British Life Research Articles

George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father

George Goodwin, <i>Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father</i>

Monuments to the Truth of Christianity: Anti-Judaism in the Works of Adam Clarke

The prevailing historiographies of Jewish life in England suggest that religious representations of the Jews in the early modern period were confined to the margins and fringes of society by the desacralization of English life. Such representations are mostly neglected in the scholarly literature for the latter half of the long eighteenth century, and English Methodist texts in particular have received little attention. This article addresses these lacunae by examining the discourse of Adam Clarke (1760/2–1832), an erudite Bible scholar, theologian, preacher and author and a prominent, respected, Methodist scholar. Significantly, the more overt demonological representations were either absent from Clarke‘s discourse, or only appeared on a few occasions, and were vague as to who or what was signified. However, Clarke portrayed biblical Jews as perfidious, cruel, murderous, an accursed seed, of an accursed breed and radically and totally evil. He also commented on contemporary Jews (and Catholics), maintaining that they were foolish, proud, uncharitable, intolerant and blasphemous. He argued that in their eternal, wretched, dispersed condition, the Jews demonstrated the veracity of biblical prophecy, and served an essential purpose as living monuments to the truth of Christianity.

Commodification and Trauma in Wordsworth’s Poetry: A Preface

Commodity refers to physical sexual desire to fulfill the material needs as well as to lead the luxurious life and the colonial system affects the life and literature society and everywhere. The Romantic period, particularly the time of Wordsworth, witnessed turbulent social upheaval due to the ascendancy of commodification in British life. Although the Romantic writers used to describe British life as reverberating with natural richness, it was actually a ploy to hide massive natural devastation as Jerome McGann’s alleges in The Romantic Ideology (1983). England, during the Romantic age, had been engulfed by modernization, deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and other different types of problems, including traumas.

‘A Passport to Cross the Room’: Cosmopolitan Empathy and Transnational Engagement in Zadie Smith’s &lt;i&gt;NW (2012)&lt;/i&gt;

This article seeks to demonstrate that Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, NW (2012), deviates away from celebratory multiculturalism in Britain, interrogating the struggle between critical cosmopolitanism and melancholia in a twenty-first century urban environment. It will be argued that Smith’s limited geographical focus (on an area in which she was born and continues to reside) intimates that the social constructs of the family and local community are more conducive to developing cosmopolitan empathy and meaningful relations. Through an analysis of the ethical values of hospitality and openness, it will be suggested that NW reflects a rise in transnational relations and the construction of a cultural model of cosmopolitan communication haunted by national identity and the difficulties of negotiating cultural diversity. The article will then conclude by examining how NW exposes the racial inequalities and socio-economic disparities continuing to reside at the heart of British urban life.

Probabilistic mortality forecasting with varying age-specific survival improvements

Many mortality forecasting approaches extrapolate past trends. Their predictions of the future development can be quite precise as long as turning points and/or age-shifts of mortality decline are not present. To account even for such mortality dynamics, we propose a model that combines recently developed ideas in a single framework. It (1) uses rates of mortality improvement to model the aging of mortality decline, and it (2) optionally combines the mortality trends of multiple countries to catch anticipated turning points. We use simulation-based Bayesian inference to estimate and run this model that also provides prediction intervals to quantify forecast uncertainty. Validating mortality forecasts for British and Danish women from 1991 to 2011 suggest that our model can forecast regular and irregular mortality developments and that it can perform at least as well as other widely accepted approaches like, for instance, the Lee-Carter model or the UN Bayesian approach. Moreover, prospective mortality forecasts from 2012 to 2050 suggest gradual increases for British and Danish life expectancy at birth.

The Poetics of (In)visibility: A Stylistic Analysis of Caryl Phillips' Foreigners: Three English Lives

Caryl Phillips’s multi-voiced texts have often been studied through the lens of Bakhtinian polyphony. In this essay, I focus on the volume of fictionalized biographies Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007) to demonstrate that the polyphonic nature of Phillips’s work resides not only in the structural confrontation of characters’ and narrators’ voices but also in the inscription of the writer’s own subjectivity within these individual discourses. Borrowing methods from the discipline of stylistics, I first focus on the use of adjectives and modality in the opening section of Foreigners, “Dr. Johnson’s Watch,” to establish how the first-person narrator’s gradual transition from tentativeness to self-confidence constitutes a way for the implied author, on the one hand, to expose the thwarted logic of the colonially-tinted discourse of his eighteenth-century narrator and, on the other, to offer larger reflections on the process of ideological encoding inherent in the writing of historiography. Such an investigation based on modality furthers allow me to challenge the critical consensus according to which the second section of the book, “Made in Wales,” is a straightforward factual account. Indeed, I suggest that the story of the rise and fall of mixed-race boxer Randolph Turpin is in fact a highly polyphonic narrative featuring increasingly marked clashes in modality and point of view. These, I argue, may draw attention precisely to the problematic construction of historiographical discourse deceptively made to appear so commonsense by the narrator of “Dr. Johnson’s Watch.”

Cosmopugilism: Thomas Moore’s Boxing Satires and the Post-Napoleonic Congresses

JULIA M. WRIGHT Cosmopugilism: Thomas Moore’s Boxing Satires and the Post-Napoleonic Congresses T homas moore’s satires were extremely popular in their day but fell into obscurity along with their topical references. Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress (1819), for instance, sold nearly two thousand copies in a matter ofdays but is now mentioned only briefly in scholarship and for its most transparent historical allusions: for its jibes at the aristocrats it all but names, and as evidence of the influence of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana (1812— 1813), especially through Regency-era boxing slang? That the poem does I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada for its generous support ofmy research, Christina Morin and Marguerite Corporaal for the kind invitation to speak at “Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century” (August 2014), a wonderfully interdisciplinary and collegial event that gave me an excuse to focus on this project, and all who attended the conference for their responses to an early version of this essay. 1.Jane Moore, ed., The Satires of Thomas Moore, vol. 5 ofBritish Satire, 1785-1840, ed.John Strachan (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003); Pierce Egan, Boxiana; Or, Sketches ofAncient and Modern Pugilism;from the Days ofthe Renowned Broughton and Slack, to the Heroes ofthe Pres­ ent Milling AEra (London: Sherwood, Neely, andJones, 1812—13). All quotations from Moore and Boxiana are taken from these editions and cited parenthetically. J. C. Reid notes that the first volume of Boxiana was sent to subscribers in numbers begin­ ning in 1812, and “The completed volume, issued bound in 1813 and 1815, retained the 1812 title-page.” See Bucks and Bruisers: Pierce Egan and Regency England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 232. Reid usefully traces the complexities ofthe series’ publishing his­ tory and warns that, because the publisher held “copyright of the first three volumes and continued to issue them” in altered form, “Egan’s authentic text will be found only in edi­ tions before [1824]” (232). The influence of the series through to mid-century is evident in its imitators, including Charles Williams’s Boxiana (1815), John Badcock’s Fancy-ana; Or, a History ofPugilism (1824), and Francis Dowling’s Fistiana; Or, the Oracle of the Ring (1841), as well as a series of “Boxiana” articles in Blackwood’s. Moore notes in his journal that the Memorial was to appear on 9 March 1819 and by 14 March he “Had a letter from the Longmans to say that they had nearly sold the first edi­ tion of‘Cribb’ (2000 copies), and had worked off 2000 more as a second and third edition.” See vol. 2 of Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord John Russell SiR, 56 (Winter 2017) 499 500 JULIA M. WRIGHT not fit Moore’s current reputation as an Irish-Catholic nationalist song­ writer and orientalist poet has likely also contributed to its neglect. But putting the poem into the context of the 1818 Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle (the Congress of the poem’s title) and the broader tradition ofboxing satire can shed light not only on the satiric and political interests of the poem but also on the significance of the sport as a trope in Romantic-era political discourse. Despite its prominence in British material life throughout the Romantic Century (1750—1850), boxing is generally neglected in literary scholarship on the era. Important exceptions include Leo J. Henkin’s 1947 essay on “Pugilism and the Poets,” Jeffrey Robinson’s recent chapter on 1820s boxing literature, centrally William Hazlitt’s “The Fight” (1822), John Strachan’s useful survey of sports and Regency writing, and Jane Moore’s invaluable edition of Moore’s satires.2 There is also a significant body of work on Romantic-era boxing by cultural historians of various disciplines (including recent books by Jack Anderson, Kasia Boddy, James Kelly, and David Snowdon) and more specifically scholarship on race and boxing, from work byJohn Whale and Daniel O’Quinn on British parallels to the many important studies on the American context (where competi­ tive boxing was inextricable from the practice of slavery).3 Boxing was not only a popular sport but also a preferred...

Redeeming Wastelands, Building Communities in the Old English Guthlac A

Although ecocriticism has recently flourished in the scholarship of medieval English literature, the majority of attention has focused on Middle English literature;1 as Alfred K. Siewers notes, “Modern scholarship long believed that descriptions of nature in Anglo-Saxon literature tended to be more alienated and distanced in tone and theme than those in neighboring contemporary Insular literary cultures” (199). However, when we examine the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, ecological concerns appear, even if seemingly on the margins. Such is the case, I argue, for the Old English poem Guthlac A, found in the late tenth-century Exeter Book, which details the religious life of Saint Guthlac. Guthlac, a member of the Mercian royal family born in 673 AD, abandoned a successful military life in order to enter a monastery at the age of twenty-four.2 A few years later, in 701 AD, he withdrew from the secular world even further by removing himself to the wild fens of East Anglia, where he lived for thirteen years, constantly repulsing demonic attacks, as attested by the various accounts of his life. In 740 AD, approximately thirty years after Guthlac’s death, which occurred in 714 AD, a monk of Crowland by the name of Felix composed the first-known hagiography of Guthlac, the Vita Sancti Guthlaci. Vernacular accounts soon appeared in various Old English texts, specifically, the Old English Martyrology, the Vercelli Homily XXIII, and an Old English prose Life.

“We Missed Caparica”: a Experiência Educativa do Estrangeiro em The Young Traveller in Portugal (1955)

In 1947, shortly after World War II, when major growth in tourism began, the London publisher Phoenix House launched an illustrated series titled «The Young Traveller Series». The first volume, set in South Africa, would be followed by another 40, targeting 12 to 16 year olds. The aim was to describe the way of life in several countries, exposing young readers to the diversity of the world and to linguistic and cultural differences. Avoiding the drier conventions of the travel book (in particular the profusion of objective, practical, utilitarian information), the series adopted an attractive and effective method of presenting the Other to an audience comprising children and young people, publishing narratives starring children and teenagers who go through the exciting experience of coming into contact with the most diverse regions of the globe. In 1955 a volume dedicated to Portugal was published: The Young Traveller in Portugal, by the journalist Honor Wyatt (1910-1998). A “book of fiction based on fact”, it is strongly autobiographical in tone, as it is the result of a journey to Estado Novo Portugal made by the author in 1953 together with her husband and two children, with the specific purpose of writing a book about this Iberian country. According to the principles of the series, the work relates a trip that from the beginning is intended as educational. Travelling along an alternative itinerary to those enshrined in travel guides, the English family escapes growing massification and instead seeks circuits that correspond to individual tastes and cultural interests. This article analyses how Portugal and the Portuguese are portrayed in this work for young British readers. Special attention is paid to the attitude of the protagonists towards the Portuguese Other and to the way the trip is presented as an experience that provides a comparison between the place of origin of the traveller and the country visited, with the consequent process of self-identification through differentiation. Getting away from the routine of everyday English life represents for the two younger characters a chance of adventure and personal challenge that has always been associated with travel. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to learn two important lessons: that Europe is not a homogeneous space, that it is, rather, made up of differences and specificities, and that the experience of the foreign can promote tolerance and understanding among peoples and cultures.

Introduction: Alternative Histories of the East India Company

Introduction:Alternative Histories of the East India Company Julia Schleck (bio) and Amrita Sen (bio) The English East India Company, established on December 31, 1600, by a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I, became one of the most important and influential mercantile companies. While it was not the first of the new joint-stock companies set up in order to access the great trading centers of the East directly, the English East India Company (EIC) proved to be one of the most successful, far outstripping the others in profit by the middle of the seventeenth century. This was in part due to the Company's adoption of what many mercantilist pamphleteers believed to be non-conventional trading practices: exchanging spices and textiles for bullion instead of actual commodities. Abandoning Edward Misselden's famous call for an exchange of "Wares for Wares," the Company was seen to be setting a dangerous precedent, one that we now recognize as being rooted in the early capitalistic transformations that accompanied the emergence of early modern globalization. Thanks to its extraordinary success, the Company became one of the very first conduits through which English men and women came to experience the East first-hand, a direct access that led to the generation of new types of knowledge about the Indies. Whether in the fields of ethnography, botany, political discourse, or myriad other areas, the East Indies, and the East India Company, fundamentally impacted the way that England perceived the world and itself. Given its importance in shaping early modern English life, it is surprising how little scholarly attention the East India Company has attracted in the last several decades, particularly from literary scholars and cultural historians. Economic historians such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Philip Lawson have made invaluable contributions in helping us recognize how the Company helped transform global circuits of trade, and Philip Stern's recent study The Company-State importantly locates the EIC as a political governing body (as opposed to a merely economic organization) from its very inception.1 However, the cultural [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. "The East Indies," Historia mundi: or Mercator's atlas (1635). Courtesy John Hay Library, Brown University. [End Page 2] and social impact of the East India Company has been largely overlooked. Despite the upsurge of interest in the "Global Renaissance," one of the organizations that most successfully linked the early modern globe in an exchange of goods, ideas, and bodies—the joint-stock trading corporation—has been left largely unexamined, and with it, a large portion of the globe (see Singh, "Introduction"). The paucity of scholarship on English encounters with the East Indies becomes most evident when we consider the rich wealth of studies based on Anglo-Ottoman or even Anglo-Mahgreb or Anglo-Safavid exchanges. Dozens of scholarly monographs and edited collections have now been published detailing the place of Ottoman, North African, and Safavid figures and cultural practices in the English imaginary, but with a few notable exceptions, the lands east of the Safavid Empire have been left untouched.2 This imbalance is partly due to the sources available to literary critics and cultural historians. As Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Matthew Dimmock, Matthew Birchwood, and now many others have shown, dramatic and other literary works featuring Islamic (particularly Turkish) characters multiplied in the early modern period, leaving us a rich body of literature through which to examine the place of Islam and its adherents in the English imaginary. The East Indies, on the other hand, appear in relatively fewer surviving dramatic works before the late seventeenth century, and even less frequently in romances or epic or lyric poems. However, this rationale does not explain the neglect of the travel narratives and other written records produced by EIC directors and servants. Although infrequently published as singular narratives, the vast body of detailed letters, logs, lists, and minutes written by company officials is weighty enough to bring an elephant to its knees. There are famously nine miles of EIC archives stored in the British Library, much of the earlier portion of which is cataloged and reprinted in widely available editions by Henry Stevens and W. Noel Sainsbury...

BRITISH HILL STATIONS IN SOUTH ASIA AND MAINLAND SOUTH EAST ASIA: BRITISH INDIA, CEYLON, BURMA AND BRITISH MALAYA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Hill stations in South Asia and Mainland South East Asia in British India, Ceylon, Burma and British Malaya were established in the 18th, 19th and 20th century by the British who governed these countries. The objective of this paper is to show the similarities of fifteen hill stations in these countries in terms of location and size, city ranking, purpose and layout, facilities and architecture. The purpose to found a hill station was to escape from the soaring heat in the plains and to recover from tropical diseases contracted and therefor located in the mountains or hills where the air is cool at a height between 2,000 and 9,000 feet. The size of the stations is between 408 (?) and 600 square miles. Some hill stations had the function of the capital of the government of a country or specific area. The hill station possessed characteristics and facilities of the British Home Counties: climate, clubs, golf courses, racecourses, lakes, and architecture in the British (Gothic Revival, Tudor Revival, Elizabethan Renaissance Revival, Victorian or Swiss Gothic) style, botanical gardens, vegetation and life style.

‘Loyal Believers and Disloyal Sceptics’: Propaganda and Dissent in Britain during the Korean War, 1950–1953

AbstractThis article looks at the small number of British subjects who visited China and North Korea during the Korean War with a view to influencing British opinion. Although none were brought to trial, all experienced some form of punitive action, whether the loss of employment, loss of passports, or damage to their reputations. The subject is placed in the context of the Cold War, and the wider concerns about disloyalty on the Left at the time, as well as the controversies surrounding the Korean War in Britain. It concludes that the actions of these individuals have to be understood in terms of their alternative loyalties (such as to the ‘new’ China, or to an alternative vision of the United Nations), which ultimately outweighed allegations of disloyalty.

In Quest of the Antique: The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart and the Democratization of Collecting, 1926-42.

The popularization of antique collecting is typically located in the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of 'retrochic' and the emergence of new markets and online trading websites for anonymously exchanging second-hand goods. Close study of the printed literature connected with the inter-war second-hand trade, however, challenges conventional chronologies in the history of consumer culture, and can provide a new perspective on the role of collecting in British social and cultural life. This article examines the period, after the late 1920s, during which The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart reinvented itself as a forum for antique and decorative art enthusiasts. It argues that, in speaking to and publishing contributions from so-called 'small collectors', this 'Popular Weekly for Collectors and Connoisseurs' helped shape a modern and democratic culture of art appreciation in which ordinary people were actively invited to participate. The private correspondence archive of a Buckinghamshire subscriber who used the Exchange and Mart to sell his collection of 'Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Antiquities' to readers across the country during the 1930s reveals an intimate portrait of the desires, fantasies, and pleasures associated with the popular experience of collecting in pre-war Britain.

Midlands cadences: Narrative voices in the work of Alan Sillitoe

This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoe’s prose fiction, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the texts’ representations of Midlands English demotic. The narrative discourse traces a link between the experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language they speak; the narrators have voices redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working-class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonists’ consciousness through the demotic idiolects that they speak. Sillitoe’s is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral – asserting the right of a character’s dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as ‘working-class’, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working-class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography.

‘A New Order is Being Created’: Domestic Modernism in 1930s Britain

This article addresses the attempts in Britain in the 1930s to integrate modernist aesthetics with the home. A number of initiatives during this period were directed towards improving both standards of living and the public's taste: arising from exposure to continental modernism (Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier) and with a fervent belief in the democratisation of the living space, innovators such as Wells Coates, Jack and Molly Pritchard, and Maxwell Fry sought to re-invent the home for the twentieth century. The results were often short-lived, and in some cases, abject failures. Yet the negotiations that these designers, architects, and visionaries made between high-minded aesthetics and the practicalities of quotidian British life reveal much about standards of taste during the 1930s. This article takes two case studies in detail: The Lawn Road Flats – the Isokon Building – in Hampstead, London, and the activities of the Design and Industries Association (DIA). In doing so, I chart the ways in which interior design developed in Britain during the decade before the outbreak of World War Two, and explore how small-scale, short-lived activities in this period laid the foundations for a flowering of new modes of living post-1945.

Optimal taxation when people do not maximize well-being

I derive the optimal nonlinear income tax when individuals do not necessarily maximize their own well-being. This generates a corrective argument for taxation: optimal marginal taxes are higher (lower) if individuals work too much (too little) from a well-being point of view. I allow for multidimensional heterogeneity and derive the optimal tax schedule in terms of measurable sufficient statistics. One of these statistics measures the degree to which individuals fail to optimize their labor supply. I empirically estimate this by using British life satisfaction data as a measure of well-being. I find that low-income workers tend to work ‘too little’ and high-income workers ‘too much,’ providing a motive for lower marginal tax rates at the bottom and higher marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution.

Linguocultural Peculiarities of British Parliamentary Discourse

Peculiarities of British parliamentary discourse are largely conditioned by context models of its participants, which influence the style and linguistic forms of their speeches. As context models are culturally predetermined, linguistic means used in parliamentary discourse have also certain linguocultural peculiarities. Centuries-old traditions of British parliamentary system find their reflection in the language and form an essential part of British parliamentary discourse. The adherence to these communicative norms, including different rituals, ceremonies and traditions peculiar to British political life and British political discourse, has a special symbolic meaning and is aimed at maintaining stability of the political system, respect for the state power and its authority.

(De)constructing difference: a qualitative review of the ‘othering’ of UK Muslim communities, extremism, soft harms, and Twitter analytics

ABSTRACTThere is some evidence that, in the UK, current counter terrorism initiatives reproduce and amplify both real and imagined differences between Muslim and anti-Muslim groups, leading in turn to social and community polarisation and isolation. It is far from clear whether these changing perceptions always lead to increased ethnic and religious violence or increased radicalisation. However, more worrying is the potential for the development of ‘soft harms’ among those ‘suspect communities’; for example, reduced social integration, withdrawal from British cultural life, hate crime, forced marriage and domestic violence. There has to date been little interrogation of the scale of ‘soft harm’ among Muslim communities. Within this paper, the author offers a qualitative review of how the Muslim ‘other’ has become an ascribed category reproduced through an endemic ‘Muslim common sense’. Following that the author suggests that Twitter analytics may be harnessed to analyse the attitudes, current condition and reactions of suspect other communities through the tweeting of everyday events. The aim in doing so is to develop a series of proposals to counter the ideological underpinnings of difference and contribute to current debates on counter terrorism policy in the UK.

Book Review: Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church

Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church. By Peter Webster. Famham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2015. vii + 255 pp. $44.95 (paper).Peter Webster's Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury (1961-1974), who was also a principal Anglican theologian of the twentieth century. In this volume in the Ashgate series on Archbishops of Canterbury, in cooperation with the Lambeth Palace Archives, Webster offers a new interpretation of Ramsey by drawing heavily on the Ramsey papers at Lambeth (not catalogued for previous studies of Ramsey), including nearly one hundred pages of previously unpublished extracts from Ramsey's Canterbury speeches, writings, and pastoralia, for which Webster provides helpful historical annotations. The texts comprise the second part of the book, while the first part, divided into five core chapters, assesses his thirteen years in office, offering historical analysis and interpretation for the contemporary church.Previous treatments of Ramsey, such as Michael De-la-Noy's Michael Ramsey: A Portrait and Owen Chadwick's Michael Ramsey: A Life, were written by close colleagues of Ramsey's. Webster, by contrast, was born the year Ramsey left office and therefore had no personal acquaintance with or memory of him as Archbishop. This generational separation gives Webster a valued alternate perspective, and accounts for his different interpretation. As an independent scholar not drawn from Ramsey's Oxbridge world, Webster also considers Ramsey in the context of the concerns of Evangelical Anglicanism.The goal of The Shape of the Church is to see Ramsey's thirteen years as a coherent whole, aiming to evaluate whether or not they were effective responses to a period of rapid cultural change (p. 31). Specifically, Webster connects Ramseys response to the pivotal period in British life that Arthur Marwick has called the long sixties (p. 91) with the cultural context which surrounds Anglicanism in the British Isles and in North America today. Among these are: (1) the collapse of the allure of the social standing of membership in Anglican churches; (2) the precipitous decline of vital statistics of church-going that have reduced confidence in the capacity of the Church's worship to be meaningful to the public (p. 104); and (3) and the lack of consensus of what it means to be a national church, whether established or non-established. Each of these categories still define the framework of the North Atlantic churches in the second decade of the twenty-first century.Webster defines Ramseys leadership as both a series of failures and one great success. Failures include lack of rapid progress in AnglicanRoman Catholic relations and an inability to master the complexities of the Irish Troubles of the time. Above all, Webster gives a masterful account of Ramseys role in the collapse of the scheme for Anglican-Methodist Unity. …

Katherine Philips’s French Translations: Between Mediation and Appropriation

ABSTRACTWhile Katherine Philips's translations from Corneille, especially her Pompey, have attracted substantial scholarly attention in recent years, her other translations from the French have been relatively neglected. Yet these shorter translations are key to understanding the kind of niche as a social, fashionable author Philips was attempting to create for herself in the latter part of her career. The French poems she chose to translate or imitate are indicative of the forms of poetry she was trying to promote in the early 1660s, as she looked towards France for inspiration and sought to make an impact in British literary and musical life by emulating French models. Her interest in the French court air and ballet also sheds light on her aims in composing her songs between the acts in Pompey. Philips's French poems testify to her interest in contemporary French musical and literary culture, as well as in a more highbrow pastoral literature that she was trying to adapt for an English audience. Her translation of Saint-Amant's “Solitude” in particular represents an ambitious attempt to make an intervention in the contemporary debate about neo-Epicureanism, while also reflecting her literary flair for identifying popular poems.