This is Thomas McGeary's third effort to explore the elusive relationship between British politics and Italian opera during the first half of the eighteenth century, following his previous works, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain (Cambridge, 2013) and Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705–1714 (Boydell, 2022). He continues to challenge the idea of any direct links between the two. In his present study, he revisits the historical period (and many of the sources) examined in the first volume of his trilogy, adopting a different perspective to focus on cultural politics. For him, this concerns ‘how a cultural product was put to use in the pursuit of political power’ (xiii). His title might still be regarded as a misnomer, since opera is not actually the cultural product in focus with regard to the pursuit of political power. Instead, the cultural products that are politically useful at the heart of his argument are writings such as poems, formal verse, satirical prints, pamphlets, and newspaper essays, whose authors, according to McGeary, projected political meaning onto opera to further their (usually partisan) case within ‘the “culture wars” of the Walpole era’ (xiii). The blurring of the lines between the cultural media used for political criticism (writings) and the cultural symbol referenced in these media (opera) extends beyond the title and is arguably the most significant flaw in this book's reasoning. Politically, the focus is on the rise, dominance, and fall of Robert Walpole or, ultimately, on writers of oppositional affiliations (dissident Whigs, Tories and Jacobites) who attempted to use literary print forms to criticise Walpole's politics and remove him from office. McGeary traces the development of such partisan writings which draw parallels between Whig-dominated politics, specifically as represented by Walpole, and vices on and around the opera stage in the 1720s and 1730s (ending in 1742, the year Walpole left office). Drawing on Bourdieu's different forms of capital, the author argues that opera, as a cultural symbol of the elite, lent itself easily to such projections, specifically considering that members of the Whig party were the primary promoters of the introduction of Italian opera in England during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. He identifies the key links consistently employed in ‘popular’ as well as sophisticated writings, from Viscount Bolingbroke's Craftsman to Alexander Pope's The New Dunciad (1742), as being between excessive luxury (opera) and corruption (politics), and between deteriorating taste (opera) and the deterioration of the country (politics). The general idea is intriguing, albeit not entirely original. Ultimately, through his analyses of various writings from over two decades, he does prove its prominence and continuity. However, McGeary's indirect approach is rather awkwardly reflected in the arrangement of the book's chapters, which leave readers waiting a long time for a chance to comprehend what he actually means by ‘cultural politics’. In some chapters, he recounts political developments, separating the actions of party members from those of the royal family, with only a few references to cultural politics, other than the (well-known) political backgrounds of the authors of the writings (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 11). In others, he does much the same with the Royal Academy of Music, the Opera of the Nobility, and the Middlesex opera company, as well as Handel's further operatic endeavours (which also ended at the end of the 1741–42 season), separating their developments from those of the royal family and political developments (Chapters 2 and 6). For the most part, albeit not exclusively (Chapter 4 is a pleasing exception), these chapters largely serve as background to those in which McGeary analyses said writings (Chapters 8–10 and 12). The imbalance between the assumed intention to introduce political and operatic history to a so far uninformed audience (e.g., students), the intention to engage in scholarly discourse, and the author's perspective on opera as a symbol in partisan cultural politics can sometimes lead to a cumbersome reading experience. In closing, McGeary briefly leaves the realm of critical writings and actually focusses on Italian opera as a cultural product, using Bourdieu's theory of capital to evaluate its place within the broader cultural sphere of the time. (Admittedly, this had been part of his proclaimed plan all along, but it was not clearly evident in the main chapters of the book, since when he focused on it, he did it only through the lens of the competition's writings.) Interestingly, he also revisits the idea that opera libretti might contain the occasional political allusion. Even more interestingly, he raises the question of how effective the partisan writers were in their scheme to use opera against Walpole. For my taste, he should have started with that.

No abstract is available for this article.

Abstract This essay examines Buffon's overlooked 1742 ‘rocaille’ shell grotto and porcelain cabinet at his Burgundian estate. Relying on Buffon's housekeeper Marie‐Madeleine Blesseau's inventory of his belongings, it critically reconstructs and analyses the distribution of the now lost pavilion. Reading its decoration through the lens of Buffon's theories of the Earth, the essay argues that the space invited visitors to partake in a sensorial spectacle of deep time. This sensorial promenade complemented Buffon's descriptions and illustrations of deep time, a phenomenon of considerable temporal scale that could not be experienced first‐hand and required imagination to conceptualise. Analysing Buffon's aesthetic taste as complementary to his geological inquiries challenges the historiographic opposition between the Rococo and Enlightenment science, a binary first constructed by anti‐Rococo critics. Buffon's garden pavilion offers an example of how decoration and natural sciences intersected to generate new understandings of Earth's history and humanity's place within it.

Abstract The quotation in my title and the three subsequent terms are taken from the most famous scene of Diderot's first play, Le Fils naturel , which has long been judged preachy and dramatically incompetent by critics. Judging by the evidence of the surviving eighteenth‐century performance texts, much of it was simply cut. This essay acknowledges the issue but/and contextualizes the scene, reading it as an attempt on the part of the philosophe to manage the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Louis XV in early January, the significance of which was still up for grabs a month or so later when Le Fils naturel was published. Re‐injecting some politics into Diderot's bourgeois domestic drama, whose œdipal dynamics have often been noted, the essay explores Diderot's concern with the national family drama of parricide and his mobilization of a discourse on fanaticism.

Studies of eighteenth-century French art are typically so dominated by developments in Paris that it is easy to get the impression that the Acadmie royale de peinture et de sculpture was the only such institution in the country at the time.Founded in 1644, the Acadmie royale enjoyed significant privileges and unrivalled prestige.Its members included all of the eighteenth-century French artists who still enjoy a certain renown today.Nevertheless, the period from 1740 saw a proliferation of art academies and drawing schools across France, with the foundation of some 60 institutions not only in major cities such as Bordeaux, Marseille, and Strasbourg but also as far afield as Dunkirk and Pau, Lorient and Annecy.A substantial body of recent scholarship has explored the contribution that these institutions made to the teaching of drawing in France, with the focus on the development of design skills for use in manufacturing and decoration.The present volume, by contrast, seeks to situate provincial art academies and drawing schools within the cultural and social context of Enlightenment France by exploring the dense networks that connected them not only with each other but also with other types of establishment, from learned societies to masonic lodges (a drawing school might be sponsored by an academy of literature and science formed of local worthies, for example).The book's editors characterize art institutions as sites of sociability that brought together a wide range of social types, including artists, students, artisans, amateurs, patrons, scholars, manufacturers, and officials, at events such as drawing classes, art exhibitions, and prize-giving ceremonies.No less significant in their analysis, however, are practices such as exchanges of letters, awards of associate membership, and gifts of art works, by means of which both institutions and individuals forged connections, shared knowledge, and acquired prestige on a regional, national, and even transnational level.At four hundred twenty-eight pages, with four synoptic texts by the editors and fifteen contributions by other authors, together with numerous appendices, the book is a substantial achievement.It is the result of a large-scale seven-year research project, ACA-RES (Les acadmies d'art et leurs rseaux dans la France prindustrielle).The project website (https://acares.hypotheses.org/)makes available a large body of additional material, including brief histories of the most important art institutions, proceedings of three study days staged under the aegis of the project, a digital library of relevant publications, and a virtual exhibition.Work on a database of all of the archival documentation gathered by the project is reportedly ongoing.The full text of the book can be freely downloaded from the arthistoricum.netwebsite.Given its scale, it is possible here only to discuss a few of the contributions.The first half of the book examines the development, functioning, and significance of academic networks through a series of case studies focusing on particular institutions and individuals.In the case of the drawing school at Lyon, which was founded to serve the needs of the local textile industry, the institution's usefulness to the city was not simply a matter of practical training but, so Lesley Miller argues, had as much to do with the professional networking that it facilitated, the cultural prestige that it brought, and the opening out to a wider world that it fostered.Conversely, Stphanie Trouv's study of the career of the Bordeaux-born painter Pierre Lacour shows how he was able to flourish professionally on his return there, after training in Paris and Rome, thanks to his integration into Bordeaux's network of cultural institutions, including the art academy, of which he became successively a member, professor, and rector.However, association with a provincial academy could also be beneficial to Paris-based artists who had little chance of becoming a member of the highly exclusive Acadmie Royale.The latter

Abstract This article examines the journals of Gertrude Savile from 1727 in light of recent scholarship on early modern and eighteenth‐century melancholy. The concept had myriad associations with medicine, physiology, the imagination, and feeling, but questions remain about how melancholy during this period was considered by those outside the narrow and male‐dominated philosophical, literary, and religious canon — particularly by women experiencing it. Drawing on the history of emotions and literary approaches to selfhood, this article demonstrates how Gertrude Savile navigated and adapted melancholic discourses to shape and consolidate her textual self in relation to her family throughout her everyday life.

Abstract This article examines image–text relations in German illustrations of gambling around 1800, specifically focusing on the card game Pharo and the artist Johann Heinrich Ramberg. It shows Ramberg's technique of reuse and variation as well as the degree of satire in the designs and their accompanying descriptive or fictional texts. It demonstrates that the London‐trained artist adapted the type and extent of satirical elements in the tradition of Hogarth to the publication context and the tastes of the German editors and middle‐class almanac audience. Thus, this article adds an important aspect to the study of a neglected artist, to British–German transfer of visual satire around 1800, and to illustration as translation.