The Material Worlds of Singlewomen Revealed Through Their Wills from the Diocese of Norwich 1604–1686

Mating by proxy: a novel perspective to donor conception

Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 218, hb. £45, ISBN: 0754641155Due to the plethora of academic literature on the subject one might wonder what could be added to the scholarship on the pamphlet wars of the English Revolution. Both historians and literary scholars have looked at them from a variety of angles, studying the material aspects of pamphlet and newsbook production (Joad Raymond) as well as the fragmentation of literary genres in the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century (Nigel Smith), or the rites of secrecy in royalist writings (Lois Potter). Recent scholars have antedated the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to the civil war period and have engaged with the role gender played within this public sphere (Sharon Achinstein, Dagmar Freist, Ann Hughes, Susan Wiseman). The list could go on. All of these works, moreover, are to varying extents optimistic about the democratising effects of pamphlet culture and participatory opportunities for women within it (p. 1). The English civil wars, the consensus goes, did not only challenge the traditional social order, but also established gender hierarchies; and the emergence of sectarian movements in particular gave women new space for agency (Patricia Crawford, Keith Thomas). Yet Marcus Nevitt adds a word of caution.Nevitt's book on Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660 deals as much with female agency as with limitations to that agency. Whenever a woman dared to speak up there was a man to silence her, and if there was not then public order was perceived as under threat and those failing to act were taken to account. In a number of case studies that look at the contributions of non-aristocratic women to revolutionary pamphlet culture Nevitt engages both with the 'rhetorical devices' of women's writings as well as with women's involvement in the 'material circumstances' (p. 4) of pamphlet production, and illustrates how female agents negotiated their way around a male-dominated world. In doing so, Nevitt offers what he calls 'a more gender-sensitive picture' (p. 4) of revolutionary print culture and at the same time a more balanced account of the actions of proto-feminist icons, such as Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, or 'Parliament Joan', without diminishing their achievements.When we meet the Leveller Katherine Chidley in chapter one, for instance, we learn of her extraordinary achievements in rebutting the anti-tolerationist writings of the Presbyterian lecturer and pamphleteer Thomas Edwards in works such as her Justifications of the Independent Churches of Christ (1641). Yet the intellectual significance of Chidley's contributions to the toleration debate was constantly being undermined by men who feared that 'female discursivity' implied 'male weakness' (p. 25). Chidley was attacked, Nevitt argues, not for what she said, but because she was female and had transgressed 'the necessary deference and silence of women in the early modern period' (p. 22). While Edwards himself for a long time decided to ignore Chidley's contributions, Edwards's critics delighted in the humiliation he suffered through Chidley. For being criticised by a woman was seen as a 'symbolic sleight' that Edwards would not be able to live down. Hezekiah Woodward, for instance, described Chidley's attack on Edwards as 'a spetting in his face' (p. 29), a physical rather than an intellectual violation and a 'wilful transgression... of social prohibition' (p. 30). Even men who agreed with Chidley's tolerationist views, it seems, would not accept her as a rational intellectual equal.Chapter two on women's reactions to the regicide is based on similar assumptions about 'a cross-party conviction of the necessity of female silence' (p. 51). Nevitt argues that 'around the time of the king's trial women's political consciousnesses were sensitively attuned to recent developments in matters of state' (p. …

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

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

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

Reviewed by: Idea and Ontology. An Essay in Early Modern Metaphysics of Ideas Ericka Tucker Marc A. Hight. Idea and Ontology. An Essay in Early Modern Metaphysics of Ideas. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 278. Cloth, $58.00. "Based on a true story: the early modern tale." In Idea and Ontology, Marc Hight argues that the story we have been told about early modern philosophy is false. What Hight calls the "early modern tale" tells us that beginning with Descartes and ending with Berkeley, metaphysics began its slide into the historical dustbin, replaced by epistemology as first philosophy. The categories of medieval metaphysics, substance and mode, so the story goes, could no longer serve the needs of the moderns, specifically their questions about the nature of ideas. Ideas could not easily be categorized as either substances or modes, and because of this difficulty, metaphysical questions were abandoned in favor of epistemological questions about the nature of representation and certainty. Hight reexamines the early modern tradition to find the metaphysicians behind the epistemologists' masks supposed by the early modern tale. Once the metaphysical questions are revealed as central to early modern philosophy, Hight argues that Berkeley's immaterialism, rather than ridiculous, is the final and triumphant conclusion of the metaphysical speculations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By showing that ideas were neither independent substances nor fully dependent modes, Berkeley solves the metaphysical problem of ideas that had vexed Descartes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume. Only once we have seen the metaphysical character of early modern debates and abandoned the early modern tale can we finally recognize, Hight argues, the importance of metaphysics for contemporary philosophy, and thus the current relevance of Berkeley. One could criticize Hight for failing to properly identify the tellers of this early modern tale, and for attributing too much to those he finally identifies: Yolton, Lennon, and Watson. But surely this is a story we all have heard. Although outside the Vienna Circle it might be hard to find anyone willing to express this sentiment explicitly, Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century hardly celebrated metaphysics. To be taken seriously, historians working on philosophers like Berkeley, a metaphysician if ever there was one, needed to rehabilitate them. Hight argues that by turning early modern philosophers into epistemologists, historians have done violence to those figures who were clearly metaphysicians and to debates that clearly concerned metaphysical questions. Although I am sympathetic to Hight's project, I did not find the strongest form of his thesis, that these figures were primarily interested in the metaphysical status of ideas, completely convincing. Part of the difficulty resides in Hight's criteria for what counts as "doing metaphysics." For Hight, using a substance-mode ontology is enough to make one a metaphysician, but even if this is what we might assume today, it is not at all clear that this was true for early modern thinkers. Because he identifies metaphysics "by our lights," Hight manages to side-step the central issue in the early modern tale, namely, were the early moderns abandoning metaphysics as they knew it? The problem of the ontological status of ideas was neither virgin territory nor scorched earth in the seventeenth century; on the contrary, it was well-tilled ground. Bracketing metaphysical questions leading to unwelcome conclusions was a genuine strategy that early modern philosophers adopted to avoid what they took to be scholastic quagmires or theological-political minefields. Trying to understand the status of metaphysics in the early modern period without this background is problematic, and without explicitly addressing it, Hight's case that these figures were primarily interested in metaphysical questions is weaker than it should be. Hight's book persuasively shows that the early moderns were exploring the ways in which the scholastic metaphysical categories could and could not be extended to answer questions about the nature of ideas. While Hight sees only Berkeley as having innovated within this history, creating a concept of "quasi-substances," and thus as the only philosopher who broke the chains of substance-mode ontology to finally solve "the early modern problem of ideas," each of the figures he covers could be seen...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

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

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism Daniel Vitkus (bio) The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity Bruno Latour declares, in We Have Never Been Modern, that "Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists. . ." (10). I suppose that the impossible task of this journal's forum on the question of (early) modernity is to contend with all of that intellectual baggage. The easiest solution is to reject the label of "modernity" (and, along with it, "early modernity") entirely. We could take all the definitions and debates and throw them into a massive data dump. But that would be too easy. The weight of our predecessors hangs on us, demanding that we respond, even if we reject the popular notion that would declare modernity to be a rationality, progress, Westernization and modernization that came to replace other and older ways of life. So what definition of "modernity" or "early modernity" can we employ, if any? What is modernity? Is it a style? a trope? a narrative? a shift in paradigm or episteme? Is it a historical "period"? If so, when did it begin? When did it end? or did it end? We could begin by accepting the notion that there is a historical "period" called "modernity" (and I do not like the term "period" because it implies a full stop, a rupture, a break, and an end), but if we were to do that, we would need to emphasize that this "modernity" is merely a conceptual framework, one of many possible frameworks, for understanding the past. A historical narrative that includes modernity is part of a story we tell about the past, but it is a narrative that is never completely disinterested or all-comprehensive. And yet the [End Page 155] telling and re-telling of the past, our painstaking efforts to sort through the many-layered historical record, and the endless debates generated by the impulse to recount and comprehend our shared origins—these are enabling, even necessary, labors. Inevitably, "modernity" is an artificial notion, but that does not mean that it is a useless one. History in its fullness is a vast and largely irrecoverable mass of events, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And yet it is our job as scholars to make some sense of the past, examining and analyzing the existing archive in order to reconstruct the shapes of time and organize history in a meaningful way that helps us to understand our relationship to earlier times and societies. Since economic systems are the primary mechanisms of social reproduction that organize human societies, they comprise the appropriate objects of description for a basic understanding of long-term historical change. As Engels puts it, "according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life" (39). Following a long line of scholars, from Marx to R. H. Tawney to Immanuel Wallerstein to Robert Brenner, I contend that the shift from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode is the process that gradually initiates modernity. In other words, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we begin to perceive a wide-ranging social and cultural transformation that we can call "the early modern."1 And what began in the early modern period (with primitive accumulation and the origins of globalization) unfolded in the form of industrial capitalism and today has become postmodern consumer capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed to the early modern period as the beginning of what would later become a world-wide capitalist system: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This...

The Concept of "Early Modern" Mitchell Greenberg (bio) The editors of this journal have posed a series of questions the answers to which would hopefully offer a more comprehensive understanding of what we mean by that catch-all concept, the "early modern." Given the very fact that the questions asked are so varied both temporally and conceptually, hopefully I will be forgiven for couching my own thinking in terms that are both general and personal. Although it would be intellectually more satisfying to be able to pin down so broad a concept as the "early modern," I am afraid that my own inability to do so cogently is directly tied to what I perceive to be the defining mark of the concept, its inherent ambiguity. To my mind, the concept of the "early modern" is elusive in a temporal sense (where do we situate it historically—beginning in the sixteenth century and extending up to the French Revolution of 1789, or is it more limited in time, say from the mid-sixteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries?) And is it not a concept whose temporal limits can shift depending on its geo-political location? (Elizabethan England, Neo-Classical, i.e., mid-seventeenth century, France, or "baroque" Rome, Madrid [Mexico City!], or Vienna?) Are the different socio-cultural productions across Europe part of the same phenomenon? What of the differences in religious expression and persecutions, scientific discoveries, extra-European exploration, exploitation, and colonization? It would appear at first hand that any over-riding conceptual framework is intellectually risky especially when we are faced with the often contradictory academic disagreements between historians, literary scholars, philosophers, sociologists, theologians, anthropologists, and many others whose differences about any single definition of the concept are varied and heated. Unable to find any one definition that would embrace so large a socio-cultural phenomenon, I rely on what appears to me to be a common thread [End Page 75] among all these varied phenomena and that thread is double. Although almost any historical period may be described as inherently traumatic, I find that the period between 1550 and 1700 is marked by both a generalized European fear that chaos is about to descend upon the world and a desire for some force, some leader who would be able to waylay that chaos, establish order and put things that seem askew, aright. We hear echoes of this fear resounding across the European continent from England to Poland, from Paris to Naples in what historians have called the "crisis of the Seventeenth Century" (Trevor-Roper). So, for starters I would start by circumscribing the concept of the "early modern" as a generalized crisis of European civilization and the various responses, political, social, and aesthetic that arose in a limited historical period (1550 to 1700) as an attempt to deal with this crisis, and in so doing ushered in new ways of configuring the place of the human subject in a radically changing symbolic system—a system that eventuates in reformulating those parameters of subjectivity that we now define as our own. It would appear that when we talk about the "early modern" for however extended or narrow our definition of it may be, it is the seventeenth century that figures as the pivotal, transitional moment where those systems of representation that had dominated, that had coalesced into a "master narrative" that had defined the period from the late Middle Ages up to and through the Renaissance, were gradually being transformed into what was to emerge in the eighteenth century as a new configuration of subjectivity that would be the mark of the "modern." In his seminal early study Les Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault argued for seeing the seventeenth century as a liminal period separating and joining one representation of the configurations of human subjectivity—the analogical—that, he claims, was the principal episteme up to and through the Renaissance, to the "transparency of Classical representation," which established its firm hold on the West in the eighteenth century. The seventeenth century would figure the moment of passage between these two epistemes, participating in both, seeing (but not, of course, in any clearly articulable fashion) the gradual, inexorable disappearance...

Volume 51 (2021)

Reviews and Short Notices