scholarly journals ‘Eloquence and Oracle’: Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Life and Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. 261-281
Author(s):  
Andrew Russell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Cognitive Changes ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Material Agency

AbstractIn a seventeenth-century play, tobacco argues for the superiority of its ‘divine breath’ in distilling eloquence and oracle upon the tongue. This essay argues that tobacco’s arrival on European shores is reflected in two distinctive eighteenth-century literary genres, namely ‘object’- or ‘it’-narratives and the ‘poetry of attention’. Such literary works reflect eighteenth-century interest in questions of ‘sentient matter’ and ‘material agency’ and the increasingly detailed examination of nature demanded by empirical science. Using concepts derived from material culture studies and Actor-Network Theory, and examples from the deep history and current landscapes of tobacco in lowland South America, this essay argues that tobacco’s transit from ‘New’ to ‘Old’ World brought with it some cognitive changes that may have had a hitherto unrecognized influence on Enlightenment life and literature.

scholarly journals Slaves’ dress between representation and materiality

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Isabela Cristina Suguimatsu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Social Barriers ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Ideal

Since the 1960s the focus of historical research about dress and clothing turned from a purely descriptive approach to a semiotic one: researches have started aiming at the representations and tried to understand the symbols behind the objects. Resting on the so called material culture studies, the objective of this article is to conceive dress no more subordinate to the dimension of the ideal meanings, but rather as materiality actively used in the process of signifying and making of social life. In the article I try to understand the role of dressing for “being a slave” in eighteenth-century Brazil: a society that valued ideals expressed in European fashion, but imposed social barriers for accessing them – for the slaves wear the materiality linked to such ideals. O vestuário dos escravos entre representação e materialidade Desde a década de 1960, os estudos sobre a indumentária e o vestuário passaram de uma abordagem puramente descritiva para outra baseada na semiótica: buscou-se atingir as representações e entender os símbolos por trás dos objetos. Com base nos chamados estudos da cultura material, o objetivo desse artigo é pensar o vestuário não mais subordinado à dimensão dos significados ideais, mas como materialidade ativamente usada no processo de significação e conformação da vida social. Para tanto, busca-se entender o papel do vestuário na constituição do “ser escravo” no Brasil oitocentista: em uma sociedade que valorizava ideais expressos na moda europeia, mas que criava barreiras para o acesso irrestrito a esses ideais e para o uso, pelos escravos, da materialidade a eles associada.

Making things on the side: creativity at a time of institutional decline

Hot Metal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Adams Stein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
Work Time ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Institutional Decline ◽  
Customary Practices ◽  
Over Time

A ‘foreign order’ is an industrial colloquialism referring to a practice whereby workers produce objects at work – using factory materials and work time – without authorisation. This is an under-explored but global phenomenon that many names, including homers, side productions, government jobs, and la perruque. There are silences about these clandestine acts of creative production in English-language studies. This chapter considers this practice from the interdisciplinary perspective of labour history and material culture studies. Using oral and archival sources, the chapter traces the ancestry of foreign orders to seventeenth century English customary practices of the Commons. It provides an account of a playful and creative culture of pranks and making in a printing factory, and identifies the workers’ motivations for creating foreign orders. Finally, the chapter explains how the making of foreign orders became more overt and politicised over time, as workers sensed their insecurity. This practice of making ‘on the side’ enabled print-workers a degree of agency and the ability to narrativise their own plight.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Everyday Religion

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.

Bach and Material Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Stephen Rose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Agency ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Working Practices ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Material Artifacts

Bach’s music is often interpreted as transcending the material conditions of everyday life. This chapter, by contrast, argues that Bach scholarship could be enriched via approaches taken from the study of material culture. It places Bach within the vibrant consumer culture of early-eighteenth-century Leipzig, exploring his postmortem inventory and his keyboard publications in the context of how the town’s bourgeoisie used material goods to show their status and identity. It investigates Bach’s printed and manuscript music in terms of the social practices surrounding these material artifacts. Finally, the chapter relates Bach’s working practices to debates about the interplay of human and material agency. It discusses how he experimented with the material characteristics of instruments such as organs, and analyzes his compositional practice as an interaction between player-composer and contrapuntal materials.

The Metaphysics of Impenetrability: Euler's Conception of force

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Fluid Medium ◽  
Elastic Bodies ◽  
Leonhard Euler ◽  
Finite Body ◽  
Newton’S Laws

In this paper I want to examine in some detail one eighteenth-century attempt to restructure the foundations of mechanics, that of Leonhard Euler. It is now generally recognized that the idea, due to Mach, that all that happened in the eighteenth century was the elaboration of a deductive and mathematical mechanics on the basis of Newton's Laws is misleading at best. Newton's Principia needed much more than a reformulation in analytic terms if it was to provide the basis for the comprehensive mechanics that was developed in the eighteenth century. Book II of the Principia, in particular, where the problem of the resistance offered to the motion of a finite body by a fluid medium was raised, was generally (and rightly) thought to be in large part mistaken and confused. There were also a number of areas crucial to the unification of mechanics which Newton did not deal with at all in the Principia: particularly the dynamics of rigid, flexible and elastic bodies, and the dynamics of several bodies with mutual interactions. Although a start had been made on some of these topics in the seventeenth century (notably by Galileo, Beeckman, Mersenne, Huygens, Pardies, Hooke, and Leibniz), it was only in the eighteenth century that they were subjected to detailed examination, and Euler's contribution to the development of these topics, and hence to the unification of mechanics, was immense.

Material Evidence in the History Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century Göttingen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
University Of Göttingen ◽  
The University ◽  
Required Courses ◽  
Material Evidence

This chapter considers the “material turn” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, particularly when the first academic curriculum for material culture studies was created. It happened at the University of Göttingen, a new foundation (from 1734, formal opening in 1737) that was envisioned as the model of an enlightened university, and was, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary hothouse for humanities research. With a professionalized training regimen for historians came the idea of required courses, and the auxiliary sciences of history were born. This curriculum lingered at Göttingen for a long time, though little effort has been made to study its development.

The Bible in the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
And Linguistics

The Bible served as the principal source of religious imagination for English colonials in the seventeenth century. It was that which inspired their radical ecclesiastical, political, and societal reconstructions and that by which they measured their faithfulness to the Christian tradition. It proved to be a remarkable stimulus to the formation of colonial institutions and material culture, and the production of an entire range of literary genres, including spiritual memoir, public rhetoric and exhortation, history, poetry, music, pedagogy, law, and linguistics. The Bible also served as the template upon which colonials worked out their understanding of the alien and the alienating, both among Europeans of differing religious understandings and between Europeans, African slaves, and Native Americans.

scholarly journals The Place of Objects and Things in the Age of Materiality

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 494-502
Author(s):  
Martin Brückner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Object Classification ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
The Status ◽  
Meaningful Engagement ◽  
The Way

Abstract This essay reprises the status of objects in relation to critical conversations that favor things and thing studies over other methodologies of material culture studies. Recent discussions have dismissed objects as passive foils that lack in meaning. Glossing the factor of representation, however, these discussions have also glossed over a factor crucial in shaping the way in which the distinction between objects and things is made accessible in theory and practice. Two examples taken from eighteenth-century American literary culture, an anecdote by Benjamin Franklin and a sales ad published by the Pennsylvania Gazette, illustrate how in the process of representation objects become imbued with significance that reaches beyond mere signification and object classification. Once conceived as ‘material signs,’ objects become participants in cognitive environments in which seemingly meaningless symbols foster meaningful engagement with materiality.

Material Agency

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael David Kirchhoff ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Material Agency

This article attempts to articulate a theoretical framework, the target of which is to systematically unearth the conditions validating the ascription of agency to material culture. A wide range of studies, located within the interdisciplinary field known as material culture studies, testify to and aim at (re)uniting the materials of material culture with the notion of agency. In this article the argument is advanced that material entities have agency only if two necessary conditions are met: an ontological condition (agency is an asymmetrical and relational category) and an epistemological condition (material entities mediate and transform human understanding). Hopefully, this way of approaching matters will help to establish a constructive framework for future debates.

Fracturing Universal Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-171
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Spiritual World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Impact

It has widely been assumed that religious objects were quickly associated with different confessions during the Reformation period. However, the unique environment of Prague enables the conditions, speed, and clarity of this process to be tested. This chapter pushes beyond previous historiography that has focused on mono-confessional contexts to examine the confessional specificity of devotional material cultures. The multiconfessional environment of Prague in the first decades of the seventeenth century enables an examination of the role of material culture in the creation of distinct confessional identities. Prague thus provides a fascinating context in which to study the process of fracturing medieval Christianity along confessional lines. It sustained an environment of what might be called ‘multiple options’ well into the seventeenth century. Three factors that shaped this confessional context are examined: survivalism of pre-Reformation devotional modes, the impact of Utraquism, and the persistence of confessional flexibility. A detailed examination of prayer beads in the inventories and as extant objects provides a microcosm through which to understand confessional identities at ground level. Close up, qualitatively, the records reveal them to be part of a spiritual world of endless possibilities and devotional options, but quantitatively, from a distance, they reveal a striking pattern of plural confessions and religious change.

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