Popular Pamphlets Research Articles

Constructing the Infant Body: The Intervention of the Educated, Male Physician in Eighteenth-Century Infant Diet

Drawing on medical advice literature, this paper examines the cultural history of the body in infancy in eighteenth-century England. This period saw the increasing professionalization of the medical field, particularly regarding children’s health, as an emerging profession of educated, male physicians sought to establish their exclusive authority on the medical market. As England’s medical market of the time was largely unregulated, these educated physicians competed with apothecaries, midwives, and female nurses for paying customers. Physicians argued that the disorderly, undisciplined nature of the infant body was incongruent with Enlightenment virtues, and therefore required a greater degree of medical management. Emerging out of this discourse were popular advice books which emphasized preventative measures in already-healthy infant patients. They were authored by a growing profession of educated, medical experts and were addressed to a lay audience of parents and child caretakers. This paper examines three immensely popular pamphlets authored by three physicians, Thomas Beddoes, George Armstrong, and William Cadogan. All three emphasized in their tracts the importance of maternal breastfeeding to the infant diet, citing Enlightenment ideals, humoral theory, and even the supernatural elements of breastmilk to support this claim. To bring the child body firmly under the control of the medical establishment, they argued that uneducated, lay practitioners, who were overwhelmingly female, received no formal education in the sciences and thus possessed little understanding of the nuances and complexities specific to the infant body. Parents were also incapable and deficient, at least to some degree, in the formal knowledge necessary to prevent illness in their infant children, and thus should rely on the physician’s expertise regarding the care of the infant body.

The Cavaliero Pasquil: An Anti-Marprelate Persona

Abstract: Broadly considered, the popular pamphlets written against Martin Marprelate in the months encompassing 1589–1591 are treated as pale imitations of their adversary, whose rhetorical and argumentative virtuosity earned him great notoriety. Considered as strenuous attempts to both counter Martinist aggression and also solve the rhetorical problems he presented, the aggressive Pasquil tracts (1589–1590) reveal how the adoption of an established satirical persona and mode allows a writer defending the Elizabethan bishops to both adopt and condemn the dangerous speech marking the Marprelate program. The tracts thus exhibit the self-generative and popular appeal characteristic of early print and pamphlet culture.

Rumbold,Valerie. Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765

Rumbold,Valerie. <i>Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765</i>

Hiding in Paine Sight: Jonathan Shipley's Forgotten Bestsellers and the Print Culture of the American Revolution

Historians widely acknowledge the significance of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the most popular pamphlet in revolutionary America, in securing American independence. Yet they have almost entirely forgotten the importance of the second-most popular pamphleteer of the era, Anglican Bishop Jonathan Shipley. This essay recovers Shipley's significance while also suggesting that his works paved the way for Paine's explosive success. Shipley's two bestselling pamphlets have been forgotten because they were more pragmatic and less ideological than Paine's writings. Focused on economics and policy rather than principle, Shipley's works do not neatly fit within nationalist narratives of the American Revolution. Examining these pamphlets, and the ways that their receptions diverged over time, provides insight onto the complex relationships among print, politics, and nation in early America.

Witchcraft Pamphlets at the Dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment

In 1563, witchcraft was established as a secular crime in Scotland and it remained so until 1736. There were peaks and valleys in the cases that emerged, were prosecuted, were convicted, and where people were executed for the crime of witchcraft, although there was a decline in cases after 1662. The Scottish Enlightenment is characterized as a period of transition and epistemological challenge and it roughly coincides with this decline in Scottish witchcraft cases. This article looks at pamphlets published in the vernacular between 1697 and 1705, either within Scotland or elsewhere, that focused on Scottish witches, witchcraft, or witch hunting. Often written anonymously, these popular pamphlets about witches, witchcraft, and witch trials reveal the tensions at play between various factions and serve as a forum for ongoing debates about what was at stake in local communities: chiefly, the state of one’s soul and the torture and murder of innocents.

Diabolical men: reintegrating male witches into English witchcraft

ABSTRACT In recent years male witches have come to the forefront of historical scholarship, with many historians attempting to explain why some men were accused of witchcraft. This article argues that by focusing on two under-examined factors – representations in popular pamphlets, and the role of the Devil in English witchcraft – we can reincorporate male witches into a broader paradigm of English witchcraft as a diabolical crime. This article argues that the behaviour of both male and female witches was portrayed remarkably similarly in print and that, rather than being defined by their gender, witches of either sex were increasingly described in popular discourse as those men and women who had entered into a pact with the Devil. In doing so, this article re-incorporates male witches into a larger framework of English witchcraft belief and stresses the importance of the demonic to our understanding of English witchcraft.

Leading with a Fist: A History of the Salafi Beard in the 20th-Century Middle East

Abstract Salafism is a global religious movement whose male participants often distinguish themselves from their co-religionists by a particular style of facial hair. Historians have focused largely on this movement’s engagement with questions of theology and politics, while anthropologists have assumed that Salafi practice reflects a longer Islamic tradition. In this article, I move beyond both approaches by tracing the gradual formation of a distinctly Salafi beard in the 20th century Middle East. Drawing on Salafi scholarly compendia, leading journals, popular pamphlets, and daily newspapers produced primarily in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, I argue that Salafi elites revived a longer Islamic legal tradition in order to distinguish their flock from secular nationalist projects of communal identity and Islamic activists alike. In doing so, I cast light on Salafism’s interpretative approach, the dynamics that define its development as a social movement, and the broader significance of visual markers in modern projects of Islamic piety.

«МИ В ЦЕ НЕ ПОВІРИМО, НІКОЛЯ»: РОЯЛІСТСЬКА ПУБЛІЦИСТИКА ЯК ДЖЕРЕЛО ФРАНЦУЗЬКОЇ АНТИНАПОЛЕОНІВСЬКОЇ КАРИКАТУРИ

The article refers to the connection between royalist publicism and anti-Napoleonic caricature through the example of two etchings from the Khanenko Museum collection. The task of royalist propaganda was to undermine the authority of Napoleon Bonaparte and, at the same time, to set society in favor of the Bourbon restoration. This causes the specifics of the anti-Napoleonic pamphlets and caricatures, which were usually focused on creating of the repulsive images of the emperor. At the same time, it is easy to notice that the authors of texts and images operated with a common set of motifs, images, as well as they used similar techniques. Therefore, the analysis of pamphlets provides better understanding of the subject of studied etchings and helps to clarify the meaning of certain details. Furthermore, taking into account that caricature was often secondary to the texts, author strived to find the literary sources of the studied caricatures and came to the conclusion that Charon’s famous engraving “The Height of Cannibalism” was strongly influenced by the François-René Chateaubriand’s “Report on the State of France” (1815). The matching texts, as well as the general consonance of the caricature “Arrival of Nicolas Buonaparte in Tuileries on January 20, 1815” with Rougemaitre’s popular anti-Napoleonic pamphlet “Life of Nicolas” (1815) suggests that the latter was among the caricaturist’s sources of inspiration at least.

For the common weal

While much of recent Hamlet criticism is heavily invested in foregrounding Catholic-nostalgic aspects in the play, I argue that the purgatorial Ghost can also be read as a caricature. Comedic and parodic depictions of Roman Catholic doctrine and beliefs were fairly common in the popular writings of Shakespeare’s age. I situate Shakespeare’s Hamlet within contemporary Protestant culture and its literary aesthetics as well as populist appeal. Finally, I read Hamlet’s mocking of the Ghost at the end of Scene 1.5 along with a popular pamphlet, Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (1590). Both, I argue, caricature Purgatory to induce community reinforcing Protestant laughter.

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 by Rachel Adcock

Reviewed by: Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 by Rachel Adcock Kathleen Lynch BAPTIST WOMEN’S WRITINGS IN REVOLUTIONARY CULTURE, 1640-1680, by Rachel Adcock. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. 232 pp. $112.00 cloth; $54.95 ebook. Rachel Adcock’s contribution to the burgeoning studies of early modern Englishwomen’s writings restores the voice of Baptist women, a group she claims has been somewhat neglected in favor of critical attention to Quaker women. Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 persuasively argues that Baptist women as a group had a particular cultural burden to bear; they struggled to maintain autonomy and independence against the larger patriarchal society that disparaged them for the church alliances they formed—often independent of their husbands—while at the same time they confronted gendered constraints within the church, where their leadership roles could become limited as the congregations they helped establish strengthened. Adcock examines how women managed to articulate their agency in speech and writing despite these burdens. In her book, Adcock addresses a number of individual authors, who were inevitably under pressure in a range of local circumstances. These women included Agnes Beaumont, Deborah Huish, Sara Jones, Susanna Parr, Elizabeth Poole, Katherine Sutton, Anna Trapnel, Jane Turner, and Anne Wentworth. Chapter one takes up the vituperative literature—and visual imagery—directed against Baptist women in popular pamphlets. The title page of Bloody Newes from Dover. Being a True Relation of the Great and Bloudy Murder, Committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) (1647), for instance, has a woodcut showing Mary Champion cutting off her child’s head rather than having the child baptized by her “Presbyterian” husband (pp. 37-41). This cruelty, presented as a “True” report, was part of partisan campaigns to distance Baptists from the body of legitimate religious reformers. Adcock examines the circulation of such pamphlets as indicative of the intense and sustained gossip and disparagement directed against Baptist women, which isolated them from their neighbors and even from their congregations. The first case Adcock turns to, that of Agnes Beaumont, is also one of the later examples in chronological terms. Adcock argues that neighborly suspicions against Beaumont were activated by the decades-long building up of stereotypes that cast her as “wanton” and cautions that [End Page 219] Beaumont’s self-defense should not necessarily be read in personal terms. Adcock also analyzes a striking dream reported by Beaumont in which she could not upright a tree toppled by a storm. Adcock illuminates the scriptural allusions to Isaiah 2, which prophesizes the humbling of all the proud, including the overturning of “all the cedars of Lebanon” and “all the oaks of Bashan” (p. 64). This imagery, employed by Anna Trapnel as well, provides an opening for Adcock to address the display of prophetic gifts as a source of power for these women, who wrote to “show that they were divine instruments rather than mad, whorish, rebellious, or heretical” (p. 27). Chapter two teases out women’s practices against congregational policies as tensions arose and as cultural assumptions that women would be submissive to men surfaced. Adcock explores women’s use of the biblical example of the Hebrew judge Deborah, who spoke from a place of leadership and authority to warn the Israelites against their continued evil behavior. Adcock examines Dorothy Hazzard as a valiant Deborah who cofounded the influential Broadmead Church in Bristol and led the barricading of the city gates against a Royalist siege in 1643. Adcock contextualizes the debate on whether such women were permitted to speak in church by referencing Paul’s contradictory teaching in the New Testament and Susanna Parr’s vociferous defense of her decision to leave her congregation in protest of women’s voices being silenced. Chapters three and four continue to explore women’s contributions to Baptist culture, emphasizing their authority of maternal care for the church. Adcock focuses on women’s use of the quasi-sanctioned genres of prophecy and conversion narrative. Her clear reading of the networks among ministers and members of the book trade support her presentation of Jane Turner as a strong, international spokeswoman for the church...

What Mary Toft Felt: Women's Voices, Pain, Power and the Body.

In autumn 1726, Mary Toft began to deliver rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case became a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures. Toft was attended by at least six different doctors, some members of the Royal College of Physicians or attached to the Royal Court, but no doctor declared the affair a hoax until Toft herself confessed on 7 December 1726. This article focuses on Toft’s three surviving confessions in order to explore not the doctors or even wider representations of the affair but instead the person of Mary Toft herself. These rare sources give rare insight into one woman’s experiences of reproduction in the early eighteenth century. The essay engages with recent work on recovering women’s voices in the past, reconstructing Mary Toft’s words and her embodied and affective experience of the affair. These documents suggest a revision to our understanding of the hoax of 1726, one that situates the affair not in the context of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment or the assumption of men’s control over midwifery, but instead in the context of power dynamics amongst women in the practices of early-modern reproduction and birth.

A Series of Fifty-four Clever Drawings on Vellum: Monstrous Births in Italian ms 63

Italian ms 63, now in the John Rylands Library, contains fifty-four images of monstrous births, both human and animal. The manuscript was probably completed in the mid-eighteenth century and was owned by Edward Davenport (1778–1847) of Capesthorne Hall and later by the Manchester-based physician David Lloyd Roberts (1835–1920). This article explores the possible sources for some of the images, which range from descriptions or illustrations in well-known publications on monsters, to popular pamphlets, to drawings and paintings. An analysis of the choice of subject matter and the ways in which the source material has been used places the manuscript within eighteenth-century collecting practices and emphasises the multivalency of the monstrous.

Engendering Contempt for Collaborators: Anti-Hanjian Discourse Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945

During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, the Nationalist government in China launched vigorous anti-collaborator movements. It condemned collaborators as hanjian, or “traitors to the Han Chinese,” and organized legal, social, and literary campaigns against them. This article examines the interplay between gender and the crime of collaboration in the context of the Nationalist government’s post-war struggles, public voyeurism, and changing literary trends. Anti-hanjian literature targeted “female collaborators” as a particular category, exposing their relationships with male collaborators and fabricating details of their private lives. Tabloids and popular pamphlets deployed hearsay and rumors to confirm political disloyalty and personal decadence of collaborators, male or female. In this way, issues such as family and sexuality were written into the discourse on war and collaboration. Many anti-hanjian strategies and vocabularies were inherited and taken up during later campaigns organized by the Chinese Communist party.

Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England

Recent scholarship in witchcraft studies has drawn greater attention to the constitutive role of sexual discourse in witch trials throughout early modern Europe—even in England, whose trials have generally been regarded as less lurid and sensationalist than those that took place in other European countries. This essay complements existing scholarship by proposing that we should likewise recognize that witchcraft discourse occupies a vital place within the history of sexuality. Examining a range of archival materials—witchcraft treatises, demonologies, trial depositions, popular pamphlets, and dramatic literature—reveals that beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft were the site of a complex discourse about sexuality, particularly regarding female erotic pleasure and women’s sexual anatomy. The essay analyzes in detail the distinctively English juridical concern with searching a suspect’s body for a witch’s mark or supernumerary teat, and proposes that standard judicial procedures provided a permissive, even urgent context for investigating women’s bodies and interrogating them about their erotic experiences. More broadly, the article argues that witchcraft discourse promoted the pursuit of sexual knowledge with regard to both sexes, legitimizing such inquiry through its affiliations with legal authority. Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi. . . . Such devils hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls. Pope Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (1484) If it is asked why the Devil is permitted to practice acts of sorcery in and concerning the sexual act rather than concerning other human acts, it is said that . . . the power of the demon [lies in the privy parts of men]. For in all contests the harder battles are those in which the fighting is continuous and victory rare. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum (1486) Knowledge of sexual function and sexual pleasure during the early modern period is generally mediated and ancillary. Sexual behaviors, sensations, and phenomena do not constitute an autonomous category of knowledge that, perhaps like botany or geography, might be investigated in their own terms, for the pleasure and challenge of mapping sex as a recognized domain of knowledge. Scholars who investigate early modern sexuality have thus found that in order to access such information, they must work through an enveloping discourse, one that may serve as a vehicle for sexual discourse but also subordinates such knowledge to its own priorities. One of the most lasting of these has been the law, which claims sex in order to regulate it and to organize specific sexual acts within the framework of criminality. Religious discourses likewise exhibit an overriding interest in drawing boundaries between licit and illicit sexual behaviors, while midwiving and gynecological manuals investigate sexual matters in order to remedy women’s physical ailments and ensure successful reproduction. More comprehensive anatomical or medical treatises may have comparatively greater latitude to describe the sexual body and address questions of pleasure and eroticism without the constraints imposed by moral and disciplinary considerations, although conception is still a controlling concern. In other words, sexual knowledge during the early modern period takes up residence in a variety of discursive domains. It has consequently been one of the primary challenges of writing histories of sexuality to survey the components of sexual discourse present in those various domains in order to piece together an intelligible account of sexual knowledge for a given period or culture. Indeed, an awareness of several discourses that pertain to sexuality, even if they contradict one another, is to be preferred. Taken in isolation, any one of these discourses may be misleading; legal statutes regarding sexual misconduct, for example, may remain on the books long after they have ceased to reflect any kind of social consensus regarding such behaviors.

“Not to Mend . . . Not to Know”: Baxter's “Call to the Unconverted” and Hardy's “God-Forgotten”

Abstract Discusses a possible echo of Richard Baxter's (pamphlet) “Call to the Unconverted” in Thomas Hardy's poem “God-Forgotten.” A reading is offered wherein Hardy is implicitly countering Baxter's request that his parishioners not mend this physical reality but turn away from it. Such a turn is, through a reading of some of Hardy's poetic engagements with Judeo-Christian theology, understood to be antithetical to his vision of ameliorative human existence: whatever divine principle is available to humanity is on offer in the physical world, and thus the possible echo in “God-Forgotten” of Baxter's phrasing would serve as a rejection of the exhortatory terms of his popular Puritan pamphlet.

George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: colonial celebrity and its postcolonial aftermath

George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’, conducted one of the most high profile and subsequently notorious experiments with indigenous people in the nineteenth-century British Empire. His ‘removal’ of Tasmanian Aborigines from the settler-dominated main island was well known at the time: celebrated by many as the most efficacious resolution to frontier conflict, even as it was criticized by (some) liberal commentators. Robinson was acutely aware of himself as an actor on the imperial stage, boasting in his diary on 3 September 1832 that, ‘By taking the whole [group of Aborigines] I gain not only the reward but also celebrity’ (Friendly Mission). As Patrick Brantlinger argues, colonial, American, European and British commentators were acutely interested in the fate of indigenous peoples when they encountered white, Western civilization: the Tasmanian genocide (as it was known) ‘offered a moral and political lesson in how the progress of empire and civilization could be badly botched’. Ideas about Robinson and his ‘mission’ to the Tasmanian Aborigines have circulated in popular culture and art since the 1830s. A variety of mechanisms have kept Robinson in the popular imagination. Benjamin Duterrau's portrait of Robinson in ‘The Conciliation’ memorably pictures a soft-faced Briton surrounded by his Aboriginal ‘charges’, but colonial and imperial commentators positioned Robinson equally often within the racial science of high imperialism. Alongside such representations, Robinson and the Tasmanian Aborigines were envisioned by popular newspapers, pamphleteers and writers in the Victorian economy's commodification of Empire. These imaginings of Robinson were as vigorous in the imperial centres as in the colonies, and have continued to be so. Twentieth-century authors—from Robert Drewe, to Mudrooroo, to Matthew Kneale, to Stephen Scheding and Nicholas Shakespeare—seem compelled to re-imagine Robinson's story. This paper examines Robinson's colonial celebrity and its postcolonial aftermath through theories of mass media and celebrity.

“Freedom with a Vengeance”: Choosing Kin in Antislavery Literature and Law

Wong's essay charts the legal controversies over slaves brought into New England after Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw's forceful application of the celebrated British civil suit, Somerset v. Stewart (1772), in the landmark case of the slave girl Med, or Commonwealth v. Aves (1836). It explores material that has been largely left out of the antislavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free territory. Wong's essay reconstructs the records of these cases from popular literature, newsprint, and legal pamphlets to explore what recent literary and historical scholarship has largely overlooked. Harriet and John S. Jacobs, Maria Weston Chapman, Sojourner Truth, and Ellis Gray Loring appear alongside a number of largely unknown slave attendants in an essay that explores the complex ways legal discourses circulating in newsprint constituted the agency and subjectivity of slaves who petitioned Northern courts for freedom (in counterdistinction from the criminal will of the fugitive). Their cases reveal the contradictory logic by which abolitionists disregarded the slaves' express desires to remain with their masters, and in many cases argued for the very sorts of separations from kin that usually figured so largely in abolitionist attacks on slavery. These legal stories compose a loose genre of antislavery literature, charting the struggles of jurists, slaveholders, free blacks, and abolitionists as they negotiated the predicament of a territorially bounded freedom.

The Myth of Ritual Murder. Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany

From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion.-Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal Hsia has...succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes.-G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best.-Library Journal A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent.-Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Munster, 1535-1618

‘A Vast Ill Nature’: Roger L'Estrange, Reputation, and the Credibility of Political Discourse in the Late Seventeenth Century

IIn 1684 a Catholic silversmith, Miles Prance, published the following triplet:A Little Wit, joyn'd with a Vast Ill Nature,And qualify'd for Lyes, as well as Satyr;May easily Commence an Observator.These lines were targeted at Roger L'Estrange, the Surveyor and a Licenser of the Press during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Throughout the late 1670s and early 1680s, the period of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, L'Estrange was engaged in an ongoing battle in print with Prance - one of the principal King's Witnesses in the plot - occasionally criticising him in his many pamphlets, and consistently attacking him in his half-sheet serial publication the Observator. L'Estrange began the Observator in April 1681, producing between two and four editions every week until the final edition in March 1687. In 1684 he gathered 470 editions together in a single volume and Prance took this opportunity to reply to L'Estrange's attacks in his 20-page pamphlet A Postscript to the Observator's First Volumn. Or the Answer of Miles Prance to Several of those Papers, Wherein he finds himself most Traduced and Slandered. This is where the above triplet appears, and Prance went on to complain that L'Estrange had been responsible for 'the blasting of [his] Reputation, spoiling of [his] Trade, and the Ruin of [his] Family'. He was fighting back against what he claimed was 'the malice' of the Observator's 'falsities ... and idle Tales', the product, he argued, of L'Estrange's 'cankered spleen'.1This essay will examine L'Estrange's alleged 'Vast Ill Nature' and how he was himself 'traduced' by Miles Prance and other contemporaries. It will consider L'Estrange's projection of his public image and defence of his reputation. L'Estrange was a prolific writer of pamphlets in defence of the government and he continually attempted to maintain a credible authorial persona in order that his publications and their contents retained some credibility. This was particularly important in the pamphlet exchanges of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis in which L'Estrange was so heavily involved, and this fashioning of an authorial persona was a continual process: he did so rhetorically, pictorially with portraiture, through alignment with humanistic predecessors, and also with the physical artefact of the book, that object which became the focus of his later life and which occupied so much of his time.2 Indeed, L'Estrange's self-awareness with respect to the printed book and what their material forms could signify to readers provides us with fascinating insights into the production, circulation, and reception of political discourse in the late seventeenth century. As a gentleman writing cheap, popular pamphlets, and such a large amount of them, he was aware that there was a tension between this format and quantity of publication on the one hand, and his background and social status on the other, and he was therefore a somewhat compromised figure, as his contemporary adversaries were never slow or remiss in pointing out.This essay also looks at L'Estrange's subsequent reputation from the late seventeenth century to the present day as Prance's hostile characterisation of L'Estrange, and his reductive view of his motivation, have to a large extent endured. Why this is so needs analysis and is related to his positions as the Surveyor and a Licenser of the Press (which involved the attempted suppression of books and pamphlets) during the reigns of Charles II and James II, to his robust support of the King and the established Church of England, and to his prolific writing output, often with an uncompromising rhetoric.There is though a broader reason for the enduring negative evaluation of L'Estrange which this essay will seek to explore: this is the problematic notion of the credibility of printed political discourse in the late seventeenth century, but in particular during the final years of Charles II's reign. …

Nelson and the bear: the making of an Arctic myth

Recent biographers of Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) have begun the job of attempting to differentiate the man from the ‘myth.’ A necessary stage in the assessment of any historical figure is the identification of the legendary aspects that make up that figure's reputation. The tale of the young Nelson engaging a huge polar bear on an ice floe off Spitsbergen in 1773 has been met with varying degrees of delight and dismissal through the years, and is one of the events an examination of which could improve an understanding of Nelson and his reputation. This paper draws upon a study of primary and secondary materials: original manuscripts and correspondence, early nineteenth-century popular biographies, souvenirs and pamphlets, periodical reviews, and a wide selection of adult and juvenile literature. This paper examines the developments of Nelsonian biography and hagiography. In a broader sense, an extended examination of the literary and visual manifestations of Nelson's encounter with the bear becomes a useful historiographical exercise into the genesis of a myth.