Eighteenth-century Society Research Articles

Dolley and James Madison through the lens of medicine, sickness, and health.

The political lives of our founding fathers and mothers have been examined in great detail by many historians, but their experiences with medicine, health, and disease have generally received only cursory attention from most biographers. Yet focusing a lens on their often dramatic encounters with epidemics, disease, and medical treatments of their time lends them a corporeal presence that is absent from most historical accounts and serves to humanize them as flesh and blood individuals. James and Dolley Madison serve as prime examples of American icons who both dealt frequently with health challenges in the trajectory of their daily lives. This essay reflects the "health biographies" of James and Dolley Madison, which opens a revealing window into eighteenth century society and medicine, demonstrating graphically that even the elite, who had access to the best of contemporary medicine and physicians, were far from immune to debilitating illness.

The Stuff of Snuff: The Affective and Sensory Connotations of Snuffboxes in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Abstract This essay explores the relationship between emotions and material culture in relation to one specific artefact, the snuffbox. Small in scale, capable of activating multiple senses and hugely fashionable, the snuffbox became an enormously popular accessory that was extensively used by both sexes in eighteenth-century society. Its scale, and intimate relationship to the body, made it an ideal gift between lovers or courting couples, and it could be personalised to carry affective inscriptions, imagery or even portraits. Often made of ornate or expensive materials, or studded with jewels, its materiality became part of its seductive charm. Its emotional potency extended to its role in the performance of public identities through the display and manipulation of the box in polite society, while its secret compartments facilitated the retention of mementos or the private display of explicitly pornographic imagery.

Mercenary Punishment: Penal Logics in the Military Labour Market

AbstractThis article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of ends that were both typical and atypical within eighteenth-century society. It argues that soldiers experienced a breadth of both corporal and carceral punishments that were, in many cases, designed to limit otherness while communicating exemplarity along a fine-tuned spectrum of pain. The clearest example of this was running the gauntlet; a harrowing physical ordeal meted out by the offender's fellow soldiers. Turning to the carceral experiences often initiated by this ritual, it then examines how former mercenaries experienced convict labour differently from other occupational groups based on several factors. Their gender and occupational belonging meant they were funnelled towards specific penal institutions. Yet, their status as migrants and potential military labour meant they would often exit these institutions in specific ways. Whereas civilians often endured dishonouring punishments, ex-military convicts experienced punishments designed to inflict great pain without rendering them unfit for later military labour.

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

Rousseau’s illiberal constitutionalism: Austerity, domination, and the circumstances of politics

Abstract While contemporary commentary on illiberal constitutionalism has focused on questions of democratic procedure—highlighting populist attacks on constitutional structures—a rather different dimension or tradition of illiberal constitutionalism is found in the constitutional projects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While the illiberalism of Rousseau’s theory of political freedom is well understood in abstract terms, the illiberalism of his substantive constitutional proposals has not been commented upon to the same extent. In this article, I argue that the illiberal constitutional devices he prescribes for specific eighteenth-century societies help shed some light not only on the foundations of Rousseau’s antiliberal philosophy, but also, relatedly, on certain weaknesses or blind spots of liberal constitutionalism, particularly in its orientation towards questions of freedom and domination. While Rousseau aims to foster social and economic austerity using constitutional devices, this not only illustrates an alternative dimension of illiberal constitutionalism, but also speaks to a dimension of freedom and domination—especially in the symbolic and cultural realms—that liberal constitutionalism tends to ignore.

Eighteenth Century Birmingham Bell Ringers: A Genealogical Perspective

By the end of the eighteenth-century the St Martin’s Youths of Birmingham was one of the leading bell ringing societies outside London, as it remains to this day. The handwritten peal books in the Archive of the St Martin’s Guild, its modern successor, provide a record of the peals rung by the society from 1755, but little was known of the eighteenth-century ringers themselves beyond a few anecdotes contained in the oral history for a later period. Genealogical records and techniques allowed a fuller understanding of the lives of the ringers to be disclosed, informing a new narrative of the history of ringing in Birmingham and the place of the ringers in Birmingham at a significant period in the town’s history. The article shows how niche sources can be combined with genealogical and other sources to provide insights into the lives of members of an eighteenth-century society.

An Accidental Genre

An Accidental Genre

RAJA RAM MOHAN ROY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND EDUCATION: ITS CURRENT RELEVANCE

Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the pioneer of the Renaissance, is one of the most memorable Bengali and Indian thinkers of all time. When in the eighteenth century, India and Bengal's whole society was around by Superstition, Poverty, Harassment-neglect-oppression of women, the breakdown of Indian education then Ram Mohan Roy appeared. As India had been ruled by Muslim rules for a long time, the social status and rights of women along with education have come to a standstill. We do not see any exceptions during the rule of the East India Company, although the colonial rulers organized some education to facilitate their rule and trade, there were many dilemmas. The social system was divided into different religions, castes, and races, and the caste system was shrouded in untouchability. The high and low caste system had an impact on women's lives and education as well. This paper seeks to show that Ram Mohan Roy stood at the time and played a positive role in breaking the barrier of prejudice of the conservative society and building a modern society. On the other hand, he was able to bring about a groundbreaking change in the protection of women's lives and rights and the field of education in India. This paper is conducted to show the relevance of Ram Mohan Roy's contributions to society, women's rights, and education in the 21st century.

Remarks on Foreignness in Eighteenth-Century German Cookbooks

This article analyses how food, recipes, and techniques and manners introduced as foreign were integrated in eighteenth-century German cookbooks. Doing so it intends to transfer a methodology recently developed in social history to history of food in order to get a better understanding of how eighteenth-century European societies defined foreignness. It claims that cookbooks should be considered as topographies of the table and presents the Holy Roman Empire as a particularly rich field of study for history of circulation in the early modern world.

Genesis: Donald J. Greene and the Founding of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Genesis:Donald J. Greene and the Founding of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Howard D. Weinbrot (bio) Donald Greene was teaching at the University of California, Riverside, in 1966–67. Probably late in 1967, he asked his three eighteenth-century junior colleagues if they were interested in forming a national eighteenth-century society. We were. Enthusiastically. Greene, after all, studied the relationships between religion, literature, and politics and had written a major revisionist book on Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century politics. He was among the most eminent students of eighteenth-century British culture. He embodied multidisciplinary scholarship. Greene never was awed by the Great and the Good because he was among them. A few days after the invitation, John Norton, David Hansen, and I joined Greene for lunch at a local restaurant and discussed possibilities. The interdisciplinary society would of course encourage research areas other than literature. Its official journal would reflect such breadth of interest. The society would be North American and encourage regional branches. It would have geographical and disciplinary representation. When occasion allowed it would be more broadly international. It would have an elected executive board and secretary as cementing forces. My own efforts were to begin by organizing a western and, for the time being, largely Californian regional society for eighteenth-century studies. The talk was good and [End Page 3] the options many. In the event, Messrs. Norton and Hansen soon left the Riverside English Department, and in the summer of 1969 I departed for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After I arrived in Wisconsin, I continued to exercise Greene's vision of supporting regional eighteenth-century societies. He saw these as a way of furthering eighteenth-century studies locally in order to expand them nationally. On 28 July 1970, he told Peter Stanlis that five regional societies had been established: "All to the good, I'm convinced—the wider the 'grass roots' are extended, the stronger and healthier the whole organization will be, I'm sure."1 I hoped to put that concept into practice. I paid special attention to the Johnson Society of the Central Region, which soon was invited to become an affiliate of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is now a thriving sixty-one-year-old scholarly enterprise. I encouraged the University of Wisconsin Press to offer a three-year contract for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. I attended several regional ASECS meetings during my amiably long tenure in Madison. As President of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1979–80, I hosted a large conference in Madison. I also served on two national meeting planning committees, presented a plenary paper and thereafter the Clifford Lecture for the national conference, and had the pleasure of serving on the Editorial Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1977–80) and on the Executive Committee (1996–99). Greene's vision of international affiliations never left my mind. I was part of the joint exchange committee for ASECS and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1999–2000) and the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS)'s planning committee for the wonderfully successful 2003 meeting in Los Angeles. That happy conclave exemplified Greene's concept of regional, national, and international eighteenth-century societies as a unified and unifying intellectual and social force. I confess to special delight in returning to the fledgling ASECS's founding and to Donald Greene's seminal role during those years. I now write with a combination of always unreliable memories and the more reliable ASECS archives. Paul Alkon, Greene's successor as Leo S. Bing Professor at the University of Southern California, wisely arranged to have these moved to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, where they have been stored since 1994. The volunteer archivist Ann Soady expertly sorted them into useful preliminary files. The Society owes thanks to each helpful individual as well as the Clark Library. Some of the information I cite below comes from my own experience. Most of the narrative, however, draws upon the Clark's ASECS archives. They demonstrate our founder's extraordinary vision and manifold generosities. Predicting the past is almost [End Page...

“Much Might Be Said on Both Sides”

Sir Roger de Coverley, representative of the landed gentry in The Spectator, is typically read as a lovable, old-fashioned eccentric and comic object. Closer attention to the series of essays set in and around Sir Roger’s Worcestershire estate — especially numbers 117, 122, and 130 — reveals that the baronet’s work as a justice of the peace stimulates Mr. Spectator’s moral development. Sir Roger’s intimate relationships with his inferiors and his quasi-familial approach to problem-solving challenge Mr. Spectator’s worldview, allowing Addison and Steele to express their ideas through an interplay of voices. Mr. Spectator’s evolving first-person perspective, animated by the loose, ad hoc structures of the justice’s work, where determining the beginning and ending of a legal action is often difficult, clarifies Sir Roger’s exemplary functions in the text. This essay argues that The Spectator functions as a provocative inquiry into ideology rather than a vehicle for Whiggish politics through a narrative point of view that responds to the characters and settings it encounters, most significantly the figure of the country magistrate. The Spectator’s adoption of the magistrate’s structures of judgment elucidates the role of the rural justice of the peace in eighteenth-century English society and law.

Varia: Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800): The Horrors of Alienation, War, Slavery, and Social Segregation

The article discusses a selection of poems from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800), offering a close reading to show how Robinson engaged with pertinent historical issues, such as slavery, war and power relations, that marked the last decade of the eighteenth century. It explores Robinson’s use of Gothic and sublime aesthetics to communicate the ruptures found in society and to represent various states of otherness. In the poems under discussion, the Gothic is used to externalize both psychological and social collapse, communicating the sense of instability, vulnerability, alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation. Robinson’s use of Gothic conventions creates a gloomy atmosphere which seeks to accentuate the ills of eighteenth-century British politics and society and to engage the reader sympathetically.

Robert Lowth’s Bible: Between Seraphic Choirs and Prophetic Weakness

Abstract Between 1741 and 1750 Robert Lowth, Oxford’s fifth chair of poetry, presented a series of groundbreaking lectures that reimagined the Hebrew Bible as literature, emphasizing its artful formal qualities. Today he is best known for rediscovering the parallelism of ancient Hebrew poetry, which he imagined as originating in the responsive singing of the seraphim. At a time when the divine authority of the Bible was waning, the reclassification of large swaths of prophecy as poetry helped Lowth extol the human figure of the prophet as a literary genius. Lowth idealized the prophetic-poetic text as “strong”: artful, controlled, ordered, and balanced. He responded to an anxiety about the place of the Bible and biblical prophecy in eighteenth-century English society by disavowing or minimizing the irregularities, stutters, and fissures in prophecy. But by introducing prophecy into poetry, Lowth—with much ambivalence—also ushered more passion, enthusiasm, and subjectivity into neoclassical English poetry. Despite his attempts to minimize the formal and theological weaknesses he found in the prophetic text, his scholarly project also transmitted them into English literature, allowing Romantic poets like William Blake to draw on biblical prophetic weaknesses in constructing their own complex prophetic positions.

Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy

Reviewed by: Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy Rachel Engl (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) U.S. Revolutionary War, British Army, Military geography, Quartering Act Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution. By John Gilbert McCurdy. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 328. Cloth, $45.00.) In the Declaration of Independence, colonists opined against the quartering of British troops as one of the enumerated grievances they addressed to King George III. This experience was not limited just to colonists in Boston or other major cities in British North America. By contrast, as John McCurdy compellingly reveals in his book, Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution, this practice pervaded British colonies throughout the Atlantic world. The Crown was eager to station troops throughout North America, yet British officials did not fully anticipate the ramifications of this plan. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, dealing with British troops had become a reality intimately known to most colonists across North America. Moreover, it was through this shared experience, McCurdy argues, that Americans began to separate themselves from the British and imagine themselves as a nation as they sought an answer to the fundamental question of “where do soldiers belong?” Structuring the book thematically, McCurdy explores the evolution of Americans’ views on the proper place of the military within eighteenth-century society. He considers more traditional places one might associate with quarters such as houses and barracks in addition to broader locales ranging from the more localized level of cities and towns to the nation and empire. In doing so, McCurdy astutely links these variety of spaces through the discourse of military geography, a term he defines as the study of “the [End Page 741] influences that soldiers, weapons, and martial codes have on notions of place” (7). McCurdy reiterates throughout his book that historians have far too long ignored the particular practice of quartering employed by the British in addition to the military geography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, more broadly. This is a valid critique for much of the research produced by revolutionary-era scholars; however, he overlooks the great work of Steven Elliott, a recent graduate of Temple University whose dissertation focuses on the military geography of New Jersey during the Revolutionary War.1 McCurdy, though, is admittedly more interested in the prewar years because at the core of his study is a fresh re-examination of the Quartering Act. Because of the centrality of the language of the Quartering Act and its revisions over time to the nuances of the book’s argument, it would have been useful to have an appendix with the complete text of the legislation for reference. Nevertheless, McCurdy persuasively contends that the Quartering Act “reshaped the military geography of British North America,” and the variety of responses to the attempts to implement it within the colonies by key British officials like General Gage foreshadowed the Crown’s inability to accommodate the demands and interests across its empire (91). One of the greatest strengths of McCurdy’s wide-ranging study is his consideration of quarters within the borderlands. His discussion fits well with current scholarship investigating the interactions within the land inhabited by Native Americans yet challenged by colonists’ persistent desire to expand westward across the continent.2 He skillfully demonstrates how, on the ground, there were inconsistencies in the implementation of the Quartering Act as British officials weighed the particular variables of local conditions against the needs of the army. Whereas Americans sought to rid their homes and towns of the presence of the British troops, the borderlands were inherently much more militarized because of the [End Page 742] tension between colonists and Native Americans. At the same time, though, there was also much more ambiguity on the borderland about the proper place for the military. McCurdy examines the practice of quartering not only in the western borderlands but also in British colonies throughout the Atlantic world. Although some of this story will be familiar to those who have read Andrew...

Genre Maketh Dog?

In The New Biography, Virginia Woolf notes that there is a paradox inherent to the genre of biography, i. e. that of »truth« and »personality«. »[P]ersonality«, she argues further, can only be truly conveyed through aesthetic selection and manipulation of the facts of a life, through fiction. Animal biography challenges both of these categories: what is a true dog character and how close can an author come to a life-like depiction of it? Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) as well as the earliest English example of animal biography, Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little or The Life and Adventures of a Lap Dog (1751), are, in their own way, concerned with this issue. Influenced by their generic predecessors, the texts explore the narratological possibilities which an animal biography can offer, from satirical purposes to aesthetic objectives, from mere functionalisation to sentient animals. Woolf is essentially affected by contemporary discussions of biography and the challenges imposed by creating a dog »personality«. This is fundamental for the depiction of Flush as having an individual (anthropomorphised) character, rather than being depicted as a mere, and changeable type. Pompey the Little, in contrast, serves as a mostly silent and apparently objective observer of society, who, by watching and imitating his masters’ manners, offers eighteenth-century society a ruthlessly unembellished look into the mirror. Consequently, his animal character is, for satirical purposes, reduced to a mere type rather than a complex, not to mention »truth[ful]«, depiction of a nonhuman character. In this paper, we argue that genre expectations interact with two further aspects, i.e. literary history and historical as well as philosophical developments, and all three decisively influence how the two texts understand and relate human as well as non-human experience.

Frankenstein in Palestine: political monstrosity, domestic fragmentation and the possibility of return

ABSTRACTThis article employs the monstrous body of Frankenstein to examine political factionalism in the Palestinian Occupied Territories; the West Bank and Gaza. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its Iraqi twin Frankenstein in Baghdad written by Ahmad Saadawi in 2013, the unnamed monster carries rich cultural and political significations that communicate certain idiosyncrasies of both English and Iraqi societies. In both narratives, the monster projects the dangers of the scientific spirit of the late eighteenth-century English society and the constant post-war traumas in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, respectively. This article claims a third political space in which the local partisan climate has contributed to the rise of fragmentation in contemporary domestic Palestinian politics. Since 2007, Palestinian political leadership gained a new meaning after Hamas's military takeover of the Gaza Strip. The different political orientations of Fatah, Hamas, and other factions have created a new political monster that I term the Palestinian Frankenstein. The article not only suggests that the Palestinian Frankenstein is a metaphorical continuity or textual extension of Shelley's and Saadawi's conceptualisations of monstrosity but also investigates other definitions of Palestinian political monstrosity which is embodied in violent sectarianism and document-based wars between many political factions.

From Guild to Society: The Foundation of Confrerie Pictura in The Hague Revisited

The foundation of the Confrerie Pictura (an artistic brotherhood) in The Hague has given rise to controversy on several occasions. In the eighteenth century, for example, Johan van Gool was annoyed by Houbraken, who believed that the artist painters of The Hague had founded their Confrerie in 1662, while it was abundantly clear to Van Gool that the correct date was 1656. Nowadays the question under discussion is the nature of the Confrerie as an organisation. Was it the first step towards an eighteenth-century society, as Hoogewerff suggested in his authoritative book on the Dutch St Luke’s guilds, or was the new organisation more like a guild, as later argued by Hoogewerff’s most important critic Hessel Miedema? Based on archival records, this article maps out the early history and establishment of the Confrerie in order to determine what kind of organisation it had been between 1656 and 1700. This article argues that all four authors are right: the Confrerie was both a guild and a society, and however paradoxical it may sound, it was founded in 1656 and again in 1662.

Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson

Much has been written on eighteenth-century British society, on the workings of maritime trade and finance, on the two long international wars in the last third of the century, and on life in Londo...

The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams

Reviewed by: The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams Paul Goring Abigail Williams. The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. New Haven: Yale, 2017. Pp. x + 351. $40; $25 (paper). An enduring narrative of eighteenth-century literary culture explains that the new genre of the novel raises its head in the literary marketplace and propagates a developing idea of the individual. That idea finds expression in novelists' explorations of individual character, but it is also mirrored within literary reception in a rise of self-absorbed readers separately indulging themselves in the private—and possibly dangerous—pleasures of prose fiction. Since that narrative gained influence in the second half of the twentieth century, numerous [End Page 100] studies have sought to refine or puncture it. Scholars have questioned both the idea of the novel's dominance within a variegated culture industry and the depiction of literary consumption that, while revolving around a notion of a broad reading public, sees readers largely seeking seclusion for the activity that places them within that public. Now The Social Life of Books entirely overturns that story with a magnificently well-researched account of how books of many different kinds were used communally in the period and functioned as a binding agent within families, among friends, in clubs and associations, and within eighteenth-century society as a whole. Appealing to readers within the academy and beyond, Ms. Williams explores both what was read and how it was read in her rich examination of "the many ways in which books have knitted people together," demonstrating with a mass of newly unearthed examples that social consumption of books was the norm rather than an exception. Ms. Williams builds on recent histories of bookselling and collecting, circulating libraries, elocution, letter-writing, and of the eighteenth-century home, discreetly synthesizing the existing scholarship in her telling of this fascinating episode in the history of sociable reading. In the foreground of her narrative are the many revealing examples of books being consumed communally or serving as a social mediator by being talked about, discussed in letters, given as gifts, borrowed, cited in company, and other communal activities. Examples are the primary tools of argument here, and one of the best achievements of this study lies in the gathering and assemblage of material from diaries, private letters, records of book borrowing, commonplace books, and scrap-books, the mass of which offers irrefutable support for the several strands within Ms. Williams's fabric of evidence demonstrating that a key function of books in the eighteenth century lay in their facilitation of social bonding. Books were commonly read aloud in the home. This is familiar enough—thanks not least to well-known fictional representations such as Austen's depiction of Mr. Collins's tedious reading of James Fordyce's Sermons in Pride and Prejudice. The Social Life of Books greatly enriches the existing picture in its probing of the practicalities and purposes of such reading, and in its attention to what Mr. Collins seems to be oblivious to: the eighteenth century's interest in performance techniques as witnessed by the numerous guides to reading aloud, anthologies of passages suitable for performance, and the widespread emulation within the home of admired actors and orators. Ms. Williams is interested in such basic matters as how printed matter was seen, with her research reminding us that candles were precious commodities and that ophthalmic spectacles were the preserve of the few until the end of the century. She tells us how books, both new and secondhand, were bought and where these owned objects were typically kept in the home, and she examines different ways in which books were borrowed: in organized ways through libraries and clubs and more casually between friends and relatives. Most important, she presents numerous scenes of communal reading to show the many different reasons why people read aloud. "They did it because they had to, and because they wanted to. Families gathered together for their evening 'duty' of reading psalms and prayers; parents read to their children and asked their children to read to them; married couples and friends...