The Theology of Prayer

Reviewed by: Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton Alexander Creighton (bio) Christina Lupton. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+199. $49.95. That Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present. Investigating the reading practices of a variety of eighteenth-century individuals—“actors, clergy, professional novelists, translators, housekeepers, and politicians” (3)—Lupton asks whether, in the modern history of the book, we have ever really had more time to read. Although the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of printed materials, the era also saw the rise of longer and more regular work days with less free time, what E. P. Thompson famously calls “time-discipline.” When, under these conditions, did people find time to read books? In what ways did book reading challenge the growing predominance of work schedules and clock time? Lupton suggests that there is no one answer to these questions, and her book unfolds as an analysis of the relation between reading and “making time” in two senses: 1) how these readers made time for books; 2) how the act of reading fashioned alternative relations to time. “In the stories I tell,” Lupton writes, “people pick up books, reread them, and postpone reading them in ways that are often out of kilter with the idea of modernity’s commitment to regularity and speed” (8). Lupton’s central argument is that over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reading books was seen as a means of negotiating with, rather than capitulating to, an emerging cultural time-consciousness centered around efficiency and speed. “Book reading develops its own character as an activity valued because it can offset newer and faster kinds of reading,” such as the reading of “newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, and sermons” (6). From a bustling early life in the theater that admitted little leisure, novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, in the 1790s, began a calmer life with more time for leisure reading—a progression dramatized in her most famous novel, A Simple Story. The notebooks of William Wyndham Grenville, Prime Minister of the U.K. after William Pitt the Younger, reveal a careful reader who scheduled his readings and rereadings of Demosthenes and Aristotle. In letters to her friend and fellow Bluestockings member [End Page 265] Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot laments her lack of time to read, always interrupted “with a thousand little errands and employments” (40). Talbot’s 1770 Reflections, which takes the form of short homilies to be read on each day of the week, preserves Sundays as a time of leisure—a time for slower reading. Lupton’s readers include fictional characters as well as real people; they range from the mid-1700s through the Romantic period; and all, in their own ways, make time for reading and through reading. The richness of ideas in Lupton’s book comes from her drawing into seamless dialogue several different but related fields, including a variety of kinds of reading and writing, such as epistolary exchange, translation, the study of classics, and the promise of future reading; specific, high-stakes questions about the structure and use of time; and an impressive range of modern theorists and literary scholars, from book historians to philosophers of time to social theorists such as Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. The result is that each of the book’s four chapters unfolds as a lucid progression of ideas. Meanwhile, brief autobiographical asides, interspersed throughout the whole, not only formally underscore the argument that books need not accord with any one tempo, but in content, they address the problem of finding time to read in the age of the internet. At a time when reading is increasingly instrumentalized as a means toward some professional end (or else deemed unworthy of our time), Lupton argues that a reevaluation of reading profits from understanding the history of reading and the temporal politics involved. Rather than capitulate to speed-reading or skipping pages, “I want to promote...

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

The distinction between a mainstream tradition in the historical thought of the eighteenth century, which eighteenth-century usage allows us to designate as philosophical history, and a counterpoint tradition, which recent convention allows us to designate as historism, has become an accepted feature in the interpretation of eighteenth-century historical thought. ' I take this distinction to be a valid one. Admittedly, there are some aspects of eighteenth-century historical thought to which the distinction does not do justice, such as the work carried out by members of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in France, or the flowering of history in the German universities and academies late in the century.2 But the exclusions are systematic rather than arbitrary, and can be readily explained; for it is clear that the distinction is concerned with historical thought in a general intellectual sense rather than with historical thought in the more limited

<i>Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840</i>. Aileen Douglas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+229.

Anne-Louise Germaine de Stael devoted her works to the idea of freedom, particularly for women and slaves. As an intellectual and a writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France, she judged not only her community but its political regimes according to the principles of feminism and abolitionism. As a woman, she had only two possible ways to play a public role: to hold a salon like her mother, or to publish books. She did both, and through these acquired considerable influence. De Stael was a feminist whose work queries the subordination of women to men, and her strong liberal position led her to equate the condition of women with that of slaves. De Stael's liberalism was a product of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Although she never departed from the Enlightenment's principles, she displayed a more Romantic attitude when she promoted 'enthusiasm' and emotion, which were reflected in her art, politics and love life. Feminism De Stael's most important struggle was her fight for the rights of women to education and freedom of thought. She was a feminist who questioned the organisation of society and the place of women in it. During the French Revolution, despite claims advocating gender equality and social justice, the status of women regressed rapidly. Like her feminist contemporaries, she advocated that women ought to be judged by the same liberal code as men while she also praised the positive aspects of female gender roles. De Stael was a moderate feminist who celebrated the feminine. She believed that if educated women retained their traditional female values, they could play an effective role in society. Slavery The European slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century, and feminists were among those campaigning for its abolition. Probably initially influenced by her father's stand against slavery, de Stael fought against it in life and in many of her writings. She took a pragmatic and political position when she addressed the subject in her literature, when she supported the campaign of William Wilberforce, and the fight of the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture. Intersection of Feminism and Slavery in Madame de Stael's Writings There is a strong link between abolitionism and feminism in de Stael's work, as in the works of other turn of the nineteenth-century feminists. Feminism was closely related to abolitionism as married women, especially from the upper classes, could identify with slaves because they too lacked certain civil rights and were treated as property. While de Stael fought for women to be treated fairly, she also introduced the notion of 'enslavement' to strong emotions which was as distressing as the physical and cultural restrictions enforced on women, and could be used to reinforce those restrictions. In her novels and treatises, she demonstrates that to be in the throes of passion is destructive, causing a loss of autonomy, identity and self-control, the same predicament suffered by slaves. While numerous biographers of Madame de Stael have noted the impact her work has had on a range of political, social and historical matters, few have considered the way her feminism and abolitionism interacted and intersected in her work. This study analyses de Stael's work in the context of her times and demonstrates that not only did she advocate passionately for abolitionism and feminism, but that she saw how the repression of women and enslavement of Africans were linked in the society of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries France.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewA World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Raúl Coronado. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+574.Judy M. BertonazziJudy M. BertonazziRowan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLanguage is the unending soul of all of our desires and discontents. For Raúl Coronado, the printing press became the medium through which Tejanos in the early nineteenth century articulated their desire to claim a felt sense of shared Latino identity within the Spanish, and later US/Mexican, territories now known as the Texas/Mexico borderlands. A World Not to Come begins during the historical period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Napoleon overthrew King Charles IV and his heir, Fernando VII, causing the creation of Spanish juntas in its empires and the vacillations between patriarchy and revolution, and between scholasticism and modernity, which were fueled by printing press technology.A World Not to Come narrates the creation of a Tejano identity as a series of communicative texts (visual, aural, and written) that had Enlightenment and Hispanic ideological origins: “As the eighteenth century lurched toward the nineteenth, books, pamphlets, broadsheets, and manuscripts launched a discursive war against Spanish imperial rule. These texts may have targeted Spain’s specific reign over America, but they were birthed throughout the Atlantic world: in London, Philadelphia, France, the Caribbean, and even Spain herself” (7). Thus, Coronado’s historical lens reveals the origins of Latino writing and print culture as a meeting of competing power structures in the modern world system: Anglo America, European empires (especially Spain), and Spanish America (New Spain, which would become Mexico and the US Southwest).Notably, the author trains his eye on the rise of the Tejano social imaginary through the influence of both print culture and New Spain’s inclination toward oratory of printed works recited in town centers and churches.1 A printed document was disseminated when it was read aloud, therefore, the “ideas conveyed were mediated by the discursive world of each listener: murmurs, gasps, whispers, and gossip could quickly transform the intent of the text” (273). It would seem, then, based on Coronado’s narrative point of view, that Latino oratory gave print culture its ideological purposes via a “live” performance, a civic drama performed by a pregonero or town crier and “announced” by “a drum, trumpet, or church bells” (270). These print culture documents, therefore, were an extension of the townspeople’s public personas. As Coronado notes, print culture in the Spanish colonies of North America was reliant on the oral culture that was a “universe of signs that were all meant to be interpreted, from religious rituals to ceremonial processions, theatrical displays, music, and dance” and would reflect the orality of Spain’s literary texts as works spoken, not read silently (217).Coronado narrates the role that the printing press played in the social acceptance of revolutionary ideas—both revolutionary via American (US) and French revolutionary ideals and those expressed by Spain’s Enlightenment thinkers such as Valentín de Foronda and diplomats such as Casa Irujo and Diego María de Gardoqui Arriquibar. However, the printing press, for Coronado, was not the cause of social imaginaries in New Spain, which the author emphasizes on more than one occasion. Instead, the printing press aided in an already developing social imaginary produced by political documents that were orally disseminated directly to the people in an organic relationship between print and oral cultures. The author emphasizes the importance of Tejano sovereignty as a basic right but is careful to note that sovereignty was sought for the pueblo over the rights of individuals. This emphasis on the pueblo marks the key difference in New Spain’s social identity compared to Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and the public sphere, which were expressed by the Western European episteme influenced by Rousseau, Descartes, and Locke.Those familiar with Raúl Coronado’s scholarship will find A World Not to Come a helpful foundation for reading his current scholarship on early Latino literature from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. His work is vital to scholars of Latino/a studies for its breadth and depth of archival research. It is important for scholars of hemispheric, transnational/trans-American studies because of its extensive examination of conflicting New World histories through the lens of New Spain (Mexico, the US Southwest, and Central America) and its position between Anglo American/British colonialism and Spanish colonialism.The archival research alone is of value to the Latino/a scholar of pre-twentieth-century writing and its development from oral discourses. The cited material is written in the original Spanish alongside English translations. There are seventy-two illustrations dispersed throughout the book that coincide with in-depth discussions of the historical and social contexts surrounding the historical figures who have contributed to Tejano intellectual production. Four appendixes of archival materials include the author’s transcriptions and translations of key texts, such as those written by nineteenth-century Latino political leaders José Antonio Gutiérrez de Lara and José Álvarez de Toledo, and by the Governing Junta of Béxar, as well as an anonymous account of the violence enacted on Tejanos by the brutal General of Eastern Interior Provinces Joaquín de Arredondo.Coronado leaves readers with a brief discussion of the rhetoric of oral culture during this time period and how it may have influenced the print culture of the day, which is perhaps the book’s most notable limitation. A World Not to Come does, however, remind readers of the origin of much contemporary scholarship on the convergence of cultures, the formation of a Latino modernity, and the budding social imaginary that stood against the dominant influence of Anglo American Protestantism, as well as “growing racial violence, and the continuing displacement of Tejanos” (353), which ultimately thwarted the prominence of a Latino public sphere in the US Southwest.Notes1. Social imaginary is defined in Coronado’s book via Charles Taylor’s definition: “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007], 171). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 1August 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685935 Views: 235Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 27, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Differing Echoes of History Jeremy Black Peter Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors 1730–1840 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2016). Pp. 282. $99.00. Andrea Walkden, Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016). Pp. 216. $70.00. Jia Wei, Commerce and Politics in Hume's "History of England" (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2017). Pp. 220. $99.00. In their different ways, these works all serve as reminders of the salience of the historical imagination in the long eighteenth century. That observation may appear counterintuitive as the Enlightenment is usually noted as a period of novelty and change, and historicist elements are not in the forefront of the analysis of the period. This approach, however, represents a misreading of the understanding of the time, notably of the relationships between past, present, and future. Indeed, in order to understand the England of the long eighteenth century, it is important to consider its engagement with history. This was an age that took an understanding of the past very seriously and employed this understanding in much of its discussion. England was suffused with history. That, of course, is not how it is presented in posterity; instead, the narrative is one of change—indeed, of revolution. A plethora of revolutions, a veritable line "to the crack of doom," as if shown to Macbeth by the witches, are found: starting with the first and most famous, the Industrial, and now including the Agricultural, Transport, Financial, Commercial, Consumer, Demographic, Emotional, Sexual, and others. More eighteenth-century revolutions, doubtless, will follow from the fertile keypads of historians. The continuing emphasis is on new ideas, new techniques, new technologies, particularly steam power; on the birth of new sciences, such as economics, sociology, and geology; and on [End Page 125] new cultural forms and themes, notably the novel, the landscape garden, and the Neo-Gothic. The idea of the Enlightenment, indeed of an English Enlightenment, adds a sense that even the very context of ideas was changing. And secularization theorists suggest that religion was on its way out beginning in the eighteenth century. In such accounts, England appears to be a country propelling itself away from its past and very self-consciously toward a transformed future. Why, then, see historical writing from this period as anything other than a branch of belles lettres? Indeed, there was relatively little then (although much more, concerning both national and local history, than is generally appreciated) of the archive-based research that was to be highly significant in the age of "scientific history" assumed to begin in the nineteenth century. In part, the latter reflected the methods, as well as the location, of a history that was increasingly pursued in universities. Moreover, in considering the earlier period, it is apparent that the English historians of the eighteenth century did not define their own era. Nor were they as influential in cultural terms, as least for posterity, as those writers who developed the novel or the Romantic movement, or, arguably, the landscape gardeners of the period. Yet eighteenth-century England, the society that more than any other contributed to the creation of the modern age, was itself profoundly historical. This was the case in terms of thought, religion, politics, law, society, literature, art, architecture, music, sculpture, and much else. It was true at all levels of society. Indeed, a sense of history was a unifying social force, a shared interest between mansion and cottage. Therefore, whereas the focus of attention in works about eighteenth-century history is very much on the culture of print, and notably on books with the word "history" in their titles, this does not mean that the approach to the subject necessarily should be mostly in these terms, and certainly not entirely so. Indeed, the literary, like the academic, approach to historiography poses many disadvantages, as it can lead to a failure to appreciate the full range of engagement with history that was seen in the period, and, in practice, in others: what can be termed the "historical culture." Historical writing and consciousness in the eighteenth century were dominated by contemporary interests and preoccupations. In this respect, history then...

Print Culture, Marketing, and Thomas Stothard’s Illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779–1826 Sandro Jung (bio) This article will offer an account of a now very rare late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pocket diary-cum-almanac, which was targeted at a multifarious audience largely from the middling ranks of British society: The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas. As a contribution to the history of the ephemeral book, it briefly sketches the variety of illustrated pocket books in the 1790s and then examines both the marketing strategies employed by its publisher and the importance of book illustration—particularly the vignettes of Thomas Stothard—in the formation of a canon of literary texts at the end of the eighteenth century. My central concern is to investigate the ideologically representative meanings of Stothard’s illustrative paratexts and relate them to proliferating cultures of consumerism. Focusing on the genesis, fashioning, and long “life” of the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, the article will explore both the interpretive narratives of the printed designs and the cultural phenomenon of the almanac among the middle and upper classes as an ephemeral, but desirable product belonging to the expanding world of eighteenth-century print culture. A practically unexplored market for pocket diaries for the middle and upper classes emerged in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, which offered a new product, the so-called “pocket-book.” Containing not only calendar and diary pages but material for instruction, ruled [End Page 27] memorandum pages, and “cash accounts” as well, these books (of up to 150 pages in length) were fashionable late eighteenth-century middle-class accessories. The pocket book is a hybrid genre that incorporates features from such earlier genres as the almanac offering information on important dates of the year but also including information that is more directly aimed at the middle classes. The replacement of the astrological pages, weather forecasts, and agricultural advice with ruled pages to be used as diaries positioned the pocket book as a publication for the professional and middle classes, as well as the aristocracy. In the course of the genre’s history in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, special class-specific sections reflecting the different needs, interests, and concerns of the users of these pocket books were introduced. The books’ diary sections—now ornately embellished with engraved illustrations—derived primarily from more functional pocket and memorandum books such as The Universal Cash Book and Newcastle Pocket Diary which was declared to be “Suited to Every Gentleman’s and Tradesman’s Business” and sold at one shilling sixpence in the 1770s. Although the titles of these publications frequently designate themselves as “almanacs,” only the cheapest among them still carried the extensive material relating to prophecies, astrology, and the seasonal cycle that characterised earlier almanacs, which were first advertised and issued by the Stationers’ Company in the seventeenth century and would remain popular into the nineteenth.1 The pocket book, exemplified by the carefully illustrated Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, by way of contrast, was not aimed to be an instrument of business or astrology, but an object of consumer pleasure and device for social engagement. The pocket diary as an ephemeral print cultural genre has not yet received much systematic scholarly attention, although Jenny Batchelor has insightfully examined a related genre, the pocket book for women.2 The neglect of the pocket diary in general by scholars can be explained by the scarcity of surviving copies with only a few scattered across collections in Britain and North America. No major research collection holds a complete or even near complete run of any of these ephemeral publications nor is there even a catalog or source that has compiled all the individual copies held in the world’s archives and libraries. The English Short Title Catalog (ESTC), for example, is missing some of the copies I have traced. WorldCat has records of eleven different copies of the Pocket Atlas,3 while Copac references a further seven.4 I have two different volumes in my possession—the atlases for 1810 and 1825—and have traced two more in archives in the United Kingdom.5 Owing to the scarcity of copies of the...

Reviewed by: The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner Amelia Dale The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner. Toronto: Toronto, 2015. Pp. xviii + 560. $90. The Secrets of Generation is a landmark edited collection that looks at reproduction (human, animal, botanical) in the long eighteenth century from a wealth of different disciplinary standpoints, with contributors working across English, art history, medical history, and gender studies, examining a transnational long eighteenth century that spans Italy, Germany, England, and America. The twenty-two chapters are grouped into four thematic sections. Beginning with the theme “Generation, Species, Breeding,” the volume opens with an ambitious chapter by Staffan Müller-Wille that uses the history of botanical gardens design as a starting point for tracking the emergence of biology as a discipline. The next subsection—”Fetus, Child, Mother”—turns to maternity and includes Corinna Wagner’s forceful reading of legal and medical responses to maternal violence alongside the sentimentalization of maternity. “Pathologies, Body Parts, Display” focuses on the anatomized body in medical history—a concern displayed throughout the collection—and the book closes with “Attitudes, Tropes, Satire,” which looks at reproduction as it is figured in print culture. These subsections are inevitably loose and overlapping. All contributions taken together, The Secrets of Generation provides an impressive picture of the vastness and interconnectedness of eighteenth-century conceptualizations of “generation,” life, and the sexed body. With essays touching on Carl Linnaeus’s flower beds, asexual reproduction, entrails, incest, infanticide, lactation, and hysteria, the collection describes how the fabrication of reproductive knowledge in the eighteenth century structured, and was structured by, competing political, religious, and cultural forces. As the length of The Secrets of Generation prevents detailing all the chapters, I will briefly discuss here some of the contributions, with an eye to the early eighteenth-century remit and British focus of the Scriblerian. A highlight of the strong “Pathologies, Body Parts, Display” section is Lianne McTavish’s account of the importance of intestinal parasites within eighteenth-century formulations of reproduction. This essay on wormy entrails is followed by Darren N. Wagner’s examination of the construction and consumption of anatomical displays of male genitals. Mr. Wagner argues—aided by illustrations of “Inflated and dry’d,” pinned and two-toned dyed penises—that eighteenth-century anatomical culture consistently blurred the medical and the erotic, the educative and the sensational. He also makes a persuasive case for rereading the phallic [End Page 73] syringe (such as Tristram Shandy’s “squirt”) in eighteenth-century print. With syringes used in artificial insemination and penile inflation they become more than just figurative phalluses: they become sexual and reproductive devices. Immersion in eighteenth-century medico-bawdy is also provided by Donald W. Nichol’s essay on The Foundling Hospital for Wit (1743–1749) and The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1768–1773). Mr. Nichol offers not so much an overarching argument but rather a whirlwind tour of bawdy quotable highlights from the two works, such as: “Hail pighog! by whose potent aid/My L–d his health had, and employ! /My L–y too was brought to bed /Heav’n bless it! of a chopping boy.” While much has been written about “monstrous births” and theories of maternal impressions, David M. Turner’s contribution uses disability studies to take a fresh approach to this topic, and examines how accounts of “defective” children contributed to broader understandings of physical difference. Eighteenth-century concerns with monstrous births take on new, political resonances when read as reflecting preoccupations with child health and the awareness of population strength as a national resource. Something like Mary Toft’s rabbit-birth becomes no longer a remnant of earlier, fading superstitions (as per the standard reading) but shadowed by the rise of eugenics in the nineteenth century. Similarly helpful is Sally Frampton’s examination of the ovarian pathology. Ms. Frampton details eighteenth-century reactions to growths in dropsical ovaries (bones, teeth and hair) and the blurring between swollen ovaries and pregnancy in eighteenth-century medicine: between the physiology and pathology of the organ. Ms. Frampton’s work is...

The history of Italian opera in the eighteenth century is as much the history of theatres, cities and performers as it is the history of composers, genres and works. Its study has benefited from a number of masterful recent inquiries that take a variety of approaches. The present summary views the history of Italian opera in the eighteenth century through the lens of the opera theatre, focusing on genres and their venues, seeking to elucidate categories of opera theatres – within and extending outside of Italy, in places where Italian opera was favoured – and exploring the implications of these varieties for the style of repertory represented by them. By no means a comprehensive overview of the history of all eighteenth-century theatres, nor a survey organized strictly according to cultural centres, composers, genres, or works (although these play integral roles), it highlights specific theatres and works, placing them in the context of the production process. Composers of eighteenth-century opera sought to 'tailor' their arias to an individual singer like a suit of clothes. Applied more broadly, this famous metaphor might be expanded to entire operatic works themselves, allowing us to explain them as whole, integrated entities – they are manifestations of the preferences, status, conditions, background and identities of the patrons and audiences for whom they were produced and the facilities for which they were designed.

Author's Introduction The articles in this cluster deal with aspects of an enormously rich and complex historical problem: the role of print and other media in political communication in Britain, from the Tudor period through the nineteenth century. They might be employed together in a course covering this large subject; but equally they lend themselves to separate use in other kinds of courses, dealing with problems ranging from conventional political history to the role of literacy in early modern society, the nature of early modern public culture or the rise of more open and ‘democratic’ forms of politics. Rather than trying to tailor this guide to a single course design I have tried to suggest a range of possibilities. The full cluster is made up of the following articles: 1. Mark Knights , ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass , 3/1 (2005), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl131 . 2. Joad Raymond , ‘Seventeenth‐Century Print Culture’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl123 . 3. Mark Hampton , ‘Newspapers in Victorian Britain’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00101.x . URL http://www.blackwellcompass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl101 . 4. Jason Peacey , ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth‐Century England’, History Compass , 5/1 (2007), 85–111, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00369.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl369 . 5. Alastair Bellany , ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00439.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl439 . 6. Brian Cowan , ‘Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl440 . 7. Andrew Walkling , ‘Politics and Theatrical Culture in Restoration England’, History Compass , DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00453.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl453 . 8. Joseph Black , ‘The Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and the Public Sphere’, History Compass , (forthcoming). Author Recommends The relevant secondary literature is enormous but the following are suggested as surveys or preliminary guides to particular topics. 1. Jurgen Habermas , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Lawrence Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). A translation of Habermas's deeply controversial but highly influential theoretical study, first published in German in 1965. An extensive literature exists debating Habermas's theories and their usefulness to historical investigations. 2. Alastair Bellany , The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A study of how the involvement of high‐ranking courtiers in a murder became the subject of a famous scandal, through the ways in which it was reported and discussed in print and especially manuscript sources. 3. Brian Cowan , The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). A wide ranging survey of the development of coffeehouses and their role as centres of social interaction and political discussion. 4. Adam Fox , Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). A ma

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Eve Tavor Bannet Aileen Douglas Eve Tavor Bannet. Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2017. Pp. viii + 298. £75. Eighteenth-century guides to reading, such as Isaac Watts's extremely influential Improvement of the Mind (1741), often presented reading as akin to surveying and mapping, according to Ms. Bannet. The experience of reading her study is akin to seeing a well-known landscape from an unfamiliar angle—the top of a bus or a low-flying plane—occasionally surprising and undeniably satisfying. Manners of Reading aspires to delineate "common, once familiar, ideas and practices" of reading as recommended or presented in a varied range of eighteenth-century texts: copybooks, grammars, guides to study, periodical pieces, philosophical essays, and novels. Urging at the outset that the most illuminating way to think of eighteenth-century reading is in terms of "variously limited and extended literacies," Ms. Bannet ranges her six chosen "manners" of reading according to increased complexity. In chapter 1, plurality presents itself in the form of the eighteenth-century's multiple alphabets; she notes that eighteenth-century copy-books, such as those published by the engraver George Bickham, ordered variety without attempting to eliminate it. In relation to spellers, dictionaries, and grammars (approximately 155 grammars printed between 1750 and 1800) she again emphasizes diversity, remarking that even apparently authoritative works such as Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) reached readers in multiple ways, often in abridged or amended form. Spellers and grammars had priorities other than the promotion of a standardized English, including the teaching of syllabic reading and the conventions of analogic thinking, which, once again, allowed readers to manage variety. The popularization of the art of reading aloud, instructions for which were increasingly available to general readers, is the subject of the appealing second chapter. Pronouncing anthologies such as James Burgh's Art of Speaking (1761), William Scott's Lessons in Elocution (1779), and Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1784), provided passages of poetry and prose for daily practice. Ms. Bannet interestingly speculates that the demands in such works for readers to exercise sympathy "may have played a neglected role" in producing the taste for literary representations of the passions so crucial to sentimental literature at century's end. Chapter 3 turns to reading as study, with particular attention given to Watts's Improvement of the Mind, and Hester Chap-one's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) as the most influential guides, noting how the intersection of chronology and geography was considered fundamental to a studious reader's retention of knowledge. One reason Manners of Reading is so informative is that it is constructed around, and driven by, often ignored primary sources. Throughout, the apparently artless methodology of the book provides detailed and impressive reconstructions of eighteenth-century recommendations to readers. In the book's final chapters, however, its boldness of conception and interpretative drive become much more apparent. The subject of chapter 4, "discontinuous reading," is not a term [End Page 99] readers in the eighteenth century would recognize, although they were almost certainly familiar with the practice. Borrowing the term from Peter Stallybrass, who uses it in describing the shift from scroll to codex, Ms. Bannet extends the designation to indicate a taste for "variety, discontinuity and the shock of novelty and surprise." This taste was satisfied by "miscellarian" writing as described and practiced by Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks (1711); by Addison, the "great theorist" of such writing, in The Spectator (1711–1714); and by Isaac D'Israeli in his Miscellanies (1796). Some works are conceived as miscellanies, but some have the miscellaneous thrust upon them. What most interests Ms. Bannet is the unruly energy of readers as they read discontinuously: reading the bits that appeal, skipping chapters, letting the eye glide over intractable matter. For her inclusion of novels under "miscellaneous," she can adduce several arguments: it was the classification often used for novels in reviews, many eighteenth-century novels are episodic...

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.

This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel.The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The book will appeal to students and scholars of eighteenth-century British literature and culture and to those interested in women’s writing and women’s relationships in the eighteenth century—and today—and in feminist literary history. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.

Reviewed by: The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paula McDowell Jennifer L. Airey (bio) Paula McDowell. The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 353. $45. We are living in a moment of profound cultural change, as the movement from print to online culture has fundamentally shifted the ways in which we access and process information and monetize written content. Set in this context, Paula McDowell’s The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain is an especially timely work, one that draws parallels between the developing technologies of the eighteenth century—in this case, the movement from oral to print culture—and our own. It is only in retrospect, McDowell argues, that we can fully understand the implications of such a monstrous cultural shift, but similarities have already emerged between eighteenth-century reactions to technological change and our own: concerns over what is being lost, fears about the democratization of access to content, and uncertainty about how to monetize new modes of information transmission. According to McDowell, the concept of the “oral” came into being in the eighteenth century as an umbrella term for a series of often unrelated concepts. Encapsulating at once beliefs about religious tradition, appropriate gender roles, and social class divides, reactions to the concept of orality in the eighteenth century offer insight into a wide variety of social and cultural attitudes. In drawing connections between the development of [End Page 494] eighteenth-century print culture and the emergence of the digital, McDowell’s book is both important and timely. As a work of scholarship on the eighteenth century, it is a masterful and often enlightening work, offering new interpretations of well-known works by authors such as Defoe, Johnson, and Swift, and engaging with previously understudied voices such as those of the Billingsgate fishwives and John “Orator” Henley. McDowell begins in her first chapter with a nuanced analysis of the concept of oral tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century. While the word “tradition” is now used in predominantly secular ways, it had important religious resonance in the early modern period. For Catholics, who placed emphasis on the importance of priestly intercession between the individual and God, “the tradition of the church is of equal authority with scripture” (28). For Protestants, by contrast, who privileged Biblical text and the individual’s relationship with God, the concept of tradition was much more fraught. Protestants positioned scripture—and by extension writing—as “the most reliable method of preserving and communicating knowledge” (29). Of particular interest in this chapter is McDowell’s reading of Dryden; prior to his conversion, she argues, Dryden linked orality with the vulgar rabble. As a Catholic, however, he became more supportive of oral tradition, arguing in The Hind and the Panther that the Catholic Church “by Tradition’s force upheld the Truth” (39). The battle between print and oral authority was central to other eighteenth-century debates. English common law, for instance, was composed of many unwritten laws, and thus “seventeenth-century proponents of the Ancient Constitution appealed to the authority of an ancient, unwritten tradition of laws and customs to further their own political goals” (45). Meanwhile antiquarians lamented the loss of oral culture (including lower-class slang, popular ballads, and the oral poetry of the Scottish Highlands) resulting from the growth of print. Not all forms of oral transmission were viewed positively, however; the concept of old wives’ tales, for instance, reflects the disrespect in which women’s speech was consistently held. McDowell turns in chapter 2 to Swift’s treatment of speech in A Tale of a Tub. As a clergyman himself, Swift understood well the importance of dynamic oratory in the pulpit, and he suggested that Dissenters were dangerous precisely because they knew how to perform for largely illiterate audiences. Swift associated the physicality and emotion of the spoken sermon “with popular unrest and gender subversion from below” (67). Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is the subject of McDowell’s third chapter. As...