Gentry Families Research Articles

Gideon the Cutpurse (review)

Reviewed by: Gideon the Cutpurse Elizabeth Bush Buckley-Archer, Linda Gideon the Cutpurse. Simon, 2006404p ISBN 1-4169-1525-7$17.95 Ad Gr. 5-8 The first installment of the planned Gideon Trilogy introduces Peter Schock, currently sparring with his neglectful father for a bit of face time, and Kate Dyer, a friend of a friend whom Peter has just met. They need to bond quickly, since on a trip to Kate's father's workplace, the children have an unfortunate run-in with an antigravity machine and are transported back to 1763. Gideon, a reformed thief who is still in the thrall of a nobleman of questionable character, cannot understand the concept of time travel, but there's no denying the evidence before his eyes. He offers to help the children make their way to London to retrieve the machine that is their only way back and which was promptly purloined by the heartless, devious Tar Man. Gideon's current employers, a kindly gentry family, are remarkably quick to assist the pair as well, and Peter and Kate's subsequent adventures on the road to London comprise expected complications ranging from encounters with highwaymen, flea-infested lodgings, bad food, worse smells, and uncomfortable clothing, to anxieties about returning home and pursuit by the Tar Man and his henchmen. The plot runs along with considerable predictability, but the eighteenth-century episodes are tidily drawn, the twenty-first century efforts to recover the children are engrossing, and the macabre backstory to the dastardly Tar Man is worth the price of admission. Gideon himself is benign but bland, and readers may prefer to have met him in his cutpurse days; the Tar Man, however, is deliciously nasty, and as the conclusion of this volume sends the Tar Man forward into our own time, the sequel may well outshine the original. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Impact of the Military Profession on Highland Gentry Families, c. 1730 – 1830

The expansion of the British military establishment from c. 1730 to 1830 is well known, as is the large numbers Scots and particularly highlanders who formed the British officer class. There is a common assumption—in some respects well founded—that the army had a beneficial impact on the political and economic experience of Scotland. This article offers an alternative interpretation through a focus on the social and cultural implications for highland gentry families of having so many male kin engaged in one particular career. The first two sections examine the scale and increasing attractions of military employment relative to other career destinations, notably farming, the legal profession and trade via urban business apprenticeship. Two generations with different motivations are compared, and the importance of the loss of practical farming and commercial expertise is noted. The next section explores the impact of military employment on relationships within families, particularly between officers and their father or elder brother, but also on relationships with female kin and on the broader processes of family formation through marriage. Of particular significance was the tendency towards teenage recruitment among the highland officer class, which removed boys from the influence of family and gave rise to reckless behaviour, extreme individualism and conspicuous consumption, posing major problems for gentry families and estates. The article concludes that although the military profession was a valuable short-term route for disposing of sons in a gentlemanly manner, the impact on their families and on the highlands could be highly disruptive. Yes, there was success and material benefits for a lucky few, but also tragedy, failure and family discord for many.

Pigott’s Private Eye: Radicalism and Sexual Scandal in Eighteenth-Century England

Charles Pigott hailed from a Shropshire gentry family that made the transition from Jacobitism to Jacobinism in the eighteenth-century. A bon vivant and man of the turf, Pigott scandalised the establishment by exposing the decadent habits of the landed aristocracy in the Jockey Club and the Female Jockey Club. These scurrilous exposés brought Pigott fame and persecution; they also established him as one of the first radical writers to make political capital out of the "boudoir politics" of the aristocracy. This paper examines the language of defamation in these pamphlets, their antecedents and their political purchase. Although the Jockey Club proved a resounding success, its sequel was less so; and this fact raises the question of why sexual scandal ultimately proved a more potent weapon of political criticism in late-eighteenth century France than in Britain. One reason is related to Britain's counter-revolution, to the reaction of the propertied classes towards French revolutionary violence, however critical they may have been to aristocratic libertinism. But another has to do with the nature of political society in France, the closer articulation between the “noble body” and the body politic. In Britain's more pluralist society, dominated by Parliament rather than the Court, attacks on the morals of the aristocracy were less politically damaging than they were in the France of the ancien regime.

Trickle Down Spirituality? Dilemmas of the Elizabethan Jesuit Mission

AbstractIn the face of many difficulties, especially mounting opposition from the Elizabethan government, Jesuits on the mission in England and Wales had to make some hard decisions about how to allocate their limited human and financial resources. In particular, with regard to the social landscape, the missioners came to realize that the gentry were, as a whole, more open to Catholic evangelization than many other groups. Moreover, they had the prestige and material resources to lend the missioners a sizable measure of protection and outreach. Due to the hierarchical nature of early modern society, winning over the gentry usually opened many doors. This increased the possibility of confirming in their faith or converting not only the Catholic gentry's families and friends, but also their servants, tenants, and others. Overall, although this focus on the world of the gentry inevitably limited the potential scope of the mission, it probably also helped to insure its survival and at least some measure of success.

Trappes of Nidd: A Family History by Richard Trappes-Lomax

In Ripon Liberty only one [Catholic] gentry family survived this period [the eighteenth century] (the Trappes of Nidd) and in their case the main line died out and a cadet branch from Carlton succeeded them’; this fact of mere survival both justifies and permits setting this account before the reader. Christopher Trappes (XIa), the founder of the Carlton branch, would probably have remained single, if he had not found an heiress with just sufficient income for marriage; had he remained single, the Trappes family would have died out in 1761, and this history would have remained unwritten. As it is, there survives just enough material to show something of how one recusant family contrived to retain its identity through and after the penal times.

Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (review)

Short Notices 235 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Short Notices Coss, Peter and Maurice Keen, eds, Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2002; cloth; pp. x, 278; RRP £45/US$75; ISBN 0851158501. This interesting collection brings together a range of studies of visual representation in medieval England. Given its focus on secular culture, chivalric display, especially heraldry, naturally looms large. Crouch and Coss use the evidence of heraldry to make important points about family structures – ‘no decisive move towards agnatic lineage’ (36) – and class formation – the failure of knighthood ‘to become the basis of a caste nobility’ (67) – between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, while Ailes provides a very useful review of the political uses of heraldry ‘as symbolic statements of political intent’ (87) in the later middle ages. In more sharply focused studies Shenton details the lengths to which Edward III took his identification with the leopard in the royal arms, while Pilbrow documents the manner in which the ceremonies of the Order of the Bath provided opportunities for ‘chivalrous bonding’ among the governing class. The papers by Gittos and Gittos on effigies and by Saul on brasses are also largely concerned, though not exclusively, with the armigerous classes. Gittos and Gittos show that gentry families facing extinction in the male line were especially driven to create memorials to their lineage and name. Saul uses his vast expertise to provide a wide-ranging survey of brasses, issues of supply and demand, and the concern to elicit prayers as well as commemorate and mark social distinction. Several papers extend the social range. Lachaud considers evidence for dress regulation prior to the sumptuary law of 1337 and asks, somewhat inconclusively, whether the legislation reflected increasing status consciousness or greater access to luxury goods. Barron provides an interesting exposition of the way in which the merchants and artisans of London developed their own distinctive cultures of display in the shadow of the royal court. Campbell discusses the curious range of items – from fine silver plate to relics and memorabilia – left to Oxford and Cambridge colleges by their founders and early benefactors. How often have we heard that medieval culture was still a largely visual culture? This collection certainly demonstrates the importance of visual representation and display in late medieval England, and the value of visual 236 Short Notices Parergon 21.1 (2004) sources in informing rather than simply illustrating larger political, social and cultural developments. What is especially striking about the essays is their freshness and range. Lachaud and Saul, for example, raise interesting points with respect to the manner in which supply may have run ahead of demand. Keen’s introduction is a gem, rich in insight and illuminating perspective. He raises the important question of how far the growth of literacy in this period, far from ‘downgrading the importance of ceremony and of the visual in culture generally’, actually served ‘to extend the range, the potential and the capacity for elaboration of the visual in culture through interplay with the written word’ (4). John Watts’s concluding chapter likewise draws attention to the lack of visibility the English state – the public rather than the private face of the monarchy – in the later middle ages. The book includes a number of choice illustrations, but it prompts the reader to look again at the surviving images of the age, especially perhaps in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum, namely J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 (1987) and R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic: Art for England 14001547 (2003). Michael Bennett University of Tasmania Debby, Nirit B.-A., Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernadino da Siena (13801444 ) (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 4), Turnhout, Brepols, 2001; hardback; pp. xiv, 344; RRP EUR65.00; ISBN 2503511635. A lot has been written on Renaissance Florence. Dominici and Bernardino have each given rise to a body of literature, both historic and recent, and sermon studies are a recognised area with its own conference groups and journals. Nirit Debby takes...

Quotation and Self-Fashioning in Margaret Paston’s Household Letters

Quotation and Self-Fashioning in Margaret Paston’s FFousehold Letters Valerie Creelman St. Mary’s University T he private co rrespo n d en ce an d papers of the Pastons, a fif­ teenth-century gentry family of Norfolk, England, have been an invalu­ able primary source for medieval scholars in piecing together the social, cultural, economic, and domestic details of a gentlewoman’s life in the late medieval period.1 O f particular interest have been the letters of Margaret Paston, whose correspondence represents the largest preserved collection of female-authored letters by a gentlewoman in late medieval England. Despite this abundance of material, few scholars have moved beyond the historical and philological interests of these letters to discover what they can teach us about women’s rhetorical skill, compositional practices, and participation in applied rhetorics like medieval letter-writing. Recent scholarly work on the Paston women’s letters demonstrates, however, that important steps are being taken in this direction: Diane Watt, for example, explores what she terms “household rhetoric” in discussing the Paston letters, and Roger Dalrymple examines the reactive, consolatory, and redressive aspects of the Paston women’s letters. Broader in scope, l For sociohistorical discussions of fifteenth-century gentlewomen see Archer, Goldberg, Jewell, Leyser, Power, Shahar, Swabey, and Ward. ESC 30.3 (September 2004): 111-128 Valerie Creelman is an assistant professor at Saint M ary’s University. Interested in medieval women’s writing and literate practices, she explores such topics as gender, social relations, and identity through her study of fifteenthcentury gentlewomen’s letters— particularly correspondence related to household and estate administration. She recently completed her dissertation entitled Household Words: The Rhetoricity ofFifteenthCentury Gentlewomen’s Household Letters and is currently working on several projects related to medieval women’s epistolography. Earlier this year, she was nominated for the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal based on her doctoral work at the University of Waterloo. Albrecht Classen’s and Malcolm Richardson’s respective efforts have worked to provide scholars with a methodology and corpus of medieval women’s epistolary writings for further study. Each author’s scholarly work not only charts new approaches and directions in studying women’s episto­ lary writings, but also emphasizes the need for and importance of studying the rhetoric of women’s household letters to enrich our understanding of women’s literary history. While scholars agree that Margaret Paston’s letters display a woman of considerable influence and consequence in the Paston family, less attention has been directed to the language of Margaret Paston’s letters to determine how her linguistic and rhetorical choices contribute to this impression of her. One distinctive feature of Margaret Paston’s household letters is her frequent reference to and recital of external sources (individuals’ state­ ments or words) in her reports. Despite the prevalence of this practice throughout her correspondence, its purpose and rhetorical effects have not been fully explored. One obvious effect of Margaret’s incorporation of others’ reported speech is that it constructs her authorial position as a reporter, chronicler, and, perhaps, even translator of the household and estate-related events, information, and experience she recounts in her household letters. This reporting role has, however, largely character­ ized Margaret Paston’s subject position in these letters as a passive and peripheral one. This characterization is not entirely surprising given that, in discussions of medieval women’s literary history, the authorial roles of chronicler and translator have been identified as strategies of submission used by women to attach themselves to male authorities and participate in male literary activities (Barratt 12-16). Margaret’s own literary activity falls within this purview, for her routine composition of these household letters is attached to the male authority of her husband, John Paston 1. Margaret’s letter-writing is, after all, primarily motivated by her husband’s request that she provide him with an ongoing written account of household and estate matters. Consequently, the report mode that characterizes her speech function throughout her letters is one that speaks of her subordinate position as a wife obligated to provide her husband with frequent written reports in governing estate business in his absence. Taking this social dynamic into consideration, this...

The Novel as Teacher: Learning to be Female in the Early American South

BEGAN A VERY CLEVER NOVEL--EVELINA IT WAS CALL'D, FRANCES Baylor Hill recorded on late October day in 1797. She had spent most of the previous week looking after household of sick children, interspersing her nursing chores with sewing projects. She was ready the diversion of good read and more than willing to slight her needlework. [K]nit short piece, she explained, for was reading the best part of the Evelina had claimed her; she finished the first volume in three days. In mid-November she picked up volume two, finished it in four days, and immediately began volume three. Her perpetual sewing duties, company, and funeral slowed her reading of the last volume, however. Still, she stole time almost every day week until November 28, when she noted triumphantly, I finish'd reading Evelina it is very good Novel and very entertaining. (1) By the end of the eighteenth century, the novel as genre was firmly planted on American soil. William Hill Brown had published The Power of Sympathy, generally regarded as the first American novel, in 1789, but English novels had permeated the colonial literary scene decades earlier. (2) Frances Baylor Hill's absorption in Evelina was characteristic of female readers, whether they read in England, New England, or the eighteenth-century South. Featuring women at the center of dramatic plots that turned upon disguise and deceit, seduction and betrayal, rebellion and reconciliation, the novel delivered moral lessons in style unmatched by traditional advice literature. Frances Baylor Hill dutifully read James Blair's Sermons when she could not get to church; regarded Dr. John Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters a very good Book; and regularly read letters on (3) But none of them captivated her as her novels did. Her reading exemplified the coexistence and persistence of devotional, traditional, and educational works as the canon of female education late in the century. The addition of novels, however, was telling portent of the change, seen in Virginian Lady Jean Skipwith's library by 1826, in which novels would supplant traditional advice literature. (4) Novels never dominated eighteenth-century southern reading, but their presence in southern libraries merits attention, their influence can be detected in the ways that women thought about female virtue, friendship, and identity. In our own century we tend to think of novels as recreational reading, and undoubtedly they served that function in the eighteenth century as well. But novels were more than diversions: they contained moral lessons, crucial in the education of southern women, both maid and matron; and this literature comprised the core readings of their education. While there was little formal education available to females, through this reading, white southern women participated actively in the life of the mind of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. Indeed, education of any kind was rather haphazard affair in the eighteenth-century South, even boys. Yet, regardless of rank, girls' education differed substantially from that of boys. For girls, learning consisted mostly of those housewifery skills they would need in marriage, reading, and perhaps writing. Even in gentry families, private tutors hired to teach both boys and girls divided the curriculum along gender lines, as the 1773-74 diary of Philip Vickers Fithian reveals: Latin and Greek the boys, and beginning arithmetic, writing, and reading the girls. Mrs. Neill's exclusive boarding school girls in Williamsburg, Virginia, offered the typical female ornamental education of needlework, music, dancing, as well as reading and writing. Even eleven-year-old Virginian Betty Pratt recognized the discrepancies in male and female education. She wrote in 1732 to her brother, who was in school in England, that write better already than can expect to do as long as live; and you are got as far as the Rule of three in Arithmetick, but can't cast up sum in addition cleverly, but am striving to do better every day. …

Virginia's Trinity of Immortals: Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, and the Story of Their Fractured Relationships

public careers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry overlapped for over three decades-in Virginia resistance movement before 1776, in Continental Congress, in General Washington's pleas to Governors Henry and Jefferson for men and supplies during Revolutionary War, in fight over ratification of Constitution, and in events of Washington's presidency and politics of 1790s. Eventually, these relationships unraveled. First Henry and Jefferson became estranged. Then same thing happened between Henry and Washington, and, finally, between Washington and Jefferson. Only one reconciliation took place between any of these pairs: Washington and Henry, both of whom died in 1799. As has often been true in American politics, political disagreements took on personal dimensions, and combination of two ended friendships and generated bitterness and estrangements. Even so, three Virginians dealt with their conflicts by peaceful means. That fact alone tells us something important about American Revolution and future character of American politics.Over years intense fascination for trio fed partly on myth, which always enlarges accomplishments of heroes who stand tall even without embellishment. That explains late Bernard Mayo's title for slim volume called Myths & Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Mayo begins his masterly surgery on layers of exaggeration by recreating cold February day in 1858, in Richmond's Capitol Square, when Washington's equestrian statute was unveiled, with figures of Jefferson and Henry standing beside him. Panegyrists hailed them The Sword, Pen, and Trumpet of Revolution.1Washington's role in American founding took place on colonial and national scene, was case with Jefferson's; Henry's participation in that same process happened almost exclusively at local level in career that was Virginia-centered. Prior to Henry's departure from Second Continental Congress in August 1775, however, he had inspired and energized Americans with his vigorous speeches and calls to action in defense of their liberties. Washington, on other hand, consistently thought and acted from high ground, in continental terms. Jefferson too knew how to view things in national context, but he did not do so with Washington's consistency. Certainly Washington's critics rarely described him preoccupied with Virginia and South. He ranks most consistent and influential nationalist of his generation. Fair or not, Henry's detractors eventually saw him particularist, and, to somewhat lesser extent, so did critics of Jefferson.There is no evidence to suggest any friction between Washington, Jefferson, and Henry for some years after their acquaintance began. All from gentry families. All served in House of Burgesses, entering that body shortly before or during imperial crisis: in 1758 (Washington), 1765 (Henry), and 1769 (Jefferson). Henry's arrival at capital in 1765 found Jefferson still reading law under George Wythe, having recently attended College of William and Mary. Jefferson's extramural political education received shot of adrenaline in May 1765, he stood at back of House chamber and heard Henry, freshman legislator, attack Stamp Act. As an old man Jefferson still remembered vividly the splendid display of Mr. Henry's talents popular orator . . . such I have never heard from any other man. He spoke as Homer wrote.2 Jefferson was never silver-tongued and never claimed to be. If he envied Henry in that respect, he denigrated his talents lawyer. Both were part of what Merrill Petersen calls a new generation of professional lawyers. In Jefferson's eyes, Henry was intellectually lazy. No doubt it irritated Jefferson that Henry came to bar after six weeks of desultory reading, whereas Jefferson devoted several years to exhaustive preparation. …

In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker

In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker. Edited by Claudia L. Bushman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xix, 292. Appendices. Cloth, $44.95.)In Old Virginia is a welcome addition the growing shelf of studies of small planters in the antebellum South. From 1824, when John Walker commenced farming at the age of thirty-nine, until shortly before his death in 1867, Walker kept a daily record of farm activities, expenses, and social activities concerning his plantation operations in King and Queen County, Virginia. Claudia Bushman's meticulous examination of the two-volume diary, supplemented by two other personal diaries and local records, is divided into thirteen topical chapters, plus a brief introduction and a conclusion, which look at crop routines, farm economies, agricultural improvements, slavery, community, Methodism, health care, the Civil War, and other subjects. Two appendices provide family genealogies and annual information about every slave mentioned in the diaries. Eschewing the historiographical controversies that mine the landscape of southern history, Bushman hews close the text to provide a historical panorama without contemporary judgment (xv), allowing readers draw their own conclusions about the significance of Walker's life. Therein lie both the book's value and its limitations.Diaries are intensely personal constructions of a world writ small; one learns not the whole of a person's life, but only the concerns and obsessions of the diarist. Born in 1785 into a gentry family whose ancestors had settled the county seven generations earlier, Walker worked in the family's milling business before moving Nashville, Tennessee, where he converted Methodism in 1818. Returning Virginia, Walker sold his share of the enterprise and purchased a portion of the family plantation. A calculating farmer, exacting slaveowner, penurious husband, devoted Methodist, practitioner of Thomsonian medicine, litigious neighbor, and reluctant Confederate, Walker produced a diary that is rich on these topics but is much less revealing about family life, women's labor, community events, or local politics.Walker's life both confirms and informs much of the recent Old South scholarship. Slavery proved adaptable mixed farming, but required careful deployment of laborers in dozens of different tasks throughout overlapping crop cycles. Even small planters like Walker, who had only a dozen enslaved workers, managed complex operations, and in one of the most original chapters Bushman describes seven distinct economies: market, farm, women's household, slave, neighborhood barter, hired slave, and paper investments. Despite the scant references women's labor in the journals, another chapter examines the importance of housewifery the plantation. As Bushman notes, Walker belies simple dichotomies that divide farmers into subsistence or commercial operators; both were integral components of highly diverse agricultural economies.The journals also illuminate how rural Virginians survived the long depression from 1819 until the early 1850s. Walker constantly cut expenses become as self-sufficient as possible, such as increasing textile production; he selectively adopted improved farming practices, applying manure and fertilizers maintain soil fertility and purchasing horse-drawn machinery increase labor productivity; he expanded crop production by clearing new ground and purchasing a second plantation in 1850; and he hired out a skilled slave. Only men with inherited land and slaves survived, and even they enjoyed but modest prosperity, consuming most of what they produced. Bushman perceptively concludes that it was the daily calculations of labor deployment, the annual gamble on the crop mix, and the determination make ends meet and leave patrimonies sons that motivated small planters like Walker. …

Misogyny and the Complete Gentleman in Early Elizabethan Printed Miscellanies

ABSTRACT Tottel's Miscellany disseminated in print a model of male courtly and cultivated behaviour in which the writing of aphoristic and amorous verse was central. This model produced a proliferation of printed miscellanies of verse in the early Elizabethan period, both single-author collections and anthologies, in which male courtly behaviour is defined in terms of the potentially contradictory ideals of elegant amorousness and well-framed virtue. Women overwhelmingly appear in such collections as figures of glamorous instability or sexual betrayal. Only occasionally, most notably in the collections of Isabella Whitney, does one find traces of the central importance, and active participation of women, in the earlier manuscript production of courtly verse. This essay will consider the plethora of printed miscellanies of short secular verse that appeared in the 1560s and 1570s in the wake of Richard Tottel's hugely successful Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honorable Lord Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, first printed in 1557, but with multiple editions until the end of the century. (1) My argument will be that by their selection and presentation in print of courtly verse, Tottel and his successors helped to erase in print the centrality of women in the production of such verse, whether as readers and performers, as instigators and answerers, or, on occasion, no doubt, as composers and adaptors of such verse. For the mid-century miscellanists, the writing of courtly verse was primarily a gentlemanly activity in which the active participants were almost exclusively male, and in which the attitudes and gestures marketed as socially desirable contributed to the construction of a desirable mid-century masculine self, humanist-educated and socially aspiring. (2) Surviving manuscripts of early Tudor verse, such as the 'Devonshire MS', used by a number of female courtiers associated with Anne Boleyn and Lady Margaret Douglas, niece of Henry VIII, or the 'Findern MS', belonging to, and used by, women as well as men of a Derbyshire gentry family in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, contain, as well as misogynist verse and poems blaming women, a number of poems in women's voices, giving female perspectives on the fashionable topics of love and fidelity. (3) Even an early Tudor manuscript that appears to have been compiled and used mainly by men such as the 'Blage MS' makes clear that the 'answer' poem, with its witty ripostes, often in female voices, to male attacks on women, was a popular topic implying a potential role and voice for women in courtly verse exchange. (4) Of course, we cannot assume that female-voiced poems were always or even usually composed by women, but in a culture of open copying, adaptation, and appropriation of manuscript verse, the relatively frequent occurrence of poems giving a sympathetic female perspective suggests the centrality of women's participation and the perceived need to provide a variety of voices for them. (5) Tottel's Miscellany, by the act of printing such verse, transformed its context and effect from witty or graceful gestures in a system of elite manuscript exchange and social pastime into exemplary models of an approved and refined style, designed in the words of Tottel in his prefatory epistle 'to the Reader' to 'exhort the vnlearned, by reding to learne to be more skilfull, and to purge that swinelike grossenesse, that maketh the swete maierome [marjoram] not to smell to their delight' (i, 2). The prominence of Surrey's name enhanced the social glamour of the Miscellany, leading to a particular association of its verse with Surrey and to the assumption, on the part of some readers at least, that most, if not all the poems it contained were his (ii, 67). As a number of scholars have argued, Tottel's Miscellany and its imitators 'marketed exclusivity [... they] functioned as conduct books [...] because they demonstrated to more common audiences the poetic practices entertained by graceful courtly readers and writers'. …

John Bellew, a seventeenth-century man of many parts, 1605-1679. By Harold O’Sullivan. Pp xiii, 229. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2000. €45. - The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland. By Karen Harvey. Pp 218. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1998. €40.

John Bellew, a seventeenth-century man of many parts, 1605-1679. By Harold O’Sullivan. Pp xiii, 229. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2000. €45. - The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland. By Karen Harvey. Pp 218. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1998. €40.

Duoyu de hua : les « Mots de trop » de Qu Qiubai

Céline WANG : Duoyu de hua, "Superfluous Words " by Qu Qiubai Qu Qiubai (1899-1935), the once-prominent Chinese Communist Party leader, was one of the very few intellectuals who wrote about political issues of their time. Currently considered in China as an important Marxist thinker and an eminent revolutionary writer, Qu's fate was both tragic and pathetic during his lifetime and well after his death. He was born in a gentry family of Jiangsu, which he rejected after a two year stay in Moscow (1921-1923). He briefly succeeded Chen Duxiu as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party between July 1927 and May 1928, but was then expelled in 193 1 as a "Putschist adventurer". When the Long March started, Qu was left behind in Jiangxi province, where he was caught by Guomindang troops and executed at the age of thirty-six. While in prison, he wrote "Superfluous words". Although he never betrayed his comrades, nor denied his convictions and responsibilities, he was condemned as a traitor during the Cultural Revolution. Taking into account recent publications in the PRC, this study aims to provide an explanation of the circumstances of the writing and publication of "Superfluous words".

Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (review)

Reviewed by: Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China Scott Lowe (bio) Kenneth Dean . Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii, 406 pp. Hardcover $45.00, ISBN 0-691-02881-8. Chinese "popular religion" has experienced a remarkable resurgence in the decades following the death of Mao Zedong, with Fujian Province often leading the way. In Lord of the Three in One, Kenneth Dean draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Putian and Xianyou, Fujian, and a number of rarely studied textual materials, to provide a complex and nuanced portrait of one particularly successful sectarian tradition, the Sanyijiao, or "Three in One," a distinctive religious tradition that attempts to assimilate selected teachings of Buddhism and Daoism into an idiosyncratic version of "Confucianism," while worshipping its founder Lin Zhao'en as a god. Dean does not restrict himself merely to describing the historical development of the tradition but attempts to analyze its cultural and economic contexts, focusing especially on the processes through which the Three in One became accepted by local society and the mechanisms employed by the Three in One to create a relatively new, economically competitive ritual tradition. Lin Zhao'en (Lin Longjiang, 1517-1598) was a brilliant and scholarly member of an affluent Fujian gentry family who became a xiucai at the age of eighteen yet rather mysteriously failed to progress through the exam system. After failing the juren exam in 1547, Lin renounced traditional Confucian studies and began practicing internal alchemy with a wandering Daoist sage. By 1554, Lin had assembled a group of disciples and built a hall for their studies. Lin and his followers achieved local fame in the next decade for their relief work during a period of social disruption caused by a series of pirate raids. For the rest of his long life, Lin enjoyed a high regard in his community as an exemplary civic leader and religious teacher. He traveled and lectured widely and wrote voluminously, providing his followers with commentaries on many important Confucian, Daoist, and Chan Buddhist texts. In addition to his efforts to harmonize the three teachings of China, Lin also created a sizable body of ritual and meditative practices distinctive to the tradition he was founding. Within a few decades of his death, Lin's deification as Xia Wuni, the Lord of the Three in One, was complete. He had become a god and was worshipped by thousands in the Xinghua area of Fujian Province. Currently there are more than one thousand temples in the People's Republic of China belonging to the various sub-traditions that claim allegiance to Lin's teachings, with a growing number of temples and followers in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Dean estimates that half a million individuals, representing nearly all [End Page 84] social classes, participate in Three in One worship and rituals on a regular basis; many followers believe that the Three in One tradition is poised to spread worldwide in the near future. The book is divided into eight substantive chapters plus an introduction, conclusion, and eleven appendixes, most of which include translated materials from Three in One texts. Dean gives a solid overview of Lin's life; the careers of his successors; the schisms in the tradition; the actual teachings, yogic practices, and rituals of the various branches of the Three in One; the cultural and economic niche the tradition has secured; and the history of the tradition during the Qing and Republican eras, followed by an assessment of the current state of the faith. Most of Dean's claims are supported with evidence, although when he speaks, as he often does, of broad periods of time or large topics, his stance is magisterial. He summarizes and generalizes with plausibility and authority; only scholars specializing in the minutiae of the Xinghua area of Fujian could contest his assertions. Dean is to be commended for the thoroughness of his research. He and his Chinese colleagues have seemingly left no stone unturned in their search for texts and inscriptions related to the Three in One. They have uncovered a great...

The Bellews of Mount Bellew: A Catholic Gentry Family in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (review)

The Bellews of Mount Bellew: A Catholic Gentry Family in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (review)

The Loraines of Kirkharle: The Decline and Resurgence of a Northumbrian Upper Gentry Family

(2000). The Loraines of Kirkharle: The Decline and Resurgence of a Northumbrian Upper Gentry Family. Northern History: Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 73-82.

Younger Sons, Illegitimate Sons and the Law: A Study of Three Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540

Younger Sons, Illegitimate Sons and the Law: A Study of Three Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540 Emma Hawkes This article examines the experiences of younger and illegitimate sons in three gentry families, arguing that their lives and even their legal activities were marked by their liminal positions in their families. I explore the ways in which the activities of these m e n can be distinguished from those of their fathers and the heirs by charting the differences in their legal undertakings in the latefifteenthand early sixteenth centuries. It is important to examine the lives of younger and illegitimate sons because gentry families were not, in some sense, undifferentiated units. The positions of members of gentle families varied - patriarchs and heirs were privileged while younger sons, illegitimate children, daughters and wives were relatively less favoured. The focus here is on the younger and illegitimate sons of three gentle families, rather than on the patriarchs w h o are often discussed as though their activities and interests were synonymous with those of their families as wholes or on the w o m e n 1 For instance, G.E. Mingay's estimates of the wealth of the gentry were without accounting for the division of land within families. G.E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall ofa Ruling Class (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 11-1 126 Emma Hawkes whose undertakings have begun to receive critical attention in recent years. By examining the undertakings of these minor m e n I hope to open up something of the diversity of the lives and legal experiences of the Yorkshire gentry. I focus on the younger and illegitimate sons of three gentle families of the fertile valley of York: the Gascoigns of Gawthorpe and Harewood, the Plumptons of Plumpton and Idle, and the Vavasours of Hazlewood and Spaldington. While I also call on anecdotal evidence of the legal activities of their Yorkshire neighbours, I concentrate on a detailed reading of these three particularly well-documented gentle families. This approach falls into neither the well-established tradition of individual biographies nor the very useful statistical histories of the late-medieval 2 David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A St of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1978, new edn, London: Yale University Pre 1985); Maria L. Cioni, Woman and Law in Elizabethan England with particu reference to the Court of Chancery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985); Judi Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household Brigstock before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Beatr Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industr Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3 The Plumptons left a collection of letters which focussed on an inheritance dispute; the Gascoigns and Vavasours both left sizeable collections of deeds; and of course members of all three families went to the courts regularly. An examination of every term of King's Bench records between 1480 and 1530 shows that the three families were involved in four Rex side and thirty-three plea side disputes. In the same period there were at least nine Rex side and sixty-six plea side actions at C o m m o n Pleas, and twenty-four Star Chamber cases. Between 1461 and 1540 there were 137 petitions sent to Chancery naming members of these families. 4 M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjured Clarence: George, Duke of Clarence, (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980); Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981); Colin Richmond, John Hopton: A Fifteenth Century Suffol Gentleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); E.W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England, Thomas Kebell: A Case Study Cambridge Studies in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Gerald Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). AStudy ofThree Yorkshire Gentry Families, 1480-1540 127 gentry as a whole, but it means that I focus on about fifty people (of w h o m twenty were younger or illegitimate sons) and that I a m thus able to compare the lives of the younger and illegitimate Plumptons, Vavasours and Gascoigns with those of the patriarchs and heirs of...

Christine Carpenter, editor. The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex, C.1417-C.1453: Chetham’s Manuscript Mun. E. 6.10 (4). Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer. 1998. Pp. viii, 214. $63.00. ISBN 0-85115-624-X.

Christine Carpenter, editor. The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex, C.1417-C.1453: Chetham’s Manuscript Mun. E. 6.10 (4). Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer. 1998. Pp. viii, 214. $63.00. ISBN 0-85115-624-X. - Volume 32 Issue 1

Review: The Bellews of Mount Bellew: A Catholic Gentry Family in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Review: The Bellews of Mount Bellew: A Catholic Gentry Family in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland

The Bellews of Mount Bellew: a Catholic gentry family in eighteenth-century Ireland