Eighteenth-century Europe Research Articles

The Life of Dr Thomas Hussey, 1746-1803. Bishop of Waterford and Lismore by Liam Murphy (review)

Book Reviews The Life of Dr Thomas Hussey, 1746-1803. Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Liam Murphy (Dublin: Kingdom Books, 2016), 175 pages. In current times, ecclesiastical matters might not enjoy widespread interest among the general public under forty years of age. Therefore, why publish an episcopal biography if the market is so small and is diminishing even further? To those who are intelligent and ambitious to progress in life, biographies of high achievers, regardless of their vocation or profession, hold important lessons. In the case of this biography, the subject, Thomas Hussey, was an exceptionally gifted player in politics and diplomacy in Irish, British, continental European and North American history, and in his case the word ‘bishop’ should not be associated with piosity, platitudes and mediocrity. The great French statesman and bishop Jean Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, once quipped: ‘Never ordain a pious fool, otherwise he might lose his piety and much else’! The character that emerges from the pages of this biography was neither a pious simpleton nor an arrogant fool but a brilliant strategist in both secular and spiritual spheres. Anyone who enjoyed reading William M Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, or watching Stanley Kubrick’s film version of it, will appreciate reading about this real-life figure, a worldly-wise priest who was effective in both his diplomatic skills and in his pastoral ministrations. He bequeathed a worthy legacy to the Irish Catholic community. Hussey circulated effortlessly and elegantly among the courts and chancelleries; salons and spas; great churches and clandestine chapels; and gracious squares and grimy backstreets of late eighteenth-century Europe. He was, above all, a gentleman. Well-educated in Seville his high culture, theological and spiritual moderation and affable disposition provided him with self-confidence and practical insight into the human condition that enabled him to be a good and effective pastor and diplomat. As principal chaplain at the Spanish embassy in London, Hussey helped successive ambassadors smooth the way for improving and maintaining better relations between Britain and Spain.Apart from spiritual duties, he was involved in negotiations concerning trade, Gibraltar and the fledgling USA. Studies • volume 106 • number 423 379 Autumn 2017: Book Reviews Through his charm, suavity and high intellect he established good personal relations with leading establishment figures such as Camden, Castlereagh, Cornwallis, Cloncurry, FitzWilliam, Portland and Westmoreland, and with great political personalities of the age such as Henry Grattan, theWhig Charles James Fox and the political philosopher Edmund Burke. Such friendships, as well as Hussey’s distinction in being the first Catholic priest to be elected to membership of the prestigious Royal Society, helped immensely in bringing about the Catholic ReliefActs, and the foundation of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth (of which he was the first president), with annual financial support from the officially Protestant state. Yet, Hussey’s social ecumenism did not compromise his sense of pastoral theology. His eloquent but robust challenge to the Protestant Church over its insistence on Catholics in the military participating in Protestant religious services, and the opprobrium of Dublin Castle that it earned him, did not equal or surpass the jealousy and back-stabbing of some of his ‘brother bishops’. The author deftly exposes a wider range of circumstances surrounding Hussey’s departure from the presidency of Maynooth than is traditionally admitted. Indeed, such was the esteem in which Hussey was held in society that, notwithstanding his aforementioned clash with the Protestant Church and the state, the authorities provided a military guard of honour at his episcopal consecration in the church of St Nicholas of Myra on Francis Street in Dublin. It was the first occasion that a ‘papist prelate’ was so honoured by the officially Protestant state. The quality of this study overwhelms the very few minor typographical errors. Occasionally in the text, the author refers to the ‘Department’ instead of the correct nomenclature of Congregation of Propaganda Fide (for example on p.95). Also footnote 101 on p.92 does not provide the complete source reference. However, this volume provides a very good companion study to that of another remarkable and noteworthy bishop of Waterford and Lismore by the late Patrick Fagan, An Irish bishop in penal times...

Book Review: Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Book Review: Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe

A case of hidden genocide? Disintegration and destruction of people of color in Napoleonic Europe, 1799–1815

ABSTRACTMigration, social mobility, and integration of new populations in late eighteenth-century Europe resulted in an expansion of diversity, which contributed to abolition and culminated in full civil rights between 1791 and 1799. This revolutionary experiment in equality faced both domestic and multinational opposition, which led to the genocidal purge of diversity in Europe and the wider world during the Napoleonic Era.

Review: The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment, by Christopher M. S. Johns

Christopher M. S. Johns. The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 440 pp., 56 color and 104 b/w illus. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271062082 Accounts of the gradual modernization of European culture over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the process we call the Enlightenment—have traditionally focused on developments in northern European countries, especially France and England. Many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers in those countries were famously anticlerical, and the secularization of the modern Western world is generally assumed to be one outcome of their project. More recently, scholars have been questioning the emphasis given to northern countries as well as assumptions regarding attitudes toward religious thinkers and institutions throughout eighteenth-century Europe, but the papacy still tends to be seen as the antithesis of Enlightenment. With Christopher M. S. Johns's magisterial study The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment , that last antiquated notion can finally be put to rest. Johns brings to his subject a wealth of erudition and a lifetime of reflection on it, beginning with his first book, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI (1993), in which he examines the titular pontiff's program of restoration for Rome's early Christian basilicas.1 In the current book he explores the many ways that the Catholic Church shared in Enlightenment assumptions and goals in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the reforming impulses of the four popes who reigned during that time: Benedict XIII Orsini (r. 1724–30), Clement XII Corsini (r. 1730–40), Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58), and Clement XIII Rezzonico (r. 1758–69). Examining a comprehensive selection and variety of papal and episcopal projects of different types and media, including art, architecture, furniture, decorative arts, prints, and ephemeral constructions, Johns defines the loaded phrase “visual culture” as “the nontextual production of things created for specific purposes in the expectation that they will be valued and preserved” (31). This broad and simple definition …

The Small Republic and the Great Power: Censorship between Geneva and France in the Later Eighteenth Century

During the 1700s, French-language texts were produced, disseminated and read across much of Europe. This article examines the French government's reaction to the production of literature beyond France's borders, specifically in the republic of Geneva. The French government exercised surveillance over the Genevan print trade and tried to curb the spread of contentious material. The Genevan government responded with a blend of cooperation and resistance. This collaboration between France and Geneva can give us a more precise understanding of both international relations and the workings of censorship. The complexities of imposing censorship on an international scale necessitated a flexible approach; one which ultimately focused on the suppression of a limited corpus of primarily political material. The extension of censorship beyond borders was not simple, nor was it wholly successful. Nevertheless, this limited form of censorship had a discernible impact on the availability of information in eighteenth-century Europe.

Negotiating an art deal in eighteenth-century Europe

This article presents new evidence concerning the sale in 1731 of Guido Reni’s Dispute over the Immaculate Conception to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first serving Prime Minister and one of the most important English collectors of the eighteenth century. The documents provide a full record of the negotiations undertaken to bring the painting to England, thereby affording a rare opportunity to examine the procedures involved in such a deal, as well as the roles and the identities of its main actors. Negotiation was a central aspect in the process of acquiring artistic masterpieces, and thus an essential stage in the creation of an art collection. Also investigated here is the possible role of Guido’s work in the contemporary Roman cultural context, while new evidence is presented on the previous owners of the painting, the De Angelis family. This new material allows, therefore, for a broader consideration of the success of Guido’s art in the context of eighteenth-century Europe.

Rethinking agency and creativity: Translation, collaboration and gender in early modern Germany

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of collaboration in European cultural history. First, it identifies the existence of a tradition of literary and translational collaboration across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe which has been only hinted at in the literature to date and demonstrates that collaboration took a particularly distinctive form in the German-speaking states. Second, the article reveals a hidden tradition of women who worked together with male colleagues as intellectual equals and published translations which contributed to the national agenda of cultural regeneration. The article argues that collaboration should be understood as a valid and creative form of authorship, as it was at the time, thus pointing to new ways of interpreting the history of literature and translation. It also suggests that we should rethink women’s involvement in collaborative (male–female) partnerships and read these relationships as positive and productive, thus offering new ways of interpreting women’s history.

International networks of production and distribution of scientific instruments in eighteenth-century Europe

Abstract The eighteenth century met a growing interest in the production of scientific instruments (mathematical, astronomical, nautical and philosophical) offering the means to achieve new physics concepts and greater precision, offering answers to some of the big questions, such as the shape of the Earth and longitude at sea. International scientific programmes promoted the production, acquisition and perfection of instruments and the progressive dissemination of experimental physics education set the tone for these instruments. The connections between instrument makers and the gentry in relation to these instruments produced or constituted important influences that were previously almost unthinkable. The spread of scientific instruments developed in close connection between producers and recipients, with the global spread of major scientific quests to solve and naturally with the impact Newtonian physics and experimental philosophy acquired at the time. J. H. de Magellan, who had a particular interest in and knowledge of scientific instruments, was actively engaged in this process of dissemination across Europe. After spending twenty years in London he could accept the demands of the Iberian courts for instruments that would allow them to carry out their work in South America.

Flight Behavior: Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy

Flight Behavior:Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy Bonnie Gaarden (bio) From ancient Greece and through much of Western history, culture, as a set of specifically human attributes and activities, was seen as superior to nature, the purely animal/biological realm. But in eighteenth-century Europe, Rousseau and the Romantic movement, Hegelian-style, inverted this traditional hierarchy by associating nature with human freedom and fulfillment, and culture with deadening, even dehumanizing, constraint. As a symbol of culture, the Parthenon gave place to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.” However, the publication of The Origin of Species in the middle 1800s imbued many people with a new nightmare vision of nature as a relentless maw grinding whole species to extinction: the nature of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, famously “red in tooth and claw” (lvi). At the same time, the aspersions cast on culture by the Romantics remained, exacerbated by the obvious social evils associated with profit-driven industrial production. By the late Victorian/early Edwardian period, to many thoughtful people, nature was a sow that eats her farrow and culture was a heartless “manufactory.” Masculinity, in particular, was envisioned as a battlefield in the nature/culture war. In reaction to the Romantic notion of the “noble savage,” the Victorians developed models of mature masculinity around the fundamental ideal of self-control. “Manliness” was the end of a developmental process in which one learned to repress the native “savagery” manifest in boyhood to dedicate oneself to the greater, social purposes determined by culture (Deane 153). As Andrew Smith puts it, men were expected to leave behind “baser, biological needs” to enter the “morally meaningful world” of public affairs (19). According to scholars such as John Tosh, Bradley Deane, and James Eli Adams, variations on this restraint-based masculine model included the paterfamilias, the entrepreneur, the gentleman, the soldier, and even—when self-rule extended to self-punishment or to heroic asceticism—the desert saint. The ability to rule themselves conferred upon men the ability to rule a family, a business, a society, and ultimately to participate in the rule of an empire (Adams 115). However, by the last third of the nineteenth century, self-control was losing credibility as the hallmark of a “real man.” Andrew Smith [End Page 69] observes that the self-repressed or “civilized” man was increasingly characterized as grey, “hollowed out,” and unable to enjoy life. He sees Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as personifying the dilemma of late nineteenth-century masculinity in its title characters: Hyde is a rapacious monster, but Jekyll is “dehumanized,” cut off from biological energy (37–38). According to Bradley Deane, by the late 1800s, the antiman was no longer the “primitive, bloodthirsty Zulu,” but “the hen-pecked, lower middle-class clerk” (158–59) as a new hegemonic masculinity was constellated: the New Imperial man, physically strong, naturally aggressive, skipping the mid-century maturation process to retain the “savagery” of his boyhood, playing out his adult life in an endless series of homosocial contests on the wild frontiers of the British empire. Deane offers James Barrie’s fantastic boy who refuses to relinquish his savage boyhood as an image of this new masculine ideal: “Peter Pan, seductive and cruel, ludic and lawless, as ready to change places with Captain Hook as to fight him, is entirely a figure of his time” (114). Abstracting Peter from his original context, I concur with Deane’s argument that he conforms in many ways to the New Imperial ideal. In this essay, however, I will stress that Barrie does not offer Peter to his readers as such. In Barrie’s context, Peter represents not a new possibility for satisfactory manhood, but the only escape from all models of adult manhood—including the New Imperial variety—all of which Barrie presents as ultimately intolerable. Deane observes that Peter’s brand of boyishness “was neither frivolous nor harmless” when transposed by British soldiers and administrators into the real world of the British colonies. And for Barrie, the only quality that renders Peter’s savagery desirable is its locus in, and control by, a factor entirely irrelevant to Deane’s...

Playing God: Testing, Modeling, and Imitating Blood Miracles in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

In the late Middle Ages, rumors began to spread throughout Europe regarding blood miracles associated with the relics of martyrs. Centuries-old blood, pulverized or solidified and black in color, was said to return to its original bright red color, or else to liquefy or bubble under certain circumstances or on certain dates in the liturgical calendar. With the Reformation, in Protestant countries most of these relics were either destroyed or forgotten. In Catholic countries, on the contrary, blood miracles multiplied, reaching a peak between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconstructs the debate that sprang up in eighteenth-century Europe over the blood of Saint Januarius and the attempts made to disprove its miraculous properties, often not in written works, but by staging highly theatrical demonstrations. It examines the way in which, with phenomena as complex as miracles, the activities of testing alleged facts, creating elucidative models, and staging imitations intertwined over the centuries, often overlapping and becoming confused.

Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction by James E. McClellan, Harold Dorn, and: Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Hanna Hodacs, and: The Great Knowledge Transcendence: The Rise of Western Science and Technology Reframed by Dengjian Jin, and: The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture

Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction by James E. McClellan, Harold Dorn, and: Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Hanna Hodacs, and: The Great Knowledge Transcendence: The Rise of Western Science and Technology Reframed by Dengjian Jin, and: The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture

The Novel and Sentimentalism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Europe and China: A Modest Proposal for Comparing Early Modern Literatures

The Novel and Sentimentalism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Europe and China: A Modest Proposal for Comparing Early Modern Literatures

Public health promotion in Bangladesh through the community health clinics: A Foucauldian analysis

The system of community health clinics in Bangladesh is contributing largely to improving the public health status of rural communities in Bangladesh. The significant success of this health promotion program leads medicine to its summit of power to influence the prevalent power structure in rural Bangladesh. A critical analysis of this paradigm shift is demanded in the context of public health. A Foucauldian analysis of the public health scenario of Bangladesh is most relevant in this context. In the paper, I propose a critical analysis of the public health apparatus of Bangladesh as manifested in the community health clinics, from the Foucauldian perspective of Discipline, Body, Power, and Space. Definitely, Foucault’s historical analysis of health in eighteenth century Europe in his Power/Knowledge is instrumental in the analysis of the medicalization of family in the public-private partnership model of Community Health Clinics. However, his other writings such as Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization are also relevant to the analysis of: a) how self-subjection becomes an element in the empowerment process of the public health initiative in Bangladesh; b) how the concept of hygiene and new diseases serve as a means of social control in the politics of medicine; c) how medicine accumulates morals like trust, solidarity, and common good in its normative role to the exercise of bio-power; and, finally d) how rural space becomes an important phenomenon of medicine in contemporary Bangladesh. It is taken for granted that the community health clinics are contributing positively to improving the public health condition. However, many stories are untold in this picture of health promotion. In this paper, I analyze the public health promotion program of Bangladesh in light of the above questions to understand the power structure and the paradigm shift of the body politic in terms of health.

Die piëtistiese egoprofiel van pioniersvrou Anna Elizabeth Steenkamp (1797-1891) in twee weergawes van haar “Joernaal” uit die Transoranje

Religious ego-texts of Cape Trekboers on the frontier reflect prominent traits of mystical Pietism. Similar features can also be detected in the ego-texts of both male and female believers deeper into the interior prior to and during the Great Trek. These pioneer texts reflect religious literary styles similar to the dominant pietistic literature in Germany and in the Netherlands. In addition to the influence of religious literature of German Pietism and devotional literature of Dutch Second Reformation authors, the marginalisation and isolation of believers stimulated pietistic tendencies similar to trends in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. The end of the eighteenth-century witnessed the gradual demise of Pietism in Germany and supplanting of pietistic tendencies by more secular oriented chronicles, autobiographical descriptions and life adventures. In the Netherlands, however, Pietism flourished from the mid- eighteenth century and publications of pietistic ego-texts continued well into the twentieth century. The “Journal” of the Voortrekker woman Anna Steenkamp is a typical example of a family chronicle with descriptions of her life adventures during the Great Trek. Two copies of her “Journal” composed in the Transorange are analysed in order to determine her religious mentality profile as representative of Voortrekker women of the period 1838 to 1854. The first contains an attachment with religious songs and poems of a typical pietistic nature. These reflections mirror religious tendencies on the frontier at a stage when the dominant culture of similar religious texts in the Netherlands had reached its peak. The second copy contains brief reflections on her life on the frontier undergirded by typical pietistic reflections on God’s providential care. This text, composed in the Transorange, reflects a more secular inclined profile undergirded by pietistic elements from an earlier epoch in German autobiographical texts from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century.

“Undistinguished Destruction”: The Effects of Smallpox on British Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any African American who fought for the British cause against the colonial rebels in his province. Dunmore's plan to reconquer Virginia with his “Ethiopian Regiment” ended in failure, not due to a lack of willing volunteers but because of a familiar eighteenth-century killer: smallpox. Five years later, similar proclamations were issued in South Carolina. Yet smallpox again hindered British designs, devastating the eager African Americans who flooded to their lines. This paper uses primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War. Focussing on the differing regions of Virginia and South Carolina this paper will assess the impact of smallpox on British military designs for runaway slaves while also evaluating the reasons why the disease had such a devastating effect on African Americans during the period. Overall, this paper will show how smallpox, so common in eighteenth-century Europe, put a fatal end to the first widespread push for emancipation on the American continent and helped derail one of Britain's best hopes for turning the tide in the Revolutionary War.

Trailing Nietzsche: Gershom Scholem and the Sabbatean Dialectics

Abstract Gershom Scholem, the most predominant scholar of Jewish Mysticism in our times, is highly known for his contribution to the field of Jewish history. But his intellectual origins lay in his adolescence, and in his heretical-philosophical criticism of the Judeo-Christian morality and the ideology of the German bourgeoisie. These early impressions and thoughts appeared in one of his first Hebrew articles, “Redemption Through Sin”, published in Palestine in 1937. Scholem’s discussion analyzed the “nihilistic revolution” of the Sabbataeans and Frankists in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe, whose main feature was the rejection of the normative ethics of rabbinic Judaism. The hidden core of the young Scholem, his revolutionary thought, was followed by an early encounter with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The dream of young Scholem, as revealed by his diary, to write “Zarathustra for the Jews”, eventually came into being in an original adaptation. His great book Sabbatai Sevi (1957), can be read as a Nietzschean re-reading of “Redemption Through Sin”. The biography of Sabbatai Sevi as a Jewish Zarathustra may provide refreshing insights into the development of Scholem’s thought and an opportunity to challenge him through an analogical perspective.

Italian technical literature in the field of architectural restoration: The case study of the Historic Memories about the Vatican Church by Giovanni Poleni

This paper provides a theoretical, methodological, and practical contribution to the debate about strategies for the divulgation of the Italian technical literature of the eighteenth century in English-speaking countries with attention to the Italian universities and cultural institutions of the time. The paper contains a survey of the historical bibliography of contemporary translations of non-technical treatises of architecture in the English language and it proceeds to draw up a set of guidelines (decalogue) of different recently proposed methodologies and strategies. It describes the selection of the treatise to translate, relevant to the context and authoritative knowledge in the European scientific background of the eighteenth century; it continues by proposing a synopsis of the original text in the Italian modern language, a strategy used in order to make historical technical treatises accessible to the contemporary scientific Italian language. Approaches and strategies are experimented with in the case study of Historic Memories about the Great Dome of the Vatican Church (Le Memorie Istoriche della Gran Cupola Vaticana) by Giovanni Poleni, one of the most authoritative scholars of eighteenth-century Europe.

Public Sphere in China: A Literature Review

Controversies have been longstanding around the application of the concept of public sphere to a Chinese context since China did not ever have the equivalent historical circumstances for the sprouting of public sphere as the eighteenth century Europe did. With a postmodern constructivist perspective, this paper combs a series of important academic works henceforth from the discussion of Chinese public sphere began in late 1980s and tries to unpack the trajectory of the development of public sphere in China as well as the discussions arising therefrom. It argues that the concept of public sphere can be extrapolated but with distinct manifestations taking root in its respective socio-political conditions. The paper echoes with some scholars’ proposal that studying Chinese public sphere should break free of the conceptual constrains and establish the theoretical autonomy by examining it in social movements rather than in theoretical argumentation.

Las cosas naturales y las cosas no naturales; las fronteras de lo hereditario en el siglo XVIII

<p class='p1'>Este artículo intenta delimitar el espacio conceptual en el que se concibió la transmisión hereditaria de peculiaridades físicas y morales durante el siglo XVIII europeo. El terreno de lo hereditario en ese periodo estaba vinculado a la comunicación, de padres a hijos, de componentes accidentales del cuerpo, que podían de algún modo transmitirse usando las vías de la reproducción biológica. Al mismo tiempo, todo lo que tenía que ver con la reproducción de los rasgos esenciales del cuerpo estaba, conceptualmente, fuera del alcance de la noción de lo hereditario. Las diferentes teorías dieciochescas de la reproducción asumieron esta dicotomía, que representaba una frontera interna para la noción de herencia. El predominio en el mismo periodo del esquema galénico de las cosas naturales y las cosas no naturales permite una exploración complementaria de la frontera externa para la transmisión hereditaria. La posibilidad de que el cuerpo (la constitución, el temperamento) pudiera transformarse por influencias externas, y que estos cambios en ciertas circunstancias pudieran a su vez comunicarse a la descendencia, definió la negociación de esta segunda frontera.</p>

Grammatiche dell'italiano ‘Pour Les Dames’ nel Settecento: Antonio Curioni fra Parigi e Londra

Across eighteenth-century Europe, a number of authors composed grammars, of their own language or of foreign languages, either dedicated to a ‘lady’ or addressed to a readership of ‘ladies’. Grammarians who indicated in the titles of their works that they had written ‘for the Ladies’, ‘pour les Dames’, ‘per le Dame’, ‘für die Damen’ (or ‘für Frauenzimmer’) often further specified, either in the subtitle or in the body of the text, that they meant to address, more broadly, a readership of beginners.The Italian Antonio Curioni, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, published a number of works, first in Paris and then in London, meant to help readers learn the Italian language and its grammar, following a progressive method aimed at beginners and then more advanced learners, including grammars ‘à l'usage des Dames’. Most of Curioni's works were dedicated to female figures, young ‘ladies’ of the higher classes, who represented the predominant part of his intended readership.This essay examines Curioni's works within the grammatical production ‘pour les Dames’ of the time and against the background of the flourishing, and very competitive, market of grammars meant for a readership eager to learn Italian.