Reproducing Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-60
Author(s):  
Glenda Goodman

Amateur musicians played an important role in the material reproduction of musical texts in the eighteenth century. Their work represents the coalescence of technological, bibliographical, and cultural forces in the early national period. Print and manuscript were mutually informing technologies for music reproduction, and both entailed manual and creative labor and expertise. Yet, unlike print, chirography (handwriting) focused attention on the creation of unique, personalized items; moreover, the practice of copying music by hand challenged the primacy of the author by emphasizing an effort to re-cord (to take material to heart). Thus, manuscript music books can be linked to earlier modes of book production, such as commonplace books. Yet they also align with other genres, such as anthologies. Finally, gendered expectations informed books’ creation: like other forms of handwork, musical penmanship expressed femininity. The work of copying music was subject to the same gendered evaluations that minimized the significance of (and yet relied on) women’s domestic work.

Author(s):  
Oliver Scheiding

Charles Brockden Brown embraced the classical tradition in English literature, as can be seen from his many references to Greek and Roman historiographers, poets, and philosophers. His retellings of ancient events and his portraits of classical figures questioned central maxims in the writing of history which derived from Cicero and had been practiced by the later school of eighteenth-century exemplary historiography. While Brown’s classicism has been frequently interpreted along the line of the growing political tensions in the 1790s, this chapter shows that his adaptations of classical sources are motivated less by a partisan spirit than by Brown’s understanding of himself as a civic commentator and public intellectual. Brown’s Roman stories and his numerous essays on topics related to classical antiquity have to be seen as an intervention in the formation and enlargement of public opinion in the early national period.


1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.


Author(s):  
Lucia Dacome

Chapter 7 furthers the analysis of the role of anatomical models as cultural currencies capable of transferring value. It does so by expanding the investigation of the early stages of anatomical modelling to include a new setting. In particular, it follows the journey of the Palermitan anatomist and modeller Giuseppe Salerno and his anatomical ‘skeleton’—a specimen that represented the body’s complex web of blood vessels and was presented as the result of anatomical injections. Although Salerno was headed towards Bologna, a major centre of anatomical modelling, he ended his journey in Naples after the nobleman Raimondo di Sangro purchased the skeleton for his own cabinet of curiosities. This chapter considers the creation and viewing of an anatomical display in di Sangro’s Neapolitan Palace from a comparative perspective that highlights how geography and locality played an important part in shaping the culture of mid-eighteenth-century anatomical modelling.


Author(s):  
Ellen Carol DuBois

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.


2012 ◽  
pp. 41-63
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Cuccoli

The article focuses on the evolution of the military technical corps in France between the mid-Eighteenth century and the Restoration, and proposes for them the notion of "State corporation". This phase - an intermediate one between the corps de métier and the corps d'État - was attained first by the engineers and the artillery. These corps selected their officers by competitive examination, which functioned both as an intellectual filter and a social one. The distinction generated by this filter - nurtured by an elitist approach based on meritocracy was not overridden by the Revolution. On the contrary, it was further consecrated by the creation of the École polytechnique, which soon became controlled by the military technical corps. The "State corporation" model was then extended through the École polytechnique to the geographical engineers and the civil public services. The institutional conflicts among the technical corps during the National Constituent Assembly and those between them and the École polytechnique (1794-1799) are analyzed along these interpretative lines. While the former show their corporative resistance of geographical engineers in the name of equality, the latter bring out their corporative resistance to external education of candidates.


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seven Ağir

Ottoman reformers' re-organization of the grain trade during the second half of the eighteenth century had two components—the creation of a centralized institution to supervise transactions and the replacement of the fixed price system with a more flexible one. These changes were not only a response to strains on the old system of provisioning, driven by new geopolitical conditions, but also a consequence of an increased willingness among the Ottoman elite to emulate the economic policies of successful rival states. Thus, the centralized bureaucracy and political economy of the Ottoman Empire at the time had remarkable parallels with those in such European states as France and Spain.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-368
Author(s):  
Johan Heinsen

Abstract In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Penal slaves laboured in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. They were chained and often stigmatized, sometimes by branding. Their punishment was likened and, on a few occasions, linked to Atlantic slavery. Still, in reality, it was a wholly distinct form of enslavement that produced different experiences of coercion than those of the Atlantic. Such forms of penal slavery sit uneasily in historiographies of punishment but also offers a challenge for the dominant models of global labour history and its attempts to create comparative frameworks for coerced labour. This article argues for the need for contextual approaches to what such coercion meant to both coercers and coerced. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the meaning of early modern penal slavery based on an exceptional set of sources from 1723. In these sources, the status of the punished was negotiated and practiced by guards and slaves themselves. Court appearances by slaves were usually brief—typically revolving around escapes as authorities attempted to identify security breaches. The documents explored in this article are different: They present multiple voices speaking at length, negotiating their very status as voices. From that negotiation and its failures emerge a set of practiced meanings of penal “slavery” in eighteenth-century Copenhagen tied to competing yet intertwined notions of dishonour.


Author(s):  
Seth Perry

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.


Author(s):  
Laura Engel

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.


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