Late 1840s Research Articles

In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America by Kelly M. Kennington

Reviewed by: In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America by Kelly M. Kennington Austin Allen (bio) In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America. By Kelly M. Kennington. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. xv, 290. $54.95 cloth; $28.95 paper) Kelly M. Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott analyzes the 287 freedom suits that African American litigants pursued in St. Louis between 1810 and 1860. The city’s location along major transit routes running east, west, north, and south and its presence on the border between slavery and freedom gave rise to a variety of fact situations that, if litigated, may have established a freedom claim. St. Louis also hosted a black community that understood the law’s potential for negotiating the terms of enslavement and a legal profession willing to pursue freedom suits. But African American litigants formed the driving force behind those suits and Kennington argues that their participation in these cases shaped St. Louis’s legal culture. Missouri policy toward freedom suits experienced two major periods of transformation. One followed statehood in the 1820s. The other [End Page 221] occurred in the late 1840s and 1850s and resulted in the Dred Scott case. Most of Kennington’s sources, however, fall between these two periods, so she approaches her topic thematically. After discussing the setting of antebellum St. Louis, Kennington explores enslaved people’s decision to bring suit. The city’s black community developed a consciousness about the right to sue for freedom. Potential litigants tapped into this knowledge and weighed their options, determining whether legal action offered a better option than, say, running away. If they decided to sue, black litigants exposed themselves to significant risks. Enslavers might retaliate with violence or by removing them from the city or selling them to someone in another state. Missouri law made provisions against such activity, but the safeguards did not always prove sufficient. Litigants in freedom claims also had access to a legal profession willing (or, in some cases, required) to take up their cases and see them through. Freedom suits in St. Louis generally turned on some combination of three claims. Litigants asserted that they were born free and thus were illegally enslaved. Or they claimed to have been freed by will or some other agreement with an enslaver. Most often, however, they claimed that residence in free territory—usually in nearby Illinois— rendered them free. And the city’s freedom claimants appeared to have been successful. Kennington notes that thirty-eight perecent of the suits initiated in St. Louis resulted in freedom. Another thirty percent did not. (She could not determine the outcome of the remaining thirty-two of cases.) In the Shadow of Dred Scott makes two historiographical contributions. One is specific to the study of the Dred Scott Case, which has generally focused on the handful of Missouri freedom suits that made their way to the state’s Supreme Court. Kennington’s study provides the best account of the social and legal context (as well as the inherent risks and personal dimensions) in which Dred Scott emerged. Second, the book contributes to a growing body of work on black litigants in the South. Kennington builds on Ariela Gross’s Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (2000) that studies the way in which enslaved people influenced the [End Page 222] legal process, usually by leveraging their status as property to exert an indirect pressure on the legal system. Much like Kimberly M. Welch does in Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (2017), however, Kennington focuses on more direct forms legal action in which African Americans asserted personhood. She emphasizes that claimants in St. Louis freedom cases foregrounded their character as persons and portrayed their treatment as property as a grievous wrong. In the hands of these claimants, the law became a powerful mechanism for African American agency and resistance to slavery. There is little to criticize in this book. In the Shadow of Dred Scott is a fine piece of scholarship. Readers might wish...

Scribes at Work: Notation and Transmission in the Stomius Partbooks

The three sets of partbooks, Regensburg, Bischofliche Zentralbibliothek, B 211-215, B 216-219, and B 220-222, copied by Salzburg schoolmaster Johannes Stomius starting in the late 1530s, contain a ...

Immigration, Crime, and the Economic Origins of Political Nativism in the Antebellum West

Abstract Scholars have described political nativism during the antebellum era of US history as the product of cultural paranoia, social anxiety, and political expediency. Much less examined are the ways in which economic motives contributed to political nativism. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, Americans in urban areas resented higher expenditures on poorhouses, prisons, mental asylums, police, and other institutions that expanded to serve immigrants. The outbreak of political nativism in the border city of St. Louis provides a representative example of the relationship between immigrants’ conditions, the bloody election-day riots of the mid-1850s, and the dramatic rise of the National American Party. Cultural issues and the potential increase in immigrant voting power intensified economic-related resentment among the native-born population and resulted in the large-scale outbreak of political nativism in 1854.

“Servants of the Tsar”: The Polish-Lithuanian subject Szymon Romejkow and the boyar’s son Vasiliy Shalygin, the informers of Moscow before the Smolensk War (1632–1634)

In 1632, the ceasefire expired, signed between the Moscow State and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in December 1618. Under the terms of this peace agreement, Moscow ceded to the Polish side a number of western territories, including Smolensk, Nevel, Sebezh, as well as the cities of Severia (Trubchevsk, Starodub, Chernihiv, Pochep, Novgorod- Seversky). It should be noted that in the Russian capital, preparations for the upcoming war began already in the late 1620s. In particular, this concerned the collection of data on events in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth through scouts, spies and informants, some of whom acted on the territory of Severia, or rather, on the Russian-Polish borderland. The documentation of the Razryadny Prikaz of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Moscow) contains a small set of documents on the activities of two informants from Lithuania: Szymon Romejkow, a nobleman of the country, and the Russian Vasily Shalygin, a son of a boyar. The details of their recruitment to the Russian service are unknown, however, already since 1629 these people had an active correspondence with the Bryansk voivodes, reporting everything that was happening in Poland. Their information turned out to be the most relevant in 1632, when the period of “Interrex” began in the Commonwealth. It was then in Moscow that they considered it necessary to take revenge and to declare war to their neighbour ahead of schedule.

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen

Reviewed by: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen Richard Stott (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Sports, Theater, Sporting culture, Horseracing They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. By Kenneth Cohen. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp. 334. Cloth, $55.00.) The “sporting culture” of early America is the focus of this fine book. Not really sports history in the narrow sense of the term, the book uses sports as a lens to examine the cultural history of early and antebellum America. Based on a huge variety of printed and archival sources, including legal records and correspondence, Cohen reconstructs and analyzes the changes that sporting culture underwent from the colonial period to the 1850s. The book is gracefully written, and a large number of well-chosen illustrations add to the narrative. While Cohen defines “sporting culture” broadly, the book mainly focuses on the theater and horseracing. It also pays some attention to billiards. It does not deal with rowing, running, baseball and cricket, cockfighting, or prizefighting—a sport that rose to incredible popularity beginning in the late 1840s. The emphasis on the theater may seem odd, but Cohen notes the broad meaning of “sports” in this era and a number of similarities to horseracing including elite backing and liminal status. The foremost sporting paper of the era, The Spirit of the Times, offered extensive theater coverage. Most of the focus in the book is on New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia. While the colonial sporting scene, as described in They Will Have Their Game, was undeveloped by later standards I think many readers will be surprised at how extensive it was. Horseracing in the early 1700s was informal but widespread—men of all classes gathered at the tavern to race their horses and bet on them. Theatrical performances were staged in miscellaneous spaces. As colonial cities grew in the 1750s and 60s, promoters began to construct racetracks and theaters. This was funded mainly by members of the elite who hoped these sites would reinforce their link with one another and their influence in society at large. These new venues were designed to separate the elite from others with less [End Page 767] status—in stands at racetracks and in boxes in theaters. Less genteel spectators were admitted but would be kept away from the elite. The Revolution set back both activities significantly. After the Revolution, sports were reborn. In the eighteenth century, many wealthy backers had seen viewed their support mainly as way of burnishing their status, but in the nineteenth century both horseracing and the theater emerged as businesses; this trend would continue to develop after the Revolution. One of the strengths of the book is Cohen’s careful tracing through letters and legal records of the financial history of the new theaters and racecourses. Men on the make seem to have been among the most enthusiastic backers, who, Cohen argues, hoped they would gain respect for their financial acumen. Both horseracing and the theater had a cross-class appeal, and the need to make a profit meant opening the doors to ordinary men and women. This began a process of democratization that was not easily controlled. Disorder was often the result, and drinking and fighting routine. Cohen argues that this new sporting-business elite “laid the foundation of for the white male republic as well as the values of capitalism that justified growing inequality within it” (12). Both horseracing and theaters had long faced criticisms. But now cogent defenses emerged. Racing horses, so it was said, improved the breed. Theaters could provide moral instruction. In horseracing, as the commercial aspects developed, thoroughbreds were raised and mated, which gave ordinary horse owners little chance of competing. Professional trainers and jockeys came to be employed by the wealthy men who dominated the sport. White men controlled these sports, but women and blacks were allowed as spectators at horseraces and the theater. African Americans were allowed in segregated sections of the gallery in theaters. Some jockeys were black, and Cohen tells the fascinating story of Cornelious Johnston, one of the leading jockeys of...

Radical Imaginings: The View from Atop a Slippery Slope

Radical Imaginings:The View from Atop a Slippery Slope Lori D. Ginzberg (bio) What were they thinking? As we consider the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment, let us abandon for a moment what we call the wisdom of hindsight and ask what the earliest advocates of woman suffrage imagined would happen once women secured the vote. Most Americans decried the mere suggestion of women's political equality as a radical disruption of God's and nature's plan and warned that votes for women would set the nation on the road to ruin. But what did the first generation of suffragists—who did not, after all, live to see what the consequences of enfranchisement would be—believe woman suffrage would accomplish, and how shocked, pleased, or dismayed would they have been by the results? Declaring women's right to full legal and political equality with men was breathtaking, reflecting a radical reimagining of political, religious, and marital hierarchies. Women's exclusion from the franchise, the earliest advocates of woman suffrage had concluded, was one of the foundations on which women's subordination to men rested; as such, it diminished their very humanity. They did not look to the vote for its practical, strategic, or legislative value. Indeed, as advocates of a moral transformation of society ("ultraists" in the terms of the day), they were deeply ambivalent about the compromises that seeking and using the vote would necessarily entail. "It is with reluctance that I make the demand for the political rights of women," Lucretia Mott asserted, even as she did so.1 To these activists, the demand for woman suffrage was a profound, if largely symbolic, step toward acknowledging the depth of women's subordination and establishing their full membership in the nation itself. Amid the commemorations of the centennial of woman suffrage, we might focus not only on its consequences and results but also on that first generation's hopes and fears and the fraught and twisted paths claims for justice take on their way to legislative results. It is worth recalling that the vote was but a fragment of what early women's rights activists demanded; few of them imagined that it would, or should, come to occupy center stage. If women's exclusion from the ballot was the most contested grievance expressed at Seneca Falls, it was in part because the abolitionists who attended the convention differed over the efficacy and morality of voting. Politics, many of them had long believed, offered little in the way of social transformation; it was best for the moral part of the community to refrain. In the late 1840s and 1850s, their commitment to moral suasion waned in the face of emerging electoral strategies [End Page 14] for reform; some African American abolitionists, desperate for a practical strategy that would actually end slavery, had already rejected it. Clearly times were changing: "No man or woman can be regarded as an entity, as a power in society, who has not a direct agency in governing its results," a Wisconsin legislative committee on woman suffrage declared. "Without a direct voice in molding the spirit of the age, the age will disown us."2 Not everyone, it should be noted, was on board with this shift. As late as 1856, while a Mr. Clark escorted the young African American activist Charlotte Forten home from a "very pleasant evening," she "vainly tried to persuade him that all political action was wrong."3 If it increasingly seemed obvious that lacking the vote was among the barriers to women "molding the spirit of the age"; for many radicals, electoral politics still offered more traps than solutions, compromises to the expansive moral vision that had long infused their approach to social change. But early women's rights supporters recognized exclusion when they saw it. Being denied the vote was insulting. Even if you did not want to vote, even if you did not think that voting accomplished much, the affront confirmed that women were not full and independent citizens of the United States. Indeed, two years before the Seneca Falls convention, six women in Jefferson County, New York, had petitioned their state's constitutional convention to grant women...

The St. Petersburg medicine of the late 1820s as seen by London physician

The article considers the condition of medicine in St. Petersburg in 1827-1828 as presented in memoirs of English physician A. B. Granville about his visiting the capital of Russia. The prominent physician and naturalist, familiar with condition of medicine in main countries of Europe, he provided substantial and objective characteristic of condition of medicine and health care in Russia. This characteristic, coming from independent and competent observer, permits to correct conceptions about condition of Russian medicine during the period when the results of modernization of the Russian Empire of XVIII-early XIX centuries manifested in full measure effecting becoming of Russian school of medicine.

ІНТЕЛЕКТУАЛИ ПЕРЕД ВИКЛИКАМИ ІСТОРІЇ: «ПОМСТА ПЕРШОДРУКАРЯ» СТАНІСЛАВА РОСОВЕЦЬКОГО ЯК УНІВЕРСИТЕТСЬКИЙ РОМАН

Since mid-twentieth century the academic novel has been treated in English literary criticism as a separate literary genre centered on the life of professors. Often the action takes place on and outside of campus, revealing the professors’ private concerns. Satire is a characteristic feature of academic novels, which usually drives the action. In these novels university appears as a “microcosm of society at large.” Even though the academic novel is an emerging genre in Ukrainian literature, there are texts which fall into this category. In the article the author analyzes “The Revenge of the Printer” by Stanislav Rosovetskyj as academic fiction. The novel has two plot lines, one of which is set in late 1580s in the times of Ivan Fedorov, another is set in the summer of 1991. The plot lines are joined by the setting, which is St. Onuphrius Monastery in Lviv, which in the twentieth century was turned into the museum of book-printing. The novel has the following features of the academic fiction: the main setting and the object of satire is theIvanFedorovMuseum, a cloistered institution like the university campus; the protagonist Shalva Bukviani is an academic and a professor of history facing the choice to leave the institution or to conform to the changing ideology. Collectively, these characteristics allow to define the main theme as the role of individual in the times of historical turmoil. Special attention is paid to the image of Fedorov, whose life in the novel is portrayed as a literary biography, based on research of contemporary Ukrainian historians alternative to the Soviet narrative. Due to the image of Fedorov as “Renaissance man” in the novel, the image of contemporary scholar appears as Sick Soul (M. Andryczyk), “a small Soviet man” unable to engage in protection of cultural heritage in the time of sociopolitical change.

The Frightful Hobgoblin against Empire

Abstract Karl Marx and the Chartist leader, writer and poet Ernest Jones developed a close intellectual and political partnership from the late 1840s through the late 1850s. Their friendship invites attention because it places Marx in the company of one of Chartism’s leading anti-colonial advocates, precisely at a time when he was simultaneously moving in that direction. This article explores the ways in which Marx and Jones converged in their estimation of the 1857 Indian uprising. It is argued that the shift in Marx’s thought, whereby the dialectics of colonialism and anti-colonialism are integrated within his materialist conception of history, was not independent of Jones’s influence.

“Dwindling Down to Farce”?: Aphra Behn’s Approach to Farce in the late 1670s and 80s

In spite of her criticism against farce in the paratexts of The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Aphra Behn makes an extensive use of farcical elements not only in that play and The False Count (1681), which are actually described as farces in their title pages, but also in Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign’d Curtizans (1679), and The Second Part of The Rover (1681). This article contends that Behn adapts French farce and Italian commedia dell’arte to the English Restoration stage mostly resorting to deception farce in order to trick old husbands or fathers, or else foolish, hypocritical coxcombs, and displaying an impressive, skilful use of disguise and impersonation. Behn also turns widely to physical comedy, which is described in detail in stage directions. She appropriates farce in an attempt to please the audience, but also in the service of her own interests as a Tory woman writer.

Wars, public finances and interest rates for rural lending: evidence from 19th-century Lima

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of political instability on rural credit in Lima between 1835 and 1865. In particular, it explores the effects of wars on interest rates for the agricultural sector. Design/methodology/approach The paper relies on primary sources for the study of the early credit market of Lima. In particular, the study relies on a sample of more than 800 notarized loans for 1835–1865, collected from the National Archives of Peru, to determine the effect of wars on the cost of credit. Findings The evidence shows that wars increased interest rates on rural loans and that the impact of wars on the cost of credit was greater when the State lacked fiscal resources. Political instability made funding more costly for landlords and farmers, especially in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Originality/value This paper is one of the few historical studies on the role of wars on rural credit in Latin America. It contributes to our understanding of the linkages between political instability and financial development.

Open Challenges in Future Electric Ship Design: High-Frequency Disturbance Propagation in Integrated Power and Energy Systems on Ships

Shipboard power systems have made great progress since Jacobi's experiment in the late 1830s (i.e., the first electric propelled boat). Today, the shipboard power system design process is facing significant changes, mostly due to the improvements both in power electronics and battery technology. (For instance, the MF Ampere entered into service in 2015 as the world's first electric battery-powered passenger and car ferry.) Moreover, the power systems sector is also undergoing significant changes due to both the ever-increasing requirements of ship owners and the enforcement of recent efficiency and pollution regulations. Currently, power electronics converters increase in both power and number in a modern Integrated Power and Energy System (IPES), exploiting different power system architectures.

The promotion of phrenology in New South Wales, 1830–1850, at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts

ABSTRACTSydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, began as a penal colony in 1788. British phrenologists would later show an intense interest in this new settlement, aroused by questions raised by convict transportation and indigenous assimilation into European culture. A more sinister engagement involved the scientific trafficking of Aboriginal skulls. This practice was seen, however, not as body snatching but as a meaningful contribution to the progress of science. In 1833, a group of educated, influential men formed the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (SMSA). This organization was successful where previously learned societies had failed. These men aimed to see the diffusion of scientific and useful knowledge throughout the colony and to enhance the lot of the working man (mechanics). They planned to achieve this aim with lectures, demonstration classes, and the development of a library and museum. Phrenology fitted perfectly into their curriculum. From 1838 to the late 1840s, many of Sydney Town’s prominent medical practitioners and other professionals delivered lectures promoting this “science.” However, interest in the study of phrenology at the SMSA waned from the 1850s, when itinerant phrenologists turned the practice into a popular entertainment.

The Hermit and the Boa Constrictor: Jeremy Bentham, Henry Brougham, and the Accessibility of Justice

Abstract This article examines the particularly complex relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Henry Brougham, with reference to the respective schemes that they devised in the late 1820s and early 1830s for achieving accessible justice through a new network of local courts across England and Wales. For a considerable part of the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Bentham and Brougham remained great friends and allies, but their disagreements gradually intensified, most notably following Brougham's six-hour law reform speech in the House of Commons on 7 February 1828, the printing of his Local Courts Bill on 7 June 1830, and the beginning of his Lord Chancellorship on 22 November of the same year. By analysing Bentham's highly detailed annotated copies of Brougham's law reform speech and Local Courts Bill—as well as Bentham's articles in the Westminster Review, and a substantial portion of his unpublished writings—it is shown how Bentham's complete loss of faith in Brougham as a reformer and as a legislator led him from describing Brougham as his own grandson to calling him an enemy of the people and a serpent. It is argued that the severity of Bentham's criticisms of the then Lord Chancellor in print, and the personal nature of the insults that he levelled towards him in manuscript, effectively dispel any suggestion that the two men were acting in concert on the issue of law reform in general, or on the matter of local courts in particular.

Hamlet and the Late Renaissance Convention of Self-Addressed Speech: An Empirical Approach to Theatrical History

In late Renaissance English drama (from the late 1580s until the closing of the theaters in 1642) soliloquies were governed by a surprisingly precise and intricate convention. Plentiful, conspicuous, unambiguous, varied, and one-sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies represented self-addressed speech as a matter of convention. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare was the most daring, imaginative, and profound exploiter of the convention, especially in Hamlet. One of the most interesting exploitations of the convention occurs in 3.3, which ends with three consecutive soliloquies, occupying a total of 63 lines, by two characters without any intervening dialogue between characters. In the course of the three soliloquies, a presumed contrast between Claudius's villainy and Hamlet's victimhood becomes a disturbing contrast between the villain's effort to repent and the victim's demonic purpose (to increase the population of hell) and eventually turns into a similarity between two characters who have both succumbed to evil. Shakespeare's most daring, imaginative, and profound exploitation of the convention occurs in 3.1. Plentiful, conspicuous, unambiguous, varied, and one-sided evidence demonstrates that Shakespeare designed the “To be, or not to be” episode to imply that the speech is not a genuine soliloquy but rather a feigned soliloquy. Arriving at the location to which he has been summoned by his deadly enemy (“We have closely sent for Hamlet hither”), Hamlet pretends to be oblivious to the conspicuous presence of Ophelia and pretends to talk to himself to mislead Ophelia, her meddlesome father, and ultimately the King into believing that he suffers from a debilitating melancholy in order to convince the King that he poses no threat.

THE ORIGIN OF PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY

ABSTRACT Prehistoric archaeology had its first pioneers in France led by Boucher de Perthes (the Abbeville school), who excavated fossil bones and stone tools beginning in the late 1820s to early 1830. At about the same time a second group in Denmark led by Worsaae (the Copenhagen school) studied an archaeological interval prior to their historical record, based on museum collections. Though lacking stratigraphical excavation they provided a chrono-typologic basic division into the stone, bronze, and iron ages across the past 3000 years. A third group led by the Italian Scarabelli (the Imola school) introduced the name ancient (prehistoric) archaeology with a field stratigraphic, geologic, petrologic and mapping approach. The discipline of prehistoric archaeology originated almost simultaneously as a multi-vocal result of activity led by these three independent groups.

Tracing a Thousand Years of Subjective Fault as the Fulcrum of Criminal Responsibility in Common Law

In this article I shall try to outline the history of subjective fault in English criminal law from the Anglo-Saxon period (roughly from 500 to 1066) to the time of Lambarde’s writings in the late 1570s. I do this to provide the historical foundations for some of the interpretations given to the law in this treatise. Furthermore, this historical understanding explains some of the modern approaches to criminalization which tend to blindly allow some serious wrongs to be treated as private wrongs rather than as crimes (i.e., privacy invasions, unfair dismissal for complaining about sexual harassment or bullying and so on), while at the same time criminalizing trivial wrongs that could be left to the parties to resolve.

Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’sMoj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey(2008) andRunning a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery(1860)

The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey, is Ellen Craft, an ex-slave whose escape from the slave-owning state of Georgia to England in the late 1840s is recounted in the escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rather than using her performance to present her biographical subject with an interiority the original slave narrative scarcely offers her, Adebayo reconstitutes Ellen and relocates her in an auto/biographical work that self-consciously blurs the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and biofiction, thus exposing the overlap and interdependency of these textual forms. Through a detailed analysis of both texts and their contexts, this essay argues that Adebayo constructs a figurative, first person auto/biography of Ellen Craft, a “call and response” production, originating in an “intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another”, whose “touch” sets up a fluid process of identification. Her work performs a textual revision of the slave narrative genre and its rich, socio-cultural contexts. As a performed, auto/biographical reimagining of Ellen Craft’s flight from slavery Moj of the Antarctic, like Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, transgresses multiple borders and, in the process, subverts expectations of what constitutes an authentic self. It deconstructs conventionally defined categories of race, gender, and sexuality and radically extends the Crafts’ own examination of the meaning of freedom.

Pseudonyms? What Pseudonyms? There were no Pseudonyms…

Abstract The paper argues that the question of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms has been largely misconceived. Referencing comparable devices such as anonymity, noms de plume, and heteronyms, and drawing on Heidegger’s discussion of Kierkegaardian pseudonymity in the lectures on Parmenides, the paper further distinguishes between fictional characters (e. g. the Seducer and Assessor Vilhelm), noms de plume (H.H.), fictional editors, and pseudonyms proper. It is argued that in the first authorship only Constantin Constantius and Johannes Climacus approximate to the criteria Kierkegaard himself lays down for pseudonymity. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s anxieties regarding the form of publication of his works in the late 1840s reveals the whole project of pseudonymity collapsing into incoherence. By means of a comparison with Nietzsche, it is argued that Kierkegaard’s work is less a manifold of different literary personalities and more a play of revealing/concealing voices. In these voices there is nevertheless a literary watermark that makes Kierkegaard’s work as a whole distinctively Kierkegaardian.

A FAKE OR GENUINE ARTEFACT? THE PARIAN CHRONICLE AND PERCEPTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

A remarkable controversy raged in the late 1780s concerning the authenticity of the Parian Chronicle, a supposedly genuine carved fragment recording ancient Greek history that was included in the 1667 Arundel bequest to the University of Oxford. Drawing in figures in British antiquarianism, including Richard Gough who, as Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, intervened in the debate with a pamphlet that came out in support of the artefact’s authenticity, this was an important moment in eighteenth-century antiquarian study. Hot on the heels of the now much more well-known Ossian controversy of the 1760s, the Chatterton–Rowley–Walpole debacle from 1770, Chatterton’s subsequent death and the publication of his forgeries from 1777, the literature variously refuting and supporting the Parian Chronicle’s authenticity strikes at the heart of antiquarianism, in particular opening up to dispute assumptions made about or accepted interpretations concerning the authenticity of the fragments upon which subsequent antiquarian work and interpretation was based. This debate took the form of a very public attack upon, and defence of, the Parian Chronicle’s status as a genuine third-century bc antiquarian fragment, and the controversy within antiquarian circles that it occasioned is reconstructed here.