relatives. The policy aimed at a gradual reduction in numbers of people on the land, through the creation of non-agricultural villages. In these villages, agricultural day-labourers, craftsmen, fishermen, foresters, lead-miners and distillery workers feued land4 and built houses to a definite plan of the landlord. In Islay there were always relatively fewer people dependent on the land than elsewhere in the region. This in itself assisted reorganization of landholdings, whether planned or informal, not only in the earlier
- Supplementary Content
8
- 10.25904/1912/1420
- Jan 23, 2018
- Griffith Research Online (Griffith University, Queensland, Australia)
This thesis sets out to evaluate the role of consumer spaces in twentieth-century daily life. It is not concerned with the act of consumption but rather with the ways in which the social, cultural and educative role of the retail spaces is used as a marketing tool. The links that have been established between civic and commercial space over the last three hundred years are charted in order to locate the reasoning behind the growing tendency to design shopping malls as social and cultural spaces in the twentieth century. Three principal benefits to developers of the retails spaces from the promotion of consumer spaces as public spaces are identified in the thesis. First, links between the public and commercial developed to encourage potential customers into a particular retail space as opposed to its competition. Second, consumer spaces are developed as social and leisure spaces to encourage consumer loyalty. That is, they are developed as a means of encouraging repeat visits. Third, they are developed as a tactic to keep potential shoppers in the retail space for a longer duration. The logic behind this strategy being the more time spent in a consumer space the more goods purchased. The origins of this merchandising practice are traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries well before the advent of the department store form. The thesis located a number of strategies developed in the seventeenth century by tradesmen and merchants to sell their wares. At this time, it is evident that the consumer space was opened up to the public who were encouraged to enter without the obligation to purchase. Further, it is evident that, by the eighteenth century, shopkeepers and manufacturers' workshops included showrooms where potential customers could sit and take tea. Public spaces were also designed within the retail space so that potential customers could see and be seen. British shopkeepers often linked the retail space with the social practice of promenading by strategically situating their premises in an already established thoroughfare or site used for promenading. By the late eighteenth century, consumer spaces housed entertainment facilities such as art galleries, exhibitions and lounging rooms. After tracing the development of this merchandising strategy to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the links that can be made between twentieth-century consumer spaces is examined. In addition, the early developments of shopping centres in the 1940s and 1950s are surveyed and their developmental logic and merchandising strategies are compared with more recent forms of shopping malls developed from the 1970s and 1980s.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/sex.2007.0054
- Jan 1, 2007
- Journal of the History of Sexuality
Reviewed by: A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain George Haggerty A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain. By Robert Darby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 368. $35.00 (cloth). Robert Darby has added a fascinating chapter to the history of sexuality by detailing the attitudes toward the foreskin and the rise of circumcision in Britain throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The book is impressive in its scholarly erudition and depth of observation, and it builds on various studies of sexuality, especially masturbation, by Thomas Laqueur and others. In addition to its careful attention to detail and its impressive range of observations, the book is largely a pleasure to read. Clear and carefully argued, it builds a case that is as fascinating as it is penetrating. At times there are repetitions and restatements of facts stated earlier, but in every case the new context seems to warrant these repetitions, and I could not imagine the study any shorter. Because Darby writes so clearly about such complex and at times contradictory material, I would be pleased to have the study continue even further into the twentieth century and into cultures beyond the British. He does have a good deal to say about the United States and Australia, to be sure, but we have to wait for a more complete study of the latter, which we are assured in the conclusion is his next book-length project. The thesis of this book is a simple one. In the eighteenth century circumcision was considered an act of deformation, relegated to Jewish and Muslim cultures, but by the early twentieth century had become a fairly common medical procedure, at least among the elite classes. Darby sets out to explain that change in attitudes. In doing so he talks in detail about masturbation phobia in families, in schools, and in the British culture at large. He also talks about the ways in which various nervous complaints were connected to the foreskin. As Darby tells us in his introduction: Frederick Hodges locates the origin of circumcision in Europe and Britain specifically in the masturbation phobia of the eighteenth century and in theories of reflex neurosis, which held that disturbances of the nervous equilibrium could cause disease and which thus targeted sensitive parts of the body as the guilty parties. In this scenario, particularly according to the work of Claude-François Lallemand on spermatorrhea, erotic sensation was redefined as irritation, prepubertal orgasms misinterpreted as epilepsy, and erections viewed as pathological; as the dynamic and most sensitive part of the penis, the foreskin was particularly suspect. (7) The implications of this illogical connection make chilling reading, and at times this book is impossible to put down. "The conviction that circumcision would alter sexual behavior was thus not a side effect of a procedure adopted as a health precaution," Darby tells us, "but its original purpose" [End Page 318] (15). This is the story that Darby tells, and the general shape of his argument is what I will explain here. I want to say at the outset, though, that I think this is a wonderful study that I would recommend without qualification to historians of sexuality and medicine. Darby begins his study by looking at various eighteenth-century accounts of the foreskin. There, "in striking contrast to the nineteenth century," he points out, "there was no concern that a man's well-being was somehow threatened by his foreskin, and no sign of the 'congenital phimosis' that suddenly become so common in boys after the 1860s" (25). (Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin is too tight for the glans to emerge. It was prevalent in cases of syphilis, "since the disease often produced scabs that fused foreskin to glans" [26].) Eighteenth-century medicine and medical practice were backward by later nineteenth-century standards. Robert James, the author of a famous medical dictionary (A Medicinal Dictionary, 1743–45), referred to circumcision as a therapeutic procedure, and he also, "more ominously," according to Darby (41), discussed the operation in terms of its hygienic importance...