Eighteenth-century Origins Research Articles

Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Hands are notoriously hard to draw. To compellingly capture their detail, proportion, and movement is generally considered a mark of an artist’s mastery of technique and concentrated effort. Reflecting the challenge it poses, mastering the technical practices, the skill to draw a hand well gives the artist great artistic pleasure in producing it. In contrast, the aesthetic pleasure of a well-drawn hand is thought to simply strike the appreciative beholder. Despite its striking effect, the aesthetic appreciation of the drawing is not necessarily effortless nor without mastery of formal practices. Rather we take it that the pleasure elicited in producing a beautifully drawn hand is just not the same as that in judging it to be so. Typically, the difference between these pleasures—artistic and aesthetic—is recognized by their diverging interest and purpose in relation to the artwork. The artist’s purpose is to produce a beautiful work and, as such, their artistic pleasure is elicited in the interests of producing that work, whereas—according to philosophical aesthetics’ eighteenth-century origins—the critic’s purpose is to aesthetically appreciate or judge the work for its own sake, where the pleasure elicited by a work’s beauty is disinterested.

A Perfect Nicking Pattern

The ideological underpinnings of the Early Modern practice of animal breeding that brought into being the animal now designated as the thoroughbred horse are explored here by attending to the terminology and original meaning of a breeding theory that persists even in contemporary practice, albeit in a dramatically altered form from its eighteenth-century origins. A significant component of today’s multi-billion dollar commercial breeding industry is a tool of analysis known as attention to “nicking patterns” — patterns that inform decisions about managed breeding of stallions and mares. Moving quickly beyond a brief discussion of how nicking patterns function today to locate the origin of this theory in Early Modern Animal Breeding practice; the discussion proceeds to illustrate how this practice keeps in play a series of underlying tensions that operate as powerfully in our current era as in the age in which the thoroughbred arose.

Theses on Theory and History

Theses on Theory and History

Introduction

Introduction

The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis

Reviewed by: The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis Nathalie Dessens The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History. By Scott S. Ellis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 280. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6935-3.) In his latest book, Scott S. Ellis explores the three-hundred-year history of the Faubourg Marigny, one of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods. Although he covers the history of the faubourg from its eighteenth-century origins as the Marigny de Mandeville plantation, his focus is on the period after 1805, when Bernard Marigny subdivided the plantation into lots. Ellis meticulously describes the evolution of the faubourg through the Civil War and subsequent emancipation of the slaves, the Great Depression, desegregation, the hippie movement in the 1970s, the late-twentieth-century gentrification period, and the difficult post–Hurricane Katrina era. While the book is a step-by-step chronological narrative, it also offers readers specifics on the faubourg’s founder, Bernard Marigny, his family, several racial and ethnic groups that made the faubourg home in the nineteenth century (including free people of color and Irish and German immigrants), and its later revival by the gay community. Ellis also includes more focused studies, like that of the twentieth-century evolution of Frenchmen Street, the main artery of the Faubourg Marigny, which is well known today for its many jazz venues. The book provides a very thorough history of the Faubourg Marigny’s population, economic development, and architectural and social reconfigurations. It shows a neighborhood in constant evolution, due to the ebb and flow of the city’s economy, only more godforsaken than the French Quarter and its sibling neighborhoods. Historical events, migrations, wars, economic depressions, epidemics (be they yellow fever, cholera, or AIDS), and natural disasters like hurricanes have kept reconfiguring the faubourg, its main commercial artery Frenchmen Street, its population, and even its idiosyncrasies. This book is meticulously sourced. Ellis not only taps an extensive secondary literature but also mines the sacramental and notarial records, the city directories, and federal censuses and includes information gathered from locals he interviewed. He relies on these sources to denounce an “enduring legend, parroted uncritically,” about Bernard Marigny and other myths about the faubourg (p. 9). Ellis uses city directories (starting with the first 1811 directory) and censuses to track each of the minute changes the faubourg has undergone in the past two centuries. His chapter on the commercial evolution of Frenchmen Street, between the 1930s and 2016, is especially fascinating. The book’s digressions and anecdotes, which may be deemed superfluous by academics, will enchant nonacademics interested in the history of New Orleans. The narrative may sometimes appear too general and insufficiently focused on the neighborhood itself (in the passages on urban slaves, for instance), but they make the book more readable for large audiences. The early parts of the book (on the nineteenth century, in particular) are slightly uneven, with very brief chapters, extremely general presentations, and, [End Page 147] at times, a focus on certain groups without explanation (firemen, for instance), but these shortcomings do not prevent the book from being fascinating and informative. Despite a few small inaccuracies (Jean Boze, for instance, was never the overseer of a Gentilly plantation), and the methodological lack of precision (the academic reader would have needed to know more about the numerous interviews the author conducted, how the interviewees were chosen, what the conditions of the interviews were, and how they were analyzed), the book is a much-needed addition to the historiography of New Orleans, and its novel-like narrative will undoubtedly draw larger audiences. Nathalie Dessens University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Horse-Racing in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Whereas previous historians have traced the eighteenth-century origins of Russian horse-racing and discussed the growth of a national sport financed by mass betting from 1876, this article instead focuses on the period 1825–75, when racing was used primarily to trial breeds in a quest for the perfect combination of speed, strength and endurance. The crucial dynamic was a tension between proponents of the English thoroughbred and advocates of less temperamental native horses, allegedly better suited to military and agricultural needs. Rival equine values stimulated contrasting equestrian cultures. The turning point was the 1840s, when the English model introduced under Catherine II came under attack, and when harness-racing and peasant cart-racing, more popular than flat-racing or steeplechasing, flourished under the umbrella of the Ministry of State Domains. State support for private studs amounted to incentives rather than subsidies, and their withdrawal in the 1860s affected racing less than broader changes in the economy of the nobility. Even in the era of mass entertainment, aristocratic equestrianism persisted in the cavalry, in Russia as elsewhere in Europe.

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

A Tale of Two Marats: On the Abhorrence of Verticality, from Laissez-Faire to Neoliberalism

Abstract This essay traces a conceptual through-line from the twenty-first century crisis of democratic institutionality, explained as an effect of contemporary neoliberalism, back to the eighteenth-century discursive origins of free-market capitalism. On both ends of this temporal bridge, we find an emphasis on the radical horizontalization of political subjectivity and power against perceived hierarchies of institutional control. The discourse of laissez-faire—and sometime democratic—horizontalization turns on affect as an organizing principle (i.e., morality, sentiment, emotion) and locates control within the self as one entity among equals; verticality, in contrast, is linked to rationality and locates control in an asymmetrical relationship of superiority and inferiority that is decried as tyranny. I offer a comparatist interpretation of these concepts in aesthetic play in Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793) alongside Vik Muniz's Marat/Tião as depicted in the documentary film Waste Land (2010) as evidence of the epistemological continuity between the laissez-faire and neoliberal political landscapes of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. The takeaways from this temporal through-line are the possibility that the twenty-first-century symptoms of institutional crisis are the ultimate epistemological expression of affectively inflected horizontal laissez-faire culture and that the reach of this epistemological paradigm extends far beyond political structure and into the deepest cultural imaginings of self and world.

Introduction: Empires in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction:Empires in the Eighteenth Century Sean Moore, Editor (bio) Predictions of the death of postcolonial theory and empire studies have been rife for about twenty years, crystallized in a roundtable in PMLA in 2007 titled "The End of Postcolonial Theory?"1 Data on what articles readers of the electronic form of this journal are downloading, however, indicate that what Jean-Francois Bayart pejoratively called the "carnaval académique" of postcolonial studies goes on.2 For example, Ramesh Mallipeddi's postcolonial essay "Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko" (ECS 45.4, Summer 2012) was by far the most downloaded article from this journal on Project Muse in 2017. The article had over 800 "clicks"—almost twice as many as the second most popular essay last year, Nicholas Hudson's "From 'Nation' to 'Race': The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought" (ECS 29.3, Spring 1996), which itself engaged with postcolonial theory's concern for the construction of identity. That these are older articles (one six years and the other twenty-two), before the deaths of postcolonial luminaries such as my dissertation director Srinivas Aravamudan, does not so much suggest that recent content has not also held appeal. Rather, the continuing popularity of these and other articles on similar topics demonstrate that readers crave engagement with analyses of empire and are sometimes reaching further back to find it. But not always. Indeed, ECS 50.1 (Fall 2016), an issue that featured commemorative essays on the work of Aravamundan, ranks among the top five issues of the journal downloaded in 2017, part of a distinguished cluster of issues that also features one (ECS 50.3, Spring 2017) dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. While this data does not indicate that our readers are [End Page 1] exclusively interested in colonialism and related issues—the next most viewed essays during 2017 were about the French Revolution, feminist approaches to Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, and the Enlightenment Anthropocene—it does tell us that research into race and imperialism is central to our readership. One explanation for this fact might be that the top three institutions downloading articles in 2017 were outside of the United States: the University of Toronto (1364 "clicks"), Cambridge (618), and Oxford (577). While this proves that Eighteenth-Century Studies is a premier international journal (though none of the top twenty-five downloading institutions was in a non-Anglophone country), it also may indicate an appreciation for the international and cosmopolitan nature of the histories of empires that postcolonialism provides. This is not to say that this "market" data should influence "thought" (in Brett Levinson's formulation) and what we publish.3 But through it we should be able to discern how both people within the field and those outside it who are interested in the eighteenth-century origins of empires use the journal. If we were to let the data tell us what to print, it would be, like the metrics on enrollments and other issues now being used at universities, a case of the tail wagging the dog rather than the other way around. This practice lacks leadership and drowns out diversity of thought in the name of the commodification of students. In short, if we did that we would be like the news media, creating content based on what they know their audiences are watching and reading rather than coming up with new ideas of their own; we would follow rather than lead. We are in the Humanities, and are not a branch of the media; our books and articles about the past teach people to be critical readers of it. This special issue on Empire, initially planned by the previous editorship of Steven Pincus and Amy Dunagin, therefore comes at a serendipitous time for the journal's new editors and for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) itself as we contemplate submissions. In the little more than a year of the University of New Hampshire's management of the journal, we have seen submissions ranging from architectural history, gardening history, literary celebrity, musicology, contemporary descriptions of ballet...

From Empire to Law: Customs Collection in the American Founding

This essay investigates the eighteenth-century origins of the federal administrative state through the prism of customs collection. Until recently, historians and legal scholars have not closely studied collection operations in the early federal custom houses. Gautham Rao's National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016) offers the most important and thoroughly documented historical analysis to date. Joining a growing historical literature that explains the early development of the US federal political system with reference to imperial models and precedents, Rao shows that the seductive power of commerce over the state within eighteenth-century imperial praxis required the early federal customs officials to “negotiate” their authority with the mercantile community. A paradigm of accommodation dominated American customs collection well into the nineteenth century until Jacksonian centralizers finally began to dismantle it in the 1830s. The book brings welcome light to a long-neglected topic in American history. It offers a nuanced, historiographically attentive interpretation that rests on a broad archival source base. It should command the sustained attention of legal, social, economic, and constitutional historians for it holds the potential to change the way historians think about early federal administration. This essay investigates one of the central questions raised in National Duties: How were the early American custom houses able to successfully administer a comprehensive program of customs duties when their imperial predecessors had proved unable to collect even narrowly tailored ones? Focusing on the Federalist period (1789–1800), I develop an answer that complements Rao's, highlighting administrative change over continuity and finding special significance in the establishment of the first federal judicial system.

Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell'sLife of Charlotte Brontë

This essay places Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë in the context of responses it provoked from contemporaries, including their retrospective rereadings of Jane Eyre. By 1857, the novel form had come a long way from its eighteenth-century origins in the roman à clef, but some parts of Gaskell's Life return to and invert that tradition, reading almost like a clef to Jane Eyre—so much so as to force a printed retraction and substantial revisions. Gaskell wrote the Life well after fictionality emerged as a concept distinct from history and journalism. Nevertheless, in its intersection with Jane Eyre, the Life reveals the traces of fictional realist convention in factual accounts and, conversely, shows how far the novel, fictional form par excellence, retained an aura of facticity.

Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory ed. by Corinna Wagner (review)

Reviewed by: Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory ed. by Corinna Wagner Deborah Laycock Corinna Wagner, ed., Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014). Pp. 625. $44.95. Scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic literature have been increasingly attentive to the transformations and evolution of this literary mode. This recent scholarship reflects gothic writers’ own understanding of their cultural moment in relation to the many layers of the past that they have labored to exhume as authors, translators, or editors. As Nick Groom notes in his 2014 edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, “If the eighteenth century witnessed an increasingly wide application of the Gothic and its cognates in a bewildering array of different fields, they remain rooted in historical and archaeological researches, in political and constitutional theory, in an escalating medievalism, and in an aesthetic that mixed the sublime with melancholy, nostalgia with the repression of history, and mortality with the revival of the past” (Groom, xxxvii). Corinna Wagner, Groom’s colleague at the University of Exeter, brilliantly addresses this multifaceted quality of gothic literature from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. As its subtitle indicates, this anthology combines literature and theory, text and context. In providing this combined focus, Gothic Evolutions is substantially different from the many collections of gothic literature that are currently available. Moreover, this collection is distinctive in its inclusion of a wide range of genres—poetry, drama, short stories, tales—from English, Irish, Scottish, French, Russian, Japanese, and American gothic writers. In four substantial appendices, Wagner presents critical, historical, scientific, aesthetic, and theoretical texts helpful for interpreting gothic literature, making this anthology ideal for teaching. It is an excellent contribution to the impressive catalog of scholarly [End Page 309] editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic novels that Broadview Press has assembled over the past two decades. Currently, there are twenty-one titles in Broadview’s “Gothic and Horror” list. In Gothic Evolutions, Wagner challenges readers and especially teachers to devise various ways of reading the Gothic, to plot its evolution, and to discern its cultural transformations through the literary and theoretical materials that she assembles and contextualizes. She not only provides a detailed chronology to enable readers to chart this evolution, but she has also, for the most part, selected “the earliest edition of the texts . . . and ordered them by that initial date of publication.” Her rationale for this choice, even though such an editorial principle might result in a student’s encountering a less familiar version of a poem such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is once again to document the evolution of gothic works, to “lend readers a sense of how texts relate to one another and how they respond to political events and cultural movements” (li). As demonstrated in her essay “The Dream of a Transparent Body: Identity, Science and the Gothic Novel” (Gothic Studies 14.1 [2012]: 74–92), Wagner’s primary intellectual concern is to identify the “deeply embedded historical continuities running through” gothic fiction as well as medical science (“Dream,” 89). And these continuities are precisely what she leads readers to explore in this anthology, by drawing our attention to the evolution of gothic culture through the literature, art, science, and theory of the nineteenth century. Wagner provides a helpful roadmap in her admirably synthesizing introduction, in which she addresses the issues that she also presents as categories, specified in the “Thematic Guide,” for the literary works she has selected. These thematic categories—“Uses of the Past/Medievalism”; “Politics, Law, Religion, Economics, and Race”; “Medicine, Science, and the Body”; “Gender”; “Sexuality”; “Psychology and Emotion”—reflect contemporary scholarly interests in gothic studies, especially medical humanities, a field that Wagner has significantly influenced with the recent publication of Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (2013). In that work she demonstrates, through a series of “case studies,” the “migration of medical into political discourse,” revealing “how frequently medicine, politics, and morality were discursively and thus ideologically yoked” (PB, 8, 13). As Angela Wright has recently observed in her contribution to Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (ed. Dale Townshend, 2015), “from its eighteenth-century origins, and even, in some senses...

Humanitarian imperialism: the politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880-1940. By Amalia Ribi Forclaz

It is very good to have a solid monographic overview of anti-slavery advocacy and politics in their later and least well-known period. Focusing on the time between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War, Amalia Ribi Forclaz's research has the truly international scope of covering several European contexts. She deftly delineates the complex landscape of interactions between several types of actors around the issue of slavery: the oldest and strongest anti-slavery ‘establishment’ in London; newer national anti-slavery organizations in Italy, Switzerland and France; national governments of European states and Ethiopia, and international bodies like the League of Nations or the Vatican. The book is organized chronologically around two main narrative arches. The focus of the first two chapters is the revival of anti-slavery activism around the turn of the century and the inclusion of slavery as a topic in the work of the newly founded League of Nations. Here, the main strength is a hitherto missing synthetic discussion of the new wave of late nineteenth-century Catholic anti-slavery in its international context. Three chapters weave together another narrative, that of the complex international politics around the issue of Ethiopian slavery. The question is first adopted and advocated by British abolitionists and then co-opted—with the willing cooperation of the Italian anti-slavery movement—by Mussolini's regime for its imperialist designs in Africa. Although Italy's allegedly humanitarian invasion provoked international opposition, a complex constellation of factors, including Italian intrigues to sway international public opinion and British anti-slavery's complicity with Mussolini, led—indirectly—to the disintegration of the anti-slavery project. Between these two narratives, somewhat uneasily sits a chapter on the limited revival of British anti-slavery around the centenary of the abolition of colonial slavery in 1933. The final pages, on the other hand, open up a larger vista, as they shed light on the eclipse of the long-term anti-slavery project with its eighteenth-century origins as, in the post-Second World War context, the ‘master frame’ of slavery is superseded by the new hegemony of the ‘human rights’ concept.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN AMERICA: MYTHS AND REALITIES

The Whiggish story of ever-evolving liberty issuing from the Revolutionary decades and progressing straightforwardly over the next two centuries is dead. But so too, it seems, on the evidence of these two good books, is the revisionist tale of either “republican virtue” (often trumpeted by progressives) or “evangelical piety” (often trumpeted by Christian conservatives) governing the American mind and its understanding of rights, obligations, and collective identity. Both Steven K. Green and David Sehat see the narrative arc of American history as a continual tension between the religious and secular understandings of the American Constitution. Sehat is more doubtful that the Jeffersonian–Madisonian doctrine of separation of church and state ever commanded broad assent. The “myth” that America was born religiously free, though peddled by liberals, he argues, actually disables secularists who are struggling to create a public realm truly free from religious coercion. Green more readily accepts the proposition that the germ of religious freedom grew from its eighteenth-century origins along a non-continuous but nonetheless clearly secularizing trajectory.

The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by Jared Gardner (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by Jared Gardner Edward Cahill The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. By Jared Gardner. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 224 pp. $50.00. This erudite, incisive, and important book traces the history of magazine culture in America from its eighteenth-century origins through the early nineteenth century, when niche periodicals and romanticism transformed and obscured an intellectually-ambitious tradition that has been largely neglected or misunderstood ever since. The first American magazines, like their English models, were deeply committed to principles of anonymity, collaboration, and heterogeneity. They rejected the celebrity of authorship, depended on “correspondence” from readers, and opined on an enormous variety of topics, often in a cacophonous, fragmentary voice. As Gardner explains, this multivocal form of literary expression was idealized by publishers, editors, and contributors as a radical new vehicle for cultural citizenship, which explains why so many of them devoted time and resources to an endeavor so fraught with financial and logistical challenges and so unlikely to succeed. But it is also why contemporary scholars who impose post-romantic assumptions on the history of literature and authorship have long overlooked such magazines as objects of inquiry. Gardner, who implicates his own excellent monograph on early American literature in his critique, seeks to correct this error not only by recovering the early magazine’s history and specifying the concepts most central to its construction, but also by exploring the broad significance in early American writing of the “editorial function,” the narrative organization of multiple texts and points of view. This account of the magazine’s complex investments explains persuasively the indefatigable ambitions of colonial and early national publishers, editors, and writers. Yet it also gives us new ways of thinking about [End Page 95] the “ambiguities,” “contradictions,” and “excesses” of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature generally, especially of the novel. By making the novel fundamental to an argument about magazines, Gardner makes his book relevant to a larger audience than it perhaps might otherwise have been. By thinking across genres, however, he also uncovers ways in which magazines and magazine-like forms of prose narrative elaborated representational possibilities that the univocal novel foreclosed. Considering the two traditions dialogically, Gardner demonstrates that magazines offered “alternative models to the political and literary choices that were being narrated and naturalized” (3) in the early national period. He also reveals how what scholars have called early American “novels” often function like magazines, using a “mode of presentation in which the author governs the events and source materials as adjudicator and compiler” (14). Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, for example, is narrated by a “complex nexus of voices and sources from a position that perhaps more closely resembles that of editor than autonomous author” (9). In this way, Gardner finds in the editorial function a vital source of the formal strangeness of early American fiction. But he also offers a revisionist account of why “most of the ‘pioneers’ of the early American novel ended by largely abandoning the ‘novel’ entirely for anonymous periodical work at the end of their careers” (28). Rather than assuming, as many scholars have, the embittered retreat of failed novelists to safer, more conservative periodicals, he sees in the latter expressions of a “bold attempt” to redefine the “authorial role” (23). He also suggests that the anti-novel discourse so often found in early American fiction represents not a “canny strategy” to appropriate the proscriptions of “cultural gatekeepers” (25) but an authentic rejection of the novel itself. Writers like Foster, Gardner intriguingly submits, thought they were doing something altogether different. The book’s main chapters explore the English and colonial origins of the magazine and the work of early national publishers, editors, contributors, and readers, observing that “nearly every major literary and political figure in [eighteenth-century] America participated in some way . . . in periodical culture” (36). The first chapter, for example, reveals the surprising importance of magazines to Benjamin Franklin’s life and work, not only his short-lived General Magazine, but also the publication of his experiments with electricity in the Gentleman’s Magazine and his investment in his nephew Benjamin Mecom...

The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, ed. William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby

This is a substantial volume in every sense of the word, with a vast array of scholarship on a wide range of subjects spread over six sections, with forty-two separate chapters filling over 760 pages. The six sections on history, ecclesial forms, worship, spiritual experiences, theology and, finally, ethics and politics deal with various different aspects of the Methodist cause from its eighteenth-century origins to the twenty-first century. The list of contributors reflects the international nature of the volume, with a large number, unsurprisingly, from the United States. The aim of the volume is clearly set out in the editors’ preface: to gather together some of the extensive work which has been undertaken over the last fifty years or so in the field of Methodist studies, including both historical and theological interests. There is an obvious determination that the resulting collection should reflect as far as possible the ‘global nature of Methodism today’ (p. vii). By doing so, the volume conjures up the ‘Empire of the spirit’ whose growth is so powerfully delineated elsewhere by David Hempton. The editors cast their net widely, while adhering to their declared principle that ‘Our judgement is that Wesley launched a spiritual movement within Western Christianity that continues to express itself along a network of specific channels’ (p. viii).

Gallant Women Students, Professors, and Historians: Learning, Sex, and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of German Literature

The decades around 1700 provided a setting relatively congenial to das gelehrte Frauenzimmer, or “the lady of learning.” Yet this gallant cultural landscape and the literary women who occupied it remain submerged under layers of anachronism and neglect. This article begins with a heuristic account of the origins of literature and of the work of gender in the invention of aesthetics. Propelled by innovative work by scholars of French and English literature, the argument develops with a consideration of literature’s gallant, French beginnings. Gallant readers reinvented the fusty res publica litteraria, making rooms hospitable to women, too. Next, I turn to marginally known texts by men and devoted to women’s literary and intellectual endeavors. Both circle around the Frauenzimmer in her private Cabinett: Talander’s romance-novel, Neu=eroffnetes Liebes=Cabinett des galanten Frauenzimmers (The Gallant Lady’s Cabinet of Love Newly Revealed, 1694), and Johann Caspar Eberti’s catalogue of learned women, Das eroffnete Cabinett des gelehrten Frauenzimmers (The Learned Lady’s Cabinet Revealed, 1706). At the origins of modern literature, some readers and critics feared these and other gallant texts promoted libertinism; indeed, they urged women to take up the pen: to learn, to teach, and to write.

The Writ of Certiorari and the Poor Law 1630-1790

Judicial review now accounts for about one half of the litigation initiated in the High Court. This paper is concerned with the seventeenth and eighteenth century origins of the process of certiorari, and, in particular, with what was probably the principal use of the remedy: a remedy for correcting maladministration of the poor law code. This paper surveys this current of law from its origins in the year 1634 to 1790. It addresses four issues: (i) levels of usage of the process, and the types of orders reviewed (and shows how the bastardy order, which had been the principal concern of the process in the mid-seventeenth century, was superseded by the order of removal in the late seventeenth century); (ii) the legal standards by reference to which the legality of orders were scrutinized, and, in particular, the origins of the ‘special case’ and of review of jurisdictional error by affidavit; (iii) the procedural rules devised by the King’s Bench (and parliament) - the recognisance, the six months’ time limit, the order of remittal, the exhaustion of remedies rule, amenability to costs - to prevent abuse of the process, and (iv) and the factors which influenced the principal users of the remedy - overseers of the poor - to employ this expensive process.

Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752–1863

This volume addresses the life history of an “unsuccessful” Mexican religious community, La Purísima Concepción in San Miguel el Grande, from its eighteenth-century origins to its suppression by the liberals in 1863. The work was made possible by the author’s serendipitous discovery of a wealth of documentation regarding this convent that had been misfiled in the archives of the Archdiocese of Michoacán. These materials detailed the saga of two “rebellions” occurring during the convent’s early decades. The letters, interrogatories, interviews, and official reports of these conflicts, along with more standard sources like documents of profession and account books, form the documentary base for the book.San Miguel el Grande’s first convent, La Purísima Concepción, was established in 1752 with an endowment from the teenaged heiress María Josepha Lina, who also became its first novice. In 1756, four nuns from the Conceptionist Convent of Regina Coeli in Mexico City arrived to establish the religious community. The convent’s life was rocky: the early decades of La Purísima’s existence were marred by internal dissention and rebellions against authority. The convent did not attract the expected numbers of professions, and it never flourished financially. Having survived for a century without having prospered, it was suppressed by the liberals during the reform.Two internal upheavals, which occurred in the first two decades after the foundation, shaped the rest of the convent’s institutional life. The first rebellion in the early 1760s stemmed from the efforts of the first abbess to impose a strenuous regimen of prayer and conduct with a strict interpretation of the vows of poverty and enclosure. The Conceptionist order in Mexico was generally known for the laxness of observance in its convents, where community life (vida común) was often deemphasized or ignored. At La Purísima, dissident nuns, chafing under the harsh rule of the first abbess, successfully challenged her authority and that of her successor. Having won this first round by forcing out the first two abbesses, the “rebellious” nuns moved into leadership positions at La Purísima. This led to a second confrontation half a decade later, this time with the bishop, who sought to enforce the vida común against the wishes of the convent’s leadership. The second rebellion ended in 1772 with the election of an abbess who was a member of the reformist faction. This did not, however, signal a return to strict reformism. In the end, neither side won outright victory; a spirit of accommodation to both groups characterized subsequent convent governance.The rich documentation Chowning discovered allows her to examine in detail the dynamics as well as the causes of these rebellions. She describes how local factors unique to La Purísima, like convent demographics and the expectations of the novices and professed nuns, as well as general attitudes toward conventual reform in the church at large impacted the outcomes of these two serious internal conflicts.Despite the end of open conflict after 1772, the rebellions continued to shape con vent life. The convent never grew the way its founders had envisioned. Having acquired a reputation for upheaval, La Purísima had chronic problems attracting sufficient numbers of appropriate novices for the rest of its institutional life. This problem exacerbated an already precarious financial situation and led to fiscal crisis. This, in turn, further contributed to recruitment problems. Despite this, the convent survived the wars of independence, although it failed to grow and economically prosper in the post-independence period. It was closed in the 1860s, a victim of the liberals’ secularization policies.This work has broader scope than the history of one troubled convent. While studying La Purísima’s specific problems in detail, the book also addresses broader historical themes, including the relationship between the nuns and the male ecclesiastical establishment, the attitude of the church toward women, and the impact of changing ideas on the church’s policies toward the convent. Chowning presents a more comprehensive view of La Purísima than is seen in many works on female religious institutions. She identifies two major approaches to writing the history of convent life, each shaped by the type of documentation available to the researcher. Scholarly works tend to take either a feminist approach, focusing on “the convent as a place where women could create fulfilling and productive communities with a minimum of male intervention” (p. 12), or an institutional one, where “writers have emphasized the social and economic functions of the convent” (pp. 12 – 13). Because of the richness of her sources, Chowning is able to combine these approaches, tracing the history of the institution while highlighting individual participants in its internal conflicts. She also takes advantage of documentation in the archiepiscopal archives to compare La Purísima to other convents that were its contemporaries in the archbishopric.

Print Culture Studies and Technological Determinism

Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds. 2007. Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $80.00 he. $29.95 sc. xii+442 pp.Kaplan, Catherine O'Donnell. 2008. Men of in Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. $59.95 he. $24.95 sc. xii+239 pp.Loughran,Trish. 2007. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in Age of U.S. Nation Building, I770-1870. New York: Columbia University Press. $46.50 he. $24.50 sc. xxvi+537 pp.According to an anonymous poem printed in Philadelphia in 1758, On Invention of and Art of Printing, printing press was key mechanical invention in advance of human knowledge and liberty:Her bold Machine redeems patriot's fameFrom royal malice, and bigot's flame;To bounded thrones displays legal plan,And vindicates dignity of man.Tyrants and time, in her, lose half their pow'r;And Reason shall subsist . . . (On Invention of Letters 1758, 281)Far from an extraordinary statement, poet merely versifies what was a common understanding of relation of to progress of natural and human sciences during Enlightenment. As Michael Warner noted in opening pages of his groundbreaking work, The of Republic: Publication and Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America:The West treasures few moments in its history way it treasures story of democratization of print. In century preceding American and French Revolutions, men of letters commonly linked spread of letters to growth of knowledge. From an early date they linked it to democratization of power as well (Warner 1990, ix).The story, however, is flawed, as Warner and others have shown. The problem is that as a technology does not necessarily determine a set of ideological uses to which it must be put. To posit a causal relation between and democracy, then, is what Warner and others have called determinism. It is a historiographie fallacy, in that [w]hat have historically become characteristics of printing have been projected backward as its natural, essential logic (1990, 9). Furthermore, historiographie fallacy is one that leads to fallacies of political and social reasoning as well, because so much of our thinking about democracy in U.S. is informed by its eighteenth-century origins. Instead, Warner insists that we attend to the reciprocal determination . . . between a medium and its (xii; emphasis added), so that we recognize that assumptions about and certain assumptions about politics were coarticulated; neither is a fixed reference point against which to tell story of other (xii).Critiques of technological determinism suggest need to ask a number of questions about dominant stories about culture. Are there alternative visions of and history that don't match determinist assumptions? Have cultures outside of modern West used technologies in ways that parallel or differ from those in Europe and U.S.? Has story that we have told ourselves about culture been grounded in study of material conditions of texts and their contexts? Are there cultures within U.S. and Europe who have imagined uses of for projects that were resistant to or countered popular and political goals, or that were oriented toward goals not normally associated with democracy? The three books under consideration offer answers to these questions, and thus will be of great interest to scholars seeking to study culture - and indeed emergent digital cultures - without fallacy of technological determinism.The foundations of field of inquiry that has come to be called print culture studies were just being laid in decade before Warner published his work. …