Retrospectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-228
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Robert Southey

Although Devine Weekes was read and admired throughout the seventeenth century, writers came to regard it as an outdated gathering of mythical information. Later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets (such as Susanna Hopton, Thomas Ellwood, and Richard Blackmore) continued to test the relation between faith, empiricism, and poetry with Du Bartas as a distant precursor. The Lake Poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey) remembered Du Bartas’ place in literary history, perhaps aware that he was an oblique precursor to literary Romanticism, even if he ignored the role of the creative consciousness. Du Bartas’ poetry should not just be read for its historical significance or as a source for other writers, but in dialogue with those who read and imitated his works.

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

scholarly journals Sounding Silence: Inspiration And Passiveness In The Reading Of Early Modern Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Essig García
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Material Change ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Las Mujeres

Abstract: cultural and material change described by historians of reading intersects with literary history in different and complex ways. An example is the cultural practice of silent reading in intimacy, which came to be pivotal for the literature of sensibility. It was gendered female in the eighteenth century and looked upon with disfavour, notably by moralists and pedagogues. However, not very long before, silent reading was associated with spirituality and women’s religious experiences, and was compatible with the virtues expected of the “lady of the Renaissance”. Several texts from the seventeenth century, notably diaries by women, will be discussed. Título en español: “Resonancia del silencio: inspiración y pasividad en la lectura femenina en el siglo XVII”.Resumen:los cambios culturales y materiales que describe la historia de la lectura entran en relaciones variadas y complejas con la historia literaria. Un ejemplo de esa dialéctica es la evolución de la práctica de la lectura silenciosa en recogimiento, que alcanzó una importancia extraordinaria para la novelística del Dieciocho. Se consideraba propia de las mujeres y estaba mal vista por moralistas y pedagogos. No mucho antes, empero, la lectura en silencio había sido un componente de la experiencia espiritual y religiosa de la mujer del Renacimiento, y como tal compatible con las virtudes femeninas. El artículo incluye comentarios de varios textos del diecisiete, en particular diarios de mujeres.

Negligence

2019 ◽  
pp. 427-450
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
General Principle ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
Reasonable Care ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the history of negligence in tort. The role of fault in the action of trespass vi et armis is somewhat speculative, since the relevant facts were hidden from courts by the plea of Not Guilty. But the concept of inevitable accident seems to be predicated on negligence. Negligence is more visible in actions on the case, though the earliest examples were contractual in essence. The first signs of a distinct tort of negligence, where there was no contract or custom imposing liability, appear in the seventeenth century, and in the next century there emerges a general principle that everyone must take reasonable care not to injure his neighbour. The duty of care was gradually enlarged between the eighteenth century and the present, especially with the removal of obstacles connected with the principle volenti non fit injuria and with the old notion that trespass would not lie for words.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

Early oligochaete science, from Aristotle to Francesco Redi

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilia Rota
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laboratory Tests ◽  
Habitat Requirements ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Internal Anatomy ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Parasitic Worms

The paper reviews knowledge on earthworms from early classical times to the end of the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian view that these “imperfect” animals developed spontaneously from mud and lacked internal organs except the gut was not challenged until the late Renaissance but, by the end of the 1600s, it was overthrown. Aldrovandi and Mouffet presented field observations of sexual reproduction and specific habitat requirements. Willis demonstrated the complex internal anatomy of an earthworm. Finally Redi, based on numberless dissections, showed the existence of variations on that basic anatomical plan, which anyway remained distinct from that of parasitic worms. Through a series of controlled laboratory tests, Redi also proved that earthworms have a physiology of their own and are most sensible to water loss. In those same years, Swammerdam investigated earthworm cocoons nursing them in his room, and Tyson discovered earthworms’ hermaphroditism. Two significant interpretations of earthworm's locomotion, by Fabrici ab Aquapendente and Borelli, also belong to this period, but were both short-lived in their influence. An awareness of the ecological role of earthworms in pedogenesis and soil fertility did not emerge until the late eighteenth century.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 625-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
Self Interest

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert'sPrincess Cloria(1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinishedTheophania(1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.

Lennox: Repertoires of Embodiment

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Systematic Comparison ◽  
Short Forms ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Embodied Language ◽  
French And English

This chapter begins with a systematic comparison of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles of embodied language through versions of the same narrative in French and English. Lennox’s work as a cultural broker and translator aims not only to bring narratives rooted in the seventeenth century into her contemporary literary world but also to extend their repertoires of embodied language. In her translations, she integrates instances of inner and outer bodily perception and grounds direct speech in the characters’ bodies. With Lennox’s literary magazine The Lady’s Museum, it will be shown how the novel and its embodied style are embedded in a larger world of book learning. The relations that Lennox establishes between the serialised novel, short forms like the maxim, and educational treatises document an understanding of the role of the novel that differs from the indices and abridgements around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.

Battle of the Styles? Classical and Gothic Architecture in Seventeenth-Century North-East England

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 79-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pears
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
North East ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
British Architecture

Research over the last twenty years into seventeenth-century elite British architecture has questioned the view that Classical designs were the preserve of a narrow group of royal and aristocratic patrons at the Stuart court, and also that Inigo Jones was a ‘lonely genius’ misunderstood in his own lifetime but prophesizing the true Classicism that was to bloom in the eighteenth century.The role of patrons in defining architectural styles has also been analysed, and it has been noted that Classicism was not the only style they favoured. For earlier historians, a perception that Classical architecture was an advance upon the Gothic style of medieval English buildings led to discussions of ‘Gothic survival’ or ‘Gothic revival’ and of a ‘Battle of the Styles’ in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, with such patrons as Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who commissioned and renovated buildings in Gothic style, being viewed as a ‘curiosity’ for not employing Classical style.

Russian Expansion to the East Through the Eighteenth Century

1961 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. Foust
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Physical Location ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Merchant Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
Service State ◽  
Important Variant

Most historical generalizations must be approached with a wary eye; Kliuchevskii's dictum that “the history of Russia is the history of a country in the process of colonization” is no exception. Taken unjudiciously this dictum grievously compresses time, focuses attention on only a single historical dynamic, lends to the historical process a pre-ordained character which is indeed usually absent. The historian's critical apparatus is dulled, and the delicate nuance and important variant are neglected. Moscow, it has been argued, was a chosen town to lead the southward and eastward expansion of the Great Russian people because of her physical location on the edge of the Valdai hills giving her control of the crucial waterways of European Russia. (Why not, for the same reasons, Vladimir or Rostov, Suzdal or even Uglich?) Muscovite expansion forms the central thread of Russian history, determining the economic and political structure of the state. It was the expansion which fixed and defined the necessity of the “service state,” which in turn subjugated all classes and groups to the all powerful tsardom. (Why not the reverse—the “service state” defining the expansion—and why did not an independent merchant class come to control the expansion, and the towns and politics of Muscovy?) To pursue the argument to a logical conclusion, die modern audioritarian state in Russia (bodi Soviet and Tsarist) is essentially a continuation of old Muscovy. As the latter expanded and colonized, so must the former. (The role of the Party and the Marxist dialectic, by this line of argument, has no fundamental historical significance.)

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