scholarly journals EDITORIAL

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARSHALL BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Starting Point

‘Music and …’ is the concluding topic in Ludmilla Jordanova’s editorial in an earlier issue of this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 153–155), and in reverse it will be the starting-point in mine. I fell into writing about music as an active amateur (and briefly professional) cellist with a background in theory consisting of a year’s tutoring in old-fashioned species counterpoint as an unruly fourteen-year-old. In the autumn of 1979 I was writing about the origins of reverie – that is, of representations and discussions of unfocused or unconscious awareness – in writings of the 1780s, chiefly by Rousseau, Kant and William Cowper. It occurred to me that the drifting sensibility I was describing was perfectly captured by the introduction to Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. It started as a footnote, but finally required a small essay to define the contexts and work out the details. Then, however, I could invoke the representation of a state of feeling not encumbered by the rational straitjacket of concepts. Whether they knew it or not – Kant certainly didn’t, Rousseau at some level certainly did – music was what my authors were after!

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

scholarly journals HA NOI – HUE – SAI GON IN TERRITORY EXPANSION TOWARD THE SOUTH AND UNIFICATION OF THE COUNTRY (1069–1802)

2020 ◽  
Vol 129 (6E) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Nguyễn Quang Ngọc
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Development Trend ◽  
Early History ◽  
Mutual Support ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Imperial Capital ◽  
The Relationship

Vietnam is a country of an early history establishment with three archaeological centres: Dong Son in the North, Sa Huynh in the Central, and Oc Eo in the South. In the long history, these three centres unite and gather into a unified block, step by step, becoming a mainstream development trend. By the eleventh century, Thang Long capital (Hanoi) is a typical representative, the starting point for the course of advancement to the South of the Vietnamese. Later, Phu Xuan (Hue) from the fourteenth century and Gia Dinh (Saigon) from the seventeenth century directly multiply resources, deciding the success of the course of territory expansion and determining the southern territory of the nation Dai Viet – Vietnam in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Tay Son movement at the end of the eighteenth century starts unifying the country, but the course is not completed with numerous limitations. The mission of unifying the whole country is assigned back to Nguyen Anh. Nguyen Anh continually builds Gia Dinh into a firm basement for proceeding to conquer the imperial capital of Hue and the citadel Thang Long, completing the 733-year journey to expand the southern territory (1069–1802) and unifying the whole country into a single unit. Hanoi – Hue – Saigon in the relationship and mutual support has become the three pillars that determine all successes throughout the long history and in each stage of expansion and shaping of territory and unification of the country.

French Influences on Germany’s Commercial Courts in the Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 469-494
Author(s):  
Thomas Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
French Law ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Legal Situation ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Commercial Courts

Summary The present contribution explores the extent of influence which French law had on the development of Germany’s commercial courts in the nineteenth century. Modern literature describes this influence as marginal, yet without further proof. The author takes this state of research as a starting point to compare the Napoleonic legislation on commercial courts with the German commercial court systems of the nineteenth century. However, the present contribution will start with an overview of the German legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century. This is followed by an examination of whether French law was transferred to Germany during the French occupation of large parts of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Against this background it is possible to fully analyse the influence which French law had on the further development of German commercial courts.

An eighteenth-century medical–meteorological society in the Netherlands: an investigation of early organization, instrumentation and quantification. Part 1

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUIB J. ZUIDERVAART
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Meteorological Parameters ◽  
Academic Science ◽  
Mathematical Apparatus ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Infrastructure ◽  
Theoretical Insight

In many areas the eighteenth century was a starting point for the quantification of science. It was a period in which the mania for collecting led to the first attempts in systematization and classification. This penchant for collecting was not limited to natural history specimens or curiosities. Due in part to the development of mathematical and physical instruments, which became more widely available, scholars were confronted with the informative value of numbers. On the one hand, sequences of measurements appeared to be the key to the advancement of scientific knowledge, yet on the other hand the mathematical apparatus to deal with these data was still largely lacking. As a result of this the first meteorological networks organized in the eighteenth century all became bogged down in the large amount of information that was collected but could not be processed properly. This development is illustrated in a case study of an early Dutch meteorological society, the Natuur- en Geneeskundige Correspondentie Sociëteit (1779–1802). What were the factors that triggered this interest in the weather in the Netherlands? What were the goals and expectations of the contributors? What were their methodological strategies? Which instruments were used to measure which meteorological parameters? How was the stream of numbers generated by these measurements organized, collected and interpreted? An analysis of this process reveals that limits on the advancement of meteorology were not only imposed by instrumentation and organization. The financing, the scientific infrastructure of the old eighteenth-century Dutch Republic and the lack of a proper theoretical insight were also crucial factors that eventually frustrated the breakthrough of meteorology as an academic science in the Netherlands. This breakthrough was only achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Soul's Imaginings: Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Meyer Spacks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Complex Functions ◽  
Spiritual Autobiographies ◽  
Christian Fellowship

The authors of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and of their fictional imitations demonstrate the complex functions of imagination as a component of the spiritual life and of its records. Robinson Crusoe and William Cowper’s Memoir (1816) both delineate detailed sequences of emotional and imaginative development as the foundation of religious experience. Crusoe progresses to self-understanding by recognizing and mastering his own fear and anger and developing his capacity for love and by enlarging the resources of his imagination. Cowper asserts that his conversion and the Christian fellowship that followed it dominate his experience, but his account, with dark imagistic undertones, may also be read as revealing the persistence of despair. The unconscious shaping which produces this counter-pattern enriches the memoir’s implication. In novel and autobiography alike, the divergence between what the author asserts and what he suggests, reflecting varying possibilities of the imagination, can generate fruitful literary effects.

Changing the Dead to Statues of Stone: The Synthesis of Fossils, Petrifaction, Photography, and the Chemistry of the Gorgonean Arts

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-308
Author(s):  
Irina Podgorny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chemical Nature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chemical Substances ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Chemical Complex ◽  
The Dead

Taking the story of Efisio Marini as its starting point, this paper argues that embalming and photography are materially and historically connected due to their chemical nature. Photography and modern embalming both originated in the “chemical complex” of the nineteenth century, i.e., the idea that nature and natural processes could be synthesized in the laboratory. As Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have remarked, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chemists experimented with materials, studied the possibilities for improving their production, examined their properties, explored their reactions, and analyzed their composition. Eighteenth-century chemistry, in their words, could be seen as the most authoritative science of materials. Marini’s story relates to this ontology of materials in that it refers to experiments with chemical substances and subsequent changes in their materiality and meaning.

William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century.

1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Lodwick Hartley ◽  
Gilbert Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Cowper

Appropriations and Contestations of the Islamic Nomenclature in Muslim North India

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-110
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ruling Elites

This article comprises a twofold attempt: the first is to establish a semantic field that revolves around the concept of siyāsat—roughly equivalent to the political—in Muslim South Asia; the second is to trace semantic shifts in this field and to identify circumstances that may have prompted those shifts. It is argued here that the terms that constitute the semantic field of the political oscillate between two sociolinguistic traditions: a strongly Islamicate Arabic one, and a more imperially oriented Persian one. Another linguistic shift is indicated with the replacement of Persian by Urdu as the dominant literary idiom in and beyond North India since the eighteenth century. The aim is to serve only as a starting point for a more intensive discussion that brings in other materials and perspectives, thus helping to elucidate the tension between normative aspirations by ruling elites and actual political praxes by variant socioeconomic groups.

‘A treasure of hidden vertues’: the attraction of magnetic marketing

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Fara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Instrument Maker ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Face ◽  
Magnetic Phenomena ◽  
Samuel Pepys

When customers like Samuel Pepys visited the shop of Thomas Tuttell, instrument maker to the king, they could purchase a pack of mathematical playing-cards. The seven of spades, reproduced as Figure 1, depicted the diverse connotations of magnets, or loadstones. These cards cost a shilling, and were too expensive for many of the surveyors, navigators and other practitioners shown using Tuttell's instruments. They provide an early example of the products promising both diversion and improvement which were increasingly marketed to polite audiences. Tuttell's description of loadstone as ‘a treasure of hidden vertues’ encapsulated many contemporary perceptions of these naturally occurring magnets which were to endure throughout the century. This phrase, with its hints of concealed financial and epistemological benefits, resonates with major eighteenth-century analytical themes, such as commercialization, the opposition between vice and virtue, and the fascination with the occult in the face of Enlightenment rationality. This card is emblematic of the multiple interpretations and utilizations of magnetic phenomena during the eighteenth century. It thus provides a useful starting-point for exploring some of the disputes which arose as enterprising individuals concerned with natural philosophy promoted themselves, their activities and their products.

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