Late Seventeenth Century Research Articles

ІСТОРИКО-АРХІТЕКТУРНИЙ АНАЛІЗ М. БАХМУТ

The article analyzes the historical and architectural development of Bakhmut, identifying five main periods of the city's development: The first stage, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a fortress city located in the area of the current central market and embankment, lying on both sides of the river. Along the river, the fortress was approximately 1,000 steps long. The fortress was 400 steps wide on the right bank and 600 steps wide on the left bank. The fortress has 3 churches, one of them stone, and 300 wooden houses, most of them poor and small, but on straight and wide streets. The main part of the city is located on the left bank of the river. The second stage, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw the expansion of the city beyond the fortress, the formation of 2 suburbs with 100 houses and a church in each of the suburbs, to the west and north of the fortress. Cartographic materials also show the development of the fortress in the southeastern part. A saltworks was located behind the fortress, so the corresponding infrastructure was formed around it. The population of Bakhmut at that time amounted to 3-3.5 thousand inhabitants. The third stage, the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, saw the development of the railroad and the formation of new buildings around it. The wooden fortress is being destroyed. The salt industry and the railroad are actively developing, which is characterized by the architecture, but along with the loss of sacred architecture, the cultural life of the city is declining. The course of the Bakhmutka River changes slightly. The population of the city is more than 20 thousand inhabitants. The fourth stage. XX - 2022. The city expands along the perimeter and along the highways and railroad. The northwestern part is developing most intensively. The number of industrial and residential buildings is increasing, and multi-storey buildings are appearing. the city's population reaches 90 thousand inhabitants. The fifth stage is the present - after the invasion of Russian troops on February 24, 2022, the city was completely destroyed by the spring of 2023. Bakhmut was a city that had its own unique architectural identity. Today, most people remember it as a fortress, a place of fierce fighting. However, the struggle for Ukrainian identity has been going on there for centuries, trying to preserve its history and culture. Therefore, the practical value of this study is that today, in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the issue of declaring, identifying, and studying in detail the existing historical cities is very relevant.

Frontline town centres within the area of the Hirskyi Tikych river

The study presents the history of the emergence, development and decline of the frontline towns concentrated in the area of the Hirskyi Tikych River. The research focuses on Buzivka, Buky, Vorone, Zelenyi Rih, Zubrykha, Okhmativ, Sokolivka and Monastyryshche. Natural factors and the branching of the Black Way determined the concentration of settlements in the river area. The study of the frontline towns is relevant due to the peculiarities of urban processes in Central Ukraine and is important for the development of historical and architectural reference plans. The research aims to determine the spatial features of the city centre in the cities of the right-bank Ukraine frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the course of the study, the methods of analysis (for literary sources), comparative analysis (for the cartography of different times), and a set of field studies were used. The studied towns had an optimal defensive perimeter dominated by a Ukrainian wooden church, and a key element of the spatial image was a residential wooden house. It is determined that the cities of the frontier had political and cultural conflicts with the centre of the state, which caused the loss of the role of settlements and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century. Based on historical cartography, source material, and the preserved ancient street network, the urban planning features of the town centres are localised and identified. The frontier towns concentrated in the area of the Gorny Tikich River were economically and culturally united and were characterised by rational planning. Improvements in the town centres of the frontier towns are linked to the political and economic intentions of magnates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The spatial layout of the town centre was centred around a Ukrainian wooden church, except Monastyryshche, which also had a wooden church in the town centre. The main building element was the Ukrainian wooden house, which defined the spatial and cultural image of the settlement. Due to the uncertain political boundaries and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century, the frontier towns lost their significance. In the nineteenth century, except for Monastyryshche, all settlements declined economically and administratively. The practical value of the study lies in the fact that the results can be used in the development of historical and architectural reference plans, revitalisation projects for the centres of historic towns, downtown regeneration projects, and the commemoration of lost important monuments. The research materials can be used in a course on the history of urban planning and architecture of Ukraine, as well as in the development of tourist and recreational routes

"The Crafty Contrivance of the Illinois": Indigenous Informants, French Manet8a , and the Myth of the Missouri River

Abstract: This article examines early relations between the Illinois nations and French explorers, traders, and missionaries in the late seventeenth century. Following their encounter in the Pays des Illinois (Illinois Country), French newcomers came to believe that the Missouri River possessed an abundance of flora, fauna, fertile soil, and easily cut through the heart of North America to the Pacific Ocean. This was no accident. The Illinois deliberately withheld, emphasized, manipulated, and conveyed details concerning their western geography to French missionaries and fur traders, whose novel technologies, trade goods, and spiritual power they sought to secure for themselves. By articulating a carefully crafted "myth of the Missouri," the Illinois sought to direct French commerce and proselytization toward themselves and their allies up the Missouri River, like the Osage and Missouria, rather than to see French manet8a (other-than-human power) in the form of trade goods and Christian prayer fall into the hands of their enemies on the lower Mississippi. The Illinois strategy to attract French alliance, commerce, and spiritual power ( manet8a ) may have contributed to the century-long European and Euro-American belief in an expedient Missouri River route from the American Midwest to the Pacific Ocean. By arguing that the Illinois confederacy shaped European newcomers' understanding and perceptions of North America to further their own economic, political, and spiritual goals, this article contributes to the historiography regarding the role played by rumors, falsehoods, and fabrications in early colonial encounters as well as in the European and later Euro-American misunderstanding of the American Midwest's geography.

Overlords, underlords and landlords: negotiating land and lordship in plantation Munster

AbstractThis article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English administrators attempted to eradicate Irish legal precedent (and with it the legitimacy of the Gaelic aristocracy), Gaelic lords responded with new and often innovative legal strategies. The territory of Collymore presents a microcosm of the legal tensions produced by and under the Munster plantation, subject to competing claims by rival O'Driscoll heirs, MacCarthy Reagh overlords, ‘Old English’ neighbours and incoming planters. This article offers a reconstruction and analysis of the complex legal disputes surrounding Collymore. It argues that through otherwise routine legal interactions like inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Irish lords reframed their authority in the vocabulary of English law, trading tanistry for primogeniture and the language of overlordship for that of landlordship. Through these rhetorical and theoretical shifts, they attempted to redefine the very basis and nature of their authority.

The Function of Mazu Belief of the Chinese People in Vietnam

Abstract The Mazu belief is a type of Chinese folk belief that has become a global cultural phenomenon. Before the Second World War, Chinese immigrants built temples for Mazu in many places of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, especially its Southern part. The region has been commonly known as the place of coexistence and multicultural exchanges between four ethnic groups, namely the Viet (Kinh), Hoa (Chinese), Khmer and Cham. Chinese immigration to Vietnam has a long history. Southern Chinese immigrants and their unique culture started arriving in the region in the late seventeenth century. After immigrating to Vietnam, they maintained various ties with their motherland through cultural practices and belief systems, especially Mazu worship. In Vietnam, they set up various guild halls, temples and chambers of commerce to worship Mazu, forming a dense ethnic social network that has played a significant role within the Vietnamese Chinese community. Using the notions of transnationalism and ethnic identity, and supported by fieldwork, literature research and a more comprehensive general analysis, this study is not only aimed at understanding Mazu belief in Vietnam but also underlines the role played by this belief in the Chinese community in Vietnam.

From edenic island to endemic park: A historical political ecology of environmental degradation narratives on Réunion (West Indian Ocean)

Exploring the premise that environmental injustices date back centuries, this article provides an overview of the long trajectory of degradation narratives on Réunion, from the earliest colonial concerns in the late seventeenth century to the contemporary National Park. Through a historical political ecology approach, we identify distinct phases where degradation narratives became prominent, and sometimes entered into conflict, in the environmental history of this French overseas territory, which was a French colony until 1946. Although degradation narratives have shifted significantly over time, they have also gradually converged to a condemnation of the uplands' inhabitants. So far, this move has reproduced socio-spatial inequalities between the uplands region, dedicated to environmental policies, and the lowlands region, dedicated to a plantation economy. Such an account suggests that environmental inequalities may be constituted through a process of continuous change that involves negotiations and often conflicts among multiple dominant stakeholders. Thus, contemporary conservation regimes should not only improve their governance mode, but need to start by doing justice to conservation’ history, especially dynamics of misrecognition with colonial roots.

Alanna Skuse, Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England. Altered Bodies and Contexts of Identity

For researchers interested in social and cultural constructions of difference in the past, embodiment has become a central category of analysis. Alanna Skuse’s study is a welcome contribution to this growing field. She focuses on medical interventions which led to permanent, radical alterations to the body, such as amputation, mastectomy, castration or facial surgery. Skuse is particularly interested in the phenomenological experiences of people who lived through these operations and the subsequent processes of adapting to a substantially changed body, including their sometimes newly acquired protheses or orthoses. What happened to these people after surgery was completed? How did they view themselves, their bodies and the body parts they lost or exchanged? What can views on radically altered forms of embodiment tell us about early modern understanding of personhood, self and identity? Based on different genres and a range of source material from the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as medical treatises, newspapers and periodicals, satirical writing, pamphlets, ethnographic writing, miracle accounts, life writing and classical literary works, Skuse approaches several social themes and cultural discourses prevalent in early modern England, using the ‘material circumstances of bodily difference’ (p. 3) as her lens. She shows that by focussing on radically altered bodies, it is possible to uncover the epistemological value that was ascribed to various forms of bodily difference in early modern England. Moreover, she maps out fears, uncertainties, social anxieties and prejudice that were realised in and through these forms of embodiment and the debates they engendered.

People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada

Examining the period from the founding of New France in the early seventeenth century to the conquest of 1760, People, State, and War presents a study of colonial warriors and warfare that surveys the exercise of state military power and its effects on ordinary people. Resisting the pervasive and overgeneralizing stereotype of “Canadians” as a warrior people, Louise Dechêne draws readers’ attention to the overlapping and all-encompassing reality of perpetual warfare in New France and the uneven and varied demands of war on the diverse members of colonial society, effectively illustrating the relationship between “Canadian” colonists and the ancien régime administration.Published posthumously, People, State, and War represents a lifetime of research. The book is separated into twelve chapters, tracing the events that led to the creation of the colonial militia in 1669 through the militia’s participation in different colonial, imperial, and inter-Indigenous conflicts, including French offensives against the Haudenosaunee in the late seventeenth century, culminating in what Dechêne terms “the Sixteen Year War,” which ended with the conquest of New France. There are immense details about administrative structures, hierarchies, and specific individuals, included in the chapters (2, 3, 4, and 8) that examine moments of conflict, which expertly reconstruct the varied conditions and composition of colonial military forces, that included members of the dispatched Carginan-Salières regiment, and later the Troupes de la Marine, the militia, colonial volunteers, and regular troops, and the crucially important Indigenous allies of the French empire. However, Dechêne also turns her attention in the intersecting chapters to the experiences and attitudes of the habitants and small urban populations who were equally affected by the exigencies of perpetual conflict through policing, forced labor requisitions, and taxation (chapters 6 and 7). In this still fragile colonial world, the military prowess and effectiveness of colonial military men, regardless of imperial objectives and frequently arbitrary measures, relied heavily on French alliances with different and powerful Indigenous allies, who usually outnumbered colonial troops and provided invaluable support in defense of the colony, on the forced labor of colonial peasants who constructed fortifications throughout the Saint Lawrence Valley, and on itinerant fur traders and coureurs de bois, whose familiarity with the pays d’en haut and Ohio Valley proved crucial to the success of French defense strategies. Rather than the well-worn image of an entire “Canadian” population of natural and enthusiastic soldiers, Dechêne emphasizes the diversity of social and individual circumstances among colonists in New France to highlight how different peoples reacted to, participated in, and came to grips with the reality of warfare in New France.Over her entire career, Dechêne recorded unimaginable details, using official correspondence, memoirs, military campaign journals, taxation records, local parish records, and visual sources, including maps, which offer a window into administrative, social, military, diplomatic, religious, and demographic patterns in New France and draw attention to the sometimes conflicting or disconnected but always enduring relationship between the colony and the metropole. Although People, State, and War examines in depth the experiences of French colonists, the constant presence and the invaluable and indisputable role of France’s Indigenous allies in military campaigns and in the colony’s defense and survival remains constant throughout Dechêne’s analysis. Contributing to the ongoing movement away from past scholarly conclusions that have overlooked or underacknowledged the role of Indigenous peoples in the growth, development, and protection of France’s overseas colonies, Dechêne situates the Indigenous inhabitants of North America as the principal military force of New France (118). Presenting a combined examination of government and societal structures, military hierarchies, and colonial conflicts, interwoven with tantalizing details about diverse peoples, specific military campaigns, diplomatic negotiations, and individual reactions and responses to changing imperial regulations, demands, and objectives in the colony, People, State, and War is an indispensable resource for scholars of New France.

The Native Militia in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Philippines: A Space of Power for the Indigenous Elite

AbstractThe history of the indigenous militia and its role in consolidating the native elite's place in the seventeenth-century colonial Philippines is an understudied topic. This paper addresses that gap. Using lists of media anata payments gathered from the Contaduría section of the Archivo General de Indias for the province of Laguna, this paper examines the beginnings of the native militia and the positions that the native elite occupied. Based on the corresponding media anata tax that these positions required, the author has listed the military ranks that native Filipinos assumed from 1633 to 1700. The Spanish government relied heavily on native arms to support Spain's expansionary agenda, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Moreover, foreign threats, the Spanish-Dutch wars, and the challenges posed by hostile indigenous groups in the Philippines left the Spaniards with no choice but to rely on native arms to defend their position. As the native militia developed and became a permanent feature of the seventeenth-century Philippines, it gave rise to a space for the indigenous elite to exercise their roles as soldiers, encomenderos, and conquistadores in territories which remained on the periphery of the Spanish empire in which they carved their niche.

No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic

In No Wood, No Kingdom, Keith Pluymers demonstrates that, over the course of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, gaps between the perceptions and realities of wood scarcity led to contradictory claims about resource availability in the English Atlantic. Pluymers focuses on the role of political ecology, which refers to ideas and practices governing resource use, in shaping imperial expansion. In contesting the “windfall” thesis, or the notion that domestic deforestation impelled the English to expand into the Atlantic basin, Pluymers argues that political ecology in the English Atlantic was characterized by uncertainty due to challenges in defining resource prevalence, regulating the movement of timber, and acquiring accurate information for imperial and commercial interests (9–10, 237). Through an examination of promotional tracts, administrative documents, maps, and forestry regulations in England, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados, Pluymers paints an insightful picture of officials, foresters, and colonists struggling over questions of land and resource use.The book is organized into five core chapters, not including the introduction or the concluding sixth chapter, with each chapter covering political ecology in distinct geographical spaces. Chapter 1 analyzes the Tudor and Stuart forestry reforms that sought to maximize the valuation of Crown lands through surveying as the kingdom tried to balance the revenue generated from timber leases with local needs (58). In chapter 2, Pluymers shows how the English went from promoting Irish woodlands as places of abundance in the 1580s to the 1630s when the fear that English forests were full of waste prompted closer scrutiny of Irish woods, but by then the Crown had already overzealously granted woodland leases such that royal access to Irish forests was limited (105). Similarly, in chapter 3, Virginia Company promoters initially encouraged a vision of abundance but, when faced with actually governing the Tsenacommacah woods, they tried to forge commercial and material connections with England by using the woods to sustain sericulture and ironworks, which ultimately failed following the 1622 Algonquian attack on Jamestown (128). Chapter 4 turns to Bermuda, where, despite many challenges, Bermudan trees became key to the colony’s early economy and the subject of the 1622 Orders and Constitutions that enacted a conservationist regime on the island (138). In chapter 5, Pluymers argues that environmental degradation on Barbados did not occur because of ecological illiteracy but because the colony’s political ecology shifted in the mid-seventeenth century from protectionism to privileging profits from sugarcane plantations (170). Chapter 6 situates John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) within these Atlantic discourses of uncertainty to underscore the persistence of scarcity anxieties.Pluymers succeeds at uncovering a range of competing and frustrated political ecologies that existed in the English Atlantic. One of the strongest sections of the book is in Pluymers’s analysis of English maps of Irish forests, which revealed their struggles with documenting the Irish landscape (67–73). Another intriguing aspect is that many colonists relied on Indigenous, African, and Afro-Caribbean experts for ecological knowledge to protect resources in the colonies (110, 166, 189). While the book’s focus on particular places is one of its strengths, one difficulty of the colony-by-colony approach is that it inadvertently reinforces spatial separation by making readers deliberate on the book’s themes across distinct geographical regions. For instance, the tension between the resource interests of colonists and the central government emerges as a key theme throughout (88, 178) but is never really highlighted for the reader. Nonetheless, the book is both timely and contributes to a growing scholarly examination of the disjunction between knowledge and practice in the early modern world. It will especially interest scholars working on environmental, imperial, and Atlantic histories.

Felipe Valencia. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora

Felipe Valencia. <i>The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora</i>

Niet zo beschaafd als we dachten

According to existing historiography the coffee house played an important role in the sociabilization of the late seventeenth- and the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie. The assumption in existing historiography is that the bourgeois went to the Dutch coffee houses to socialize, converse about political and ethical issues, and thus achieve personal growth. Sociabilization in the coffeehouses is assumed to have been encouraged by ‘literary socialization’: the conversations were spurred by the bourgeois’ reading of texts and introduced them to literary reading of these texts. In this article, we question this historiography for the case of Amsterdam between 1685 and 1785 by a closer investigation of both literary representations of coffee houses and judicial (notary) sources. Coffee houses often appear as scenes of gambling and violent encounters in the notary archives. Literary representations (plays, diaries) confirm a more dissolute and less civilizing character of the Amsterdamcoffeehouse. Moreover, the number of coffee houses in Amsterdam diminished in the eighteenth century, and literary representations are almost completely absent after 1730. They do not appear in a typical bourgeois novel such as Sara Burgerhart. We conclude that coffee houses did not play the key role in literary socialization and sociabilization previously assumed. The remaining question; which places did?

Iatrochemical and Alchemical Knowledge in Medieval India

Inthis essay, I describe very briefly, the pursuit of chemical knowledge in India until the period of the early eighteenth century. The attempt is not to discuss in any exhaustive way various strands of chemical practices from the antiquity till the late seventeenth century but to offer a glimpse of a variety of chemical endeavours, in different geographical locations of India, visualized from iatrochemical, alchemical and chemical industry perspectives. The first two perspectives also seem to suggest a strong theoretical backdrop of the relevant practices. However, it historically remains an open question how the theory and the practices informed each other if at all it actually happened. The motivation for organizing this essay in the way I have arises from two distinct ideas. The first is to revisit the historiographic insights that late Professor Prafulla Chandra Ray brought to bear in writing a remarkable two volumebook titled A History of Hindu Chemistry. I will explain that in a bit more detail below. Second, in engaging with the primarily textual accounts of chemical practices in Ancient and Medieveal India, I stay true to the view that Chemistry is both a science (a body of knowledge about some aspects of nature or the material world) and an art, a set of practices which have a bearing on the kind of knowledge these practices produce including making new materials with interesting functions and properties. Indeed there has been a great deal of interest to review our understanding of Chemistry given that Chemistry is involved in making new materials and molecules. This synthetic and preparative aspect of chemistry (see e.g., Schummer (1997), opens up new historiographical directions to write history of chemistry.I will have a bit more to say about what historiographical repercussion this view has and how I employ it below.

Genoese Rome and Genoa–Rome relations in the late seventeenth century (1644–1700)

Abstract The late seventeenth century in Genoa presents aspects of great fascination, some of which are largely unexplored, as in the case of relations with Rome (city, court and Curia). These were decades in which Genoa tried to find an alternative route to the Spanish Mediterranean, to relaunch its navy towards the Levant and the Far East (as an ideal goal). Its diplomats for this purpose went to Constantinople, London and Holland, although their most important forum remained Rome, the court of the courts, where, from the death of Urban VIII Barberini (1644) onwards, they managed tough negotiations, assisted by the most eminent prelates of their nation. The crisis of the protectorate (for the entire second half of the seventeenth century, Genoa did not have a cardinal protector) and that of St. John the Baptist, a national church, hospital and confraternity, is also inscribed in this framework of relations. Furthermore, from the pontificate of Innocent X Pamphilj (1644–55) onwards, the postmaster generals of Genoa had the task of renewing and managing communications between the Holy See and the nunciature in Madrid, the apostolic see to which the papacy entrusted the task of mediating between Spain and France, in view of the agreements of Westphalia (1648) and the Pyrenees (1659).

The Harrowing of Hell in English Poetry from Spenser to Milton

Abstract By Spenser’s time, the doctrine of Christ’s literal descent to hell was controversial in the Church of England, and English harrowing poetry all but disappears in the following century. And yet we find a depiction of Christ’s descensus in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, as many critics have acknowledged. Why does the doctrine appear in a Puritan poem of the seventeenth century? This essay argues that the narrative tradition of Christ’s descent survived in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Spenserians. After introducing the Reformation controversy, the first section explores how Spenser and his followers—Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Aemilia Lanyer, and Joseph Beaumont—preserve the tradition, but also how they respond to contemporary theological debate. The second section examines, first, how mortalism offers Milton a theological rationale for a local descent (i.e., a literal visit to the place of the dead) in De Doctrina Christiana, and then how this theological recovery allows him to continue the tradition of harrowing poetry in Paradise Lost. The final section considers two additional poets and thinkers of the late seventeenth century, Henry More and Samuel Wesley, who attest to the doctrine’s imaginative power and hence offer insight into why it persisted long after it failed to meet the Reformation’s new standards of credibility.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry

Reviewed by: Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry Peter Degabriele Melissa Mowry, Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 250; 3 illus. $80.00 cloth. Melissa Mowry's Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History follows the traces of a non-elite communal practice of hermeneutics and a collectivist politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary history. The book has five chapters, the first of which functions as an introduction, as well as a short but provocative coda. Throughout, Mowry looks to the Levellers as the positive articulation of a collective hermeneutics that she claims has been buried by the standard narrative of the rise of liberal individualism, and she argues that the political and literary history of the period she examines should be reconceived as a consistent attempt to eradicate this collectivism in favor of a conservative individualism. This is in stark contrast to the conventional narrative of early eighteenth-century political and literary history which argues that an individualist ideology produced a new liberal and anti-absolutist politics. For Mowry, by contrast, the theater of the Restoration and early novels by Defoe worked tirelessly to disavow the possibility of collectivist thought and politics. This refraction of the traditional narrative throws up some surprising and enlightening results. The Tory Aphra Behn and the dissenting Whig Daniel Defoe, for instance, are, in Mowry's account, engaged in the same political project of anti-collectivism rather than existing on opposite sides of a partisan political spectrum. This new lens thus reorients our vision of this period and stands as a profound challenge to conventional ways of understanding the relation of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature to political ideology. Collective Understanding models a new form of literary criticism that Mowry terms collective hermeneutics. Mowry's reading of the Leveller tradition in the second chapter of the book demonstrates this practice by paying attention to the ways in which texts "articulate relationships rather than statements/principles/ideas, or even identities" (13). This method allows Mowry to recover the contribution of Leveller women to the political praxis of the group, and to demonstrate the way Leveller texts worked by producing affective relationships. These relationships, Mowry argues, are the very basis of political association for the Levellers, a communal political thought that forthrightly challenges the sovereign exceptionalism being developed contemporaneously by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Mowry argues that instead of a popular sovereignty that would grant "the commonalty the sovereign power of exceptionalism," the Levellers claimed "a more fluid and socially grounded account of authority, stabilized through the affective bonds of collectivity" (57). Mowry deftly recovers this theory of association by her method of reading Leveller writings, a process in which instead of focusing on ideas or individual authorship, she follows traces of collective and social production of texts, from authorship, to printing, to distribution. The claim that Mowry makes through her practice is a significant one: that the kind of liberal, individualist criticism we are accustomed to practice makes it impossible for us to see the very collectivity characteristic of the Leveller movement, and that only a changed critical practice can recover a communitarian and sociable politics. The final three chapters of Collective Understanding focus not so much on tracing the positive development of a collectivist politics, as on finding the remnants of this collectivism in literary and ideological works that are determined [End Page 484] to erase it. Chapter 3 argues that attending to the work of William Davenant and Aphra Behn can demonstrate that "the royalist push to regain cultural authority over the late seventeenth century" enlisted literature to "secure the value and cultural centrality of exceptionalism and singularity" (129). Mowry thus reads the Restoration period as an ideological battle between an alliance of sovereignty and singularity against collectivism. The most interesting account of this battle comes in Mowry's readings of Behn's rewriting of the history of Bacon's rebellion in The Widdow Ranter. The play, for Mowry, is an "indictment of collectivity" (123) in which the "aggregated authority of the first-hand accounts" on which Behn's (and others') knowledge of the...

A Science of Letters? Forms of “Normal Science” in the Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Humanities

A Science of Letters? Forms of “Normal Science” in the Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Humanities

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday

Tarde’s ancestors. Imitation and crowds from Hobbes to Locke

Sociological studies on imitation and crowds usually point to the late nineteenth-century French jurist and sociologist Gabriel Tarde as their forerunner. This article argues that a lively debate on those issues already existed in Europe in the late seventeenth century. A review of works by Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Locke will show how they commented upon the dangerous influence of charismatic leaders over excitable mobs or the ordinary occurrence of someone’s opinions or manners being subsequently imitated by others until they become a new fashion. These four authors developed distinct approaches to the study of imitation and crowds. I call them the ‘authoritarian’ (Hobbes), the ‘rationalist’ (Malebranche), the ‘affective’ (Spinoza) and the ‘liberal’ (Locke) frames. The authoritarian and the rationalist approaches easily lead to dismissive or hostile views, while the affective and the liberal ones may open the way to more sympathetic (or at least practical) assessments. This study aims to show that: a) early modern discussions on imitation and crowds made a significant contribution to the formation of the field of social sciences; and b) these classical authors may still prove valuable for understanding imitation and crowds in the twenty-first century, in regard to the digital environment as well.

The Development of the Discourse Surrounding ‘Social Improvement’ during the Anglo-Irish Trade Dispute, 1695–1800

The idea of social improvement, including the concept of ‘reciprocity’, had substantially been developed in the Anglo-Irish trade disputes since the late seventeenth century. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, commentators became more sceptical of ‘reciprocity’. The Irish reception of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations must be situated in this historical context, and the article explores the implications of the relevant discourses for John Robertson's concept of Enlightenment. Like in Scotland, ‘improvement’ was considered significant in eighteenth-century Ireland. Nevertheless, political economy played different roles in the two nations because of their different political systems and circumstances. Many, including Adam Smith, believed that political and constitutional, rather than economic, reforms would be more crucial to improving Irish society.