Antiquarian Transformations in Historical Scholarship

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-170
Author(s):  
Rosemary Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts

One of the most impressive aspects of A Polite and Commercial People is Paul Langford’s skilful synthesis of a bewildering array of lesser known authors and publications to tap into opinion and sentiment on social, economic, political, and cultural questions, including the remarkable popularity of works of antiquarianism (as well as history) amongst eighteenth-century readers. The progress of manners, a thematic undercurrent throughout the book, allowed eighteenth-century antiquaries such as John Brand and Joseph Strutt to look back upon the manners and customs of the past as the expressions of different social mores, characteristic of ruder, less polished times. Through innovative interdisciplinary research which combined written and visual sources, material culture and architectural analysis, this interest developed into historical accounts of manners and customs, sports and pastimes, which documented the everyday practices of the English people from the time of the Roman conquest onwards: it offered in effect a history of the domestic life of the English people. The historicization of domesticity or everyday life was notably elaborated upon in historical novels by antiquarian-minded writers such as Walter Scott (who had himself worked on Strutt’s failed novel Queenhoo Hall), Harrison Ainsworth, and Bulwer Lytton. Rather than focusing upon novels, however, this chapter analyses how ‘domesticity’ and ‘domestic life’, particularly of the middling sorts, became categories of antiquarian and historical research from the later eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century and in the process provided a social history of the mores and lifestyle of Britain’s polite and commercial classes.

scholarly journals Baby care: practices, texts and cultural conflicts

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-269
Author(s):  
Alexandra Pletneva
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Peasant Household ◽  
History Of ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

To create the social history of Russia and the history of everyday life, one needs a description of local everyday practices. This article focuses on the everyday practices associated with the birth of a baby and care for it. The author proceeds from the fact that the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia saw the coexistence of two cultures and two household traditions – the culture of the educated classes and the peasant culture. At the level of everyday practices, they made a certain influence on each other. On the one hand, ethnographic materials were used as sources, and on the other hand – popular medical literature of the 19th century. The article analyzes the practices themselves and the mechanisms of their influence on each other, while it appears that the effect of the practices of educated social groups on people’s life was a conscious Kulturtraeger activity. The influence of peasant household traditions on the lifestyle of educated classes was carried out primarily through direct impact. The ubiquity of nurses who belonged to a different social group than the child’s parents, led to the fact that, despite the parents’ resistance, peasant childcare practices (baby-rocking, pacifier, sleeping together, etc.) were used quite actively.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

From Siege to Lock-out: An Actors' Strike at the Comédie-Française in 1765

1978 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Roddick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
En Bloc ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Typical Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complete Disruption

The aims and ambitions of this article are initially fairly limited. I want to examine a series of events which occurred at the Comédie-Française in April and May of 1765, leading to a complete disruption of normal performances at the theatre, to the imprisonment of most of the company's leading actors, and to the temporary withdrawal from performance of what might otherwise have been eighteenth-century France's biggest ‘box-office hit’, Le Siège de Calais, a patriotic tragedy by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. In themselves these events, sometimes known as l'affaire Dubois after the actor most directly involved in them, are little more than a bizarre and sporadically scurrilous footnote to the theatrical history of France in the eighteenth century. But the more one examines them, the more they illuminate certain rather murky areas of literary and social history, two areas in particular: firstly, the social relations of the acting profession at a time when it was, despite considerable pressure from numerous sources, still barred en bloc from the sacraments of the Catholic church; and secondly, the degree of autonomy which could be said to have existed for a company which was, legally, a kind of workers' co-operative but which, at any rate at that stage, operated within a rather ill-defined administrative limbo (it was simultaneously autonomous and totally subject to noble whim). The strike which brought about the cancellation of performances of Le siège de Calais in April 1765 is, then, a specific and in no way typical event, but one which draws together a number of historical strands – literary, theatrical, economic, moral and political – in a particularly interesting way. I want, in the course of this article, to deal with two questions – questions to which I do not really feel able to give definitive answers but which may, when examined, cast doubt upon one or two familiar preconceptions about the nature of the eighteenth-century theatre as a profession, and at the same time open up certain areas of enquiry with regard to the theatre as a material reality rather than a predominantly literary or artistic form. The questions are in themselves quite simple: why did the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française refuse, on Monday, 15th April 1765, to perform a play which, given its enormous success earlier in the year, it was very much in their economic interests to present? And why did the resulting situation become so irreducible that, far from the usual discreet pressures being brought to bear on the relevant authorities to resolve the dispute, it led to the imprisonment of three of the most popular ‘stars’ of the century, and to an effective lockout lasting for almost a month?

Lo sguardo del geografo: Massimo Quaini, l’archeologia, la storia

2021 ◽  
pp. 275-275
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Stagno ◽  
Vittorio Tigrino
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Local History ◽  
Population Geography ◽  
Study Centre ◽  
History Of

In this paper we discuss how Massimo Quaini, since the end of the 1960’s, dialogued (or did not) with the sister disciplines of historical geopgraphy: archaeology and social history. We reflect on the experimental path of Quaini “towards a new geographicity” and on the numerous meetings, separations, parallel and divergent routes which had place along it; focusing on Massimo’s experiences and acquaintances in Genoa, those of the Ligurian Study Centre on Deserted Villages and of the debates around population geography and history of material culture, and later those related to the Permanent Seminar on Local History and the long discussion around micro-history and its different outcomes.

Frontier Anxieties: Toward a Social History of Muslim-Christian Relations on the Ottoman-Habsburg Border

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Edin Hajdarpasic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim noblemen who tried to capitalize on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century. Through these processes, by the end of the century the meaning of the reaya or raya—an Ottoman term for taxpaying “subjects” that theoretically applied to all denominations, including Muslims—had become synonymous with “Christians,” acquiring a new political significance.

scholarly journals BJHS special section: book history and the sciences Introduction

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN R. TOPHAM
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Book History ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
Culture Of Science ◽  
History Of Books

The expanding interest in book history over recent years has heralded the coming together of an interdisciplinary research community drawing scholars from a variety of literary, historical and cultural studies. Moreover, with a growing body of literature, the field is becoming increasingly visible on a wider scale, not least through the existence of the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing (SHARP), with its newly founded journal Book History. Within the history of science, however, there remains not a little scepticism concerning the practical value of such an approach. It is often dismissed as an intellectual fad or as an enterprise which is illuminating but ultimately peripheral, rather than being valued as an approach which can offer major new insights within the field. This is no doubt in part because much of the most innovative work in history of science over recent years has been carried out by historians anxious to get away from an earlier overemphasis on printed sources. Eager to correct a profoundly unsocial history of ideas, usually rooted in texts, historians have looked increasingly to both the practices and the material culture of science. In such a context, a renewed focus on the history of books sometimes seems like a retrograde step, especially given the common misidentification of ‘books’ with ‘texts’. On the contrary, however, it is just such a twin emphasis on practices and material culture which also characterizes the new book history. Indeed, to the question ‘what is book history for?’ we might answer that its object is to reintroduce social actors, engaged in a variety of practices with respect to material objects, into a history in which books have too often been understood merely as disembodied texts, the meaning of which is defined by singular, uniquely creative authors, and is transparent to readers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document