Iberian War Writing

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig

This chapter explores the roots of the modern war memoir genre. It debunks the enduring idea that in the early nineteenth century the Iberian peninsula did not produce military autobiographies, or any autobiographical writing at all, comparable to the output in north-western Europe. Making the argument for a broader definition of ‘war memoir’, it highlights the numerous ephemeral, polemical pamphlets (also known as manifiestos) written by Spanish veterans during the Peninsular War. It presents these military authors as ambitious, high-ranking career officers and shrewd guerrilla leaders, who used memoir-writing as a political tool to defend their actions on the battlefield, assert their suitability for command, and win popular support. In doing so, it emphasises the juridical and bureaucratic origins of Spanish life writing, dating back to colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios and an elite eighteenth-century service culture, as well as the shifts caused during the Peninsular War by the forced abdication of the king and the temporary declaration of freedom of the press.

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Joule

In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.


Author(s):  
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva ◽  
Hélder Carvalhal

ABSTRACTChallenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.


1936 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 169-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ullyott

Sometime after the last retreat of the ice in the Quaternary ice age, the Scandinavian peninsula was separated on the south from the north German plain and Denmark. Later, England was cut off by the Channel from the continental land mass. An estimation of the times at which these two events happened is interesting to archaeologists, botanists and zoologists alike, because the communities with which they are concerned are affected by the barrier of an intervening arm of the sea.So far most of the evidence about the times of separation comes from botanical and archaeological sources, from pollen analysis and the investigation of cultural sites. In this paper the distribution and physiology of certain freshwater animals are used to provide argument that the separation of Scandinavia and of England could only have taken place at times of particular climatic conditions. The climatic definition of the times of separation makes it possible to fit them in to the absolute geochronological scale which has been established by Scandinavian workers.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 359
Author(s):  
Niamh Roche ◽  
Steve Langton ◽  
Tina Aughney ◽  
Deirdre Lynn ◽  
Ferdia Marnell

Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.


Author(s):  
Michel Noiray

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”


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