Gentry Culture Research Articles

Gentry Culture and Lifestyle in the 18th-Century Russian Provinces

Gentry Culture and Lifestyle in the 18th-Century Russian Provinces

Richard Cust and Peter Lake. Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of Civil War. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. $130.00 (cloth).

Richard Cust and Peter Lake. Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of Civil War. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. $130.00 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 1

Historical writing? – Richard Wilton’s “Booke of particular remembrances”, 1584–1634

ABSTRACTFrancis Bacon’s Advancement of Knowledge shaped contemporary and modern conceptions of historical writing and culture which historians have only begun to re-examine more recently. This case study of the “notebook” of Sir Richard Wilton demonstrates the fruitfulness of considering non-narrative texts as “historical”. Wilton self-fashioned his identity from the ideals of gentry culture and his Protestant faith. Wilton’s personal memory was influenced by the Reformation which led to forms of commemoration in texts. He also used elite knowledge networks to negotiate historical networks that were fundamentally oral and local. Finally, early modern historical writing found in personal accounts, commonplace books, and remembrance books could be fluid and dynamic, and it appropriated forms of writing that were highly accessible in the day-to-day lives of the writers that compiled them. The decision to use particular forms of writing was intrinsically associated with the utility and meaning of these forms.

“This infant Borough”: The Corporate Political Identity of Eighteenth-Century Norfolk

The rapidly growing eighteenth-century port city of Norfolk, Virginia, occupied an unusual position. It was the largest city in a colony known for its rural gentry culture and also a formally incorporated borough in an era when urban corporate independence was increasingly unusual in the British Atlantic. This essay explores Norfolk’s corporate political identity and argues that it was crucial to the city’s position in a planter-dominated society. The charter helped reconcile the city’s need for local authority over trade and urban policing with the planter elite’s suspicion of commerce by effectively quarantining the port city outside the planters’ political world. As tensions rose within the British Empire during the 1760s, however, the borough’s corporate authority became a contentious issue, as planters asserted their civic authority to regulate trade. The planter revolutionaries’ suspicion of Norfolk’s corporate status led to the showdown between the borough and the new revolutionary government and eventually to the destruction of the city in January 1776. These experiences informed the efforts of Virginia’s new state government to craft a unique subsidiary status for municipal government in the 1780s. Norfolk’s corporate status is therefore crucial to understanding the republican political economic vision of Virginia’s planter class.

The Southchurch Chapel and the Earliest Building Contract in England

The contract for the construction of the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the cemetery of Holy Trinity, Southchurch, Essex, is probably the earliest surviving building contract in England. It dates from 1293 and recounts the instructions of Sir Peter de Southchurch for the construction of a large, freestanding chapel for his father’s burial. The chapel does not survive, if it was ever built, and the contract has been almost entirely disregarded by scholars, including L. F. Salzman, with the exception of some local historians of the 1920s–40s. Its significance for our understanding of contracting for building work, gentry culture and the construction of detached chapels has been wholly overlooked. This paper includes a new transcription and translation of the document.

:"No Historie so Meete": Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England

:<i>"No Historie so Meete": Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England</i>

Gentry culture and the stifling of industry

The paper determines the role of the gentry in stifling the manufacturing development of formerly industrial southern England. An increasing divergence in economic composition between south and north is discussed, with particular reference to de-industrialisation in the former. The expanding estate system and emergence of a specific culture among landowners is described. Finally the case is made that this gentry culture was instrumental in reducing or redirecting southern enterprise during the industrial revolution.

Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England

Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England

Taoist tradition, gentry culture, and local societies: The cult of Zougong at Sibao in western Fujian Province since the Song and Ming dynasties

Zougong, the most important local deity at Sibao, Tingzhou Prefecture, was worshipped by local villagers at least from the Yuan and the Ming dynasties on. The Zou lineages in the area regarded Zougong as their common ancestor. Existing literature usually identifies Zougong as Zou Yinglong, a zhuangyuan in the Southern Song Dynasty. However, such identification appeared only in the late Ming period when local elites of several Zou lineages consciously tried to unite and consolidate their lineages. Before that, Zougong was a mighty ritual master in a series of magic contest stories popular at Tingzhou, rather than a zhuangyuan. The change of his identity from ritual master to zhuangyuan was a result of convergence of Taoist tradition, gentry culture and local culture, which may be called “cultural hybridization,” rather than a simple process by which local culture gave way to gentry culture.

‘No historie so meete’. Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England ‐ By Jan Broadway

<i>‘No historie so meete’. Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England</i> ‐ By Jan Broadway

Reviews: Historians, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History, Political Culture in Later Medieval England, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation., the Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation, ‘No historie So meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England., the Spanish Match. Prince Charles's Journey to Madrid, 1623, the

Reviews: Historians, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History, Political Culture in Later Medieval England, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation., the Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation, ‘No historie So meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England., the Spanish Match. Prince Charles's Journey to Madrid, 1623, the

Gentry culture in late‐medieval England – Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove

Gentry culture in late‐medieval England – Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941 (review)

Reviewed by: New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941 Jianyue Chen (bio) Gregor Benton. New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xxiv, 949 pp. Hardcover $85.00, ISBN 0520219929. Gregor Benton is a well-published British scholar whose previous work, Mountain Fires (University of California Press, 1992), won him a Joseph Levenson award, one envied by many scholars of modern China. The book deals with the three-year struggle for survival of the Communist guerrilla forces in Jiangnan (south of Changjiang) after the main Red Army forces left their Jiangxi base for the historic "Long March" and survival from Nationalist attacks. As its sequel, New Fourth Army traces almost the same guerrilla forces from their transformation in the spring of 1938 into a Nationalist army until its "official" disbandment in January 1941, following the Wannan Incident. The book is divided roughly into three parts: the rapid development of the New Fourth Army, the great success of its detachments led by Chen Yi and Liu Shaoqi in building a strong base in Subei (North Jiangsu), and the tragic fate of its main forces, including its headquarters, led by its commander Yi Ting and its commissar Xiang Ying in Wannan (South Anhui). According to Benton, the Party center in Yan'an chose Subei as a new base, for the region was not only "emptied" of both the Nationalist and the Japanese forces but was also self-sufficient in sustaining the communist expansion "in all directions" (p. 422). The subsequent Communist success depended on the masterful grasp by their leaders of social connections, gentry culture in particular, rather than on the Marxist theory of class. In other words, Chen Yi and his lieutenants used social ties such as tongxiang (people from the same areas) and tongxue (classmates) to set up a "vast network of connections" (p. 157) before defeating the forces led by Han Deqin, Nationalist governor of Jiangsu. With the great majority of the Chinese population illiterate and living in the countryside, rural intellectuals were "particularly useful" in their service to the Communist [End Page 362] success in Subei. With the Nationalist political infrastructure destroyed by the Japanese invasion, local gentry leaders had to abandon their middle course and follow the Communist Party. Above all, the Communist success in Subei was due to their dedication, discipline, and ability to expand "on the pretext of escaping Nationalist attacks" (p. 406). Like his senior colleagues such as Lyman P. Van Slyke and Chen Yung-Fa, Benton believes that the Communist success resulted from more than a single cause, whether "socio-economic factors or nationalism," as mainstream historians often try to highlight. However, Benton goes beyond that to show how successfully Communist leaders manipulated gentry culture so that local gentry leaders such as Han Guojun considered them "a superior embodiment of cherished moral values"—not realizing that the Communists "were committed to destroying" their "vested interest" (p. 211). The "enlightened" gentry would become Communist targets once the latter had consolidated their position. In sharp contrast to the Communist success in Subei, Ye Ting and Xiang Ying faced a costly tragedy in Wannan. Ironically, the Wannan Incident of January 1941, in which Nationalist troops ambushed the main forces of the New Fourth Army, killing or capturing most of them, resulted from the Communist success in Subei. The latter had convinced Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), head of the Nationalist government, to suppress an unauthorized "deployment" (p. 342) and respond to "the outcome of [Communist] aggression" (p. 399). The Wannan Incident actually developed with the Nationalist Party planning to wipe out the Communist forces, while the Communists were building up their forces to challenge the former (p. 512), yet its trigger was the indecision of the Party center in offering Ye and Xiang a timely direction. The position of Mao Zedong, the Party chief, turned from extremely cautious to exceedingly careless in the face of the government order, Mao trying to use a Communist evacuation of Wannan as a bargaining chip for the Nationalist acknowledgment of the Communist success in Subei. While Mao miscalculated that Jiang would not attack...

The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House

This volume is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring the uniquely Irish dimensions of colonial and post-colonial societies, she charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry culture facing its extinction - more often and more successfully - with comic irony than nostalgia. Vera Kreilkamp positions the Big House novels within current debates in post-colonial criticism and theory. She argues that these fictional representations of a beleaguered society provide a complex, nuanced gaze into a hybrid colonial group that distanced itself from the self-aggrandizements of the revivalists. As she examines the gothic, revisionist and post-modern permutations of an enduring national form, she illustrates the ways ascendancy women transformed conventions of an English domestic genre into political fiction. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever and the gothic forms of the Big House by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin, provides a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins and John Banville.

George Washington--the man behind the myths

George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths. By William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 328. Paper, $24.95 ISBN 0-8139-1900-2.) This sumptuous book--ostensibly the catalog of an exhibition organized by the Virginia Historical Society, with support by Washington and Lee University and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association--is a work of original scholarship with many insights into both George Washington and the myths surrounding him. The volume interweaves four themes. The first theme is a readable biography that acts as the book's narrative spine; it traces the major events of Washington's private life and public career. Unlike most of his biographers, William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton explain Washington in terms of colonial Virginia's gentry culture. Their Washington is not a self-created hero standing outside of history, but a person who in his values and tastes, goals, and pursuits is the product of a specific place in time. The authors offer an admiring but not uncritical interpretation of his development, motivation, and character. Rasmussen and Tilton's second subject is Washington's relationship to Mount Vernon. As a working plantation (or rather, several connected plantations) that employed black slaves, white indentured servants, and free white workers, the estate required Washington's constant attention. The authors usefully review his management style, agricultural program, business strategies, and problematic involvement with slavery. Mount Vernon was also a showcase Washington designed to display its proprietor's social status. The authors explain in great detail the ongoing effort to refurbish the entire grounds, and especially the main house, in order to transform a simple, though large, colonial farmhouse and farm into an impressive mansion and estate. Rasmussen and Tilton show Washington's attention to contemporary architectural practices, but they also recount his readiness to depart from current standards and to adapt forms when necessity and his own sense of style prompted him to go his own way. Most readers will surely be surprised at Washington's taste and creativity as a self-trained architect. Buildings need furnishings, and the authors' third theme examines Washington's choices of tables and chairs, dinnerware and decorations, and all manner of accoutrements for Mount Vernon and the presidential residences in New York and Philadelphia. …

The rise of Confucian ritualism in late imperial China: ethics, classics, and lineage discourse

Reign periods of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties Introduction 1. The crisis of the confucian order and didactic responses 2. Ritualist ethics and textual purism in the K'ang-hsi reign 3. Lineage discourse: gentry, local society, and the state 4. Ancestral rites and lineage in early Ch'ing scholarship 5. Ritual a nd the classics in the early Ch'ing 6. Linguistic purism and the hermeneutics of the Han learning movement 7. Ritualist ethics and the Han learning movement 8. Ritualism and gentry culture: women and lineage Conclusion Reference matter Notes Bibliography Character list Index.