Gothic Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This book seeks to provide the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction, poetry, drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the literature/architecture relation is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains no monograph-length study of the intriguing interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only cursory treatment in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of texts. In turn, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was much more than a matter of style. Incarnating the memory of a vanished ‘Gothic’ age in the enlightened present, Gothic architecture, whether ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s past—a notable ‘visionary’ turn in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. Through initiating a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, the book argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

A. J. Davis’s Belmead

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Daniel Bluestone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
James River ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Slave Quarters

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Significant Factors ◽  
Established Church

This introductory chapter discusses the two ‘E-word’ coordinates of the volume—‘Establishment’ and ‘Empire’—which were arguably the most significant factors affecting the Anglican Church between 1662 and 1829 and asks what the consequences were for the Church of its establishment status and how it was affected by being the established Church of an emerging global power. The chapter surveys the historiography and argues that the Church was far more vital to the period than is often maintained. The chapter also explores the relationship between Anglicanism and two other ‘E-words’—‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Evangelicalism’—which have often been seen as critical reactions against the Church. While the themes of ‘Establishment’, ‘Empire’, ‘Enlightenment’, and ‘Evangelicalism’ had separate, and sometimes competing, trajectories, as this volume indicates, Anglicanism during the long eighteenth century could also hold them together in distinctive ways.

THE BEOWULF POET'S SENSE OF DECORUM

Traditio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
LEONARD NEIDORF
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Literature ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

This paper reassesses the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. Through wide-ranging comparative analysis, it identifies probable departures from the antecedent tradition and argues that these departures are best understood not in impersonal terms, as Christian reactions to a pagan tradition, but in terms of a singular poet's sense of decorum, which was not possessed by all Christian authors throughout the Middle Ages. Focusing on interpretive controversies related to matters such as slavery, kin-slaying, the posthumous fate of pagans, and violence orchestrated by women, this paper argues that a series of ostensibly unrelated problems in the poem's critical literature could be resolved with a single coherent explanation: namely, that Beowulf was composed by a poet who sought to preserve as much as possible from the antecedent tradition, while not hesitating to obscure indecorous features and to express value judgments alien to the inherited material. The Beowulf poet's sense of decorum is shown herein to be idiosyncratic yet coherent and pervasive, responsible for various minor departures from tradition and for the selection of the untraditional protagonist around which the poem is structured.

Reception

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-136
Author(s):  
Emma Bridges ◽  
Joanna Paul
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Social Agendas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Domestic Level

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.

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.

scholarly journals The Great Leap from Earth to Heaven: The Evolution of Ballet and Costume in England and France in the Eighteenth Century

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Collins ◽  
Joanna Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship

The evolution of classical ballet from its accepted origins as one method of displaying status and aristocratic power in Renaissance Italy to its Romantic form, featuring professional ballerinas in white costumes dancing en pointe, took place largely during the long eighteenth century. This article discusses this transformation from the dual perspectives of choreography and costume by using the premise that these two vital elements in the presentation of ballet were co-dependent, each prompting the other to develop and evolve. Concentrating on Paris and London, it examines the relationship between court dress, fashion and theatre costume, and how this affected both the choreography and the style of dance throughout the long eighteenth century.

Periodicals and the Problem of Women’s Learning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Robert Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gender Difference ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Culture Of Learning ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Selection Of

One of the questions published in the 23 May 1691 issue of The Athenian Mercury (1690-7) was ‘Whether it be proper for Women to be Learned?’ In this essay, James Wood takes the question of the propriety of women's education and the learned woman as a lens through which to read a selection of periodicals and magazines from the 1690s to the 1820s. Through detailed case studies of the Ladies’ Diary (1704–1841), Ladies Mercury (1693), Female Tatler (1709–10), Female Spectator (1744–6), Lady’s Museum (1760–6), and Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), Wood elucidates how periodicals offer unique insights into: how women participated in the wider culture of learning across the long eighteenth century; how learning was incorporated into women’s lives; how women’s learning was understood and variously negotiated by the periodical press; and the role that gender difference played in what in meant to be learned across the long eighteenth century.

The Construction of Humanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-68
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Correct Reading ◽  
George Buchanan ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter starts with a very concise discussion of how the different approaches to classical literature debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced back to the ancient world and the Middle Ages. The rest of the chapter demonstrates how scholars in the early eighteenth century reflected on the work of their predecessors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on their own scholarly concerns. The first example is Pieter Burman (1668–1741) and his Sylloge epistolarum (1724–7), the edition of unpublished writings by the French critic Henri Valois (1603–76; edition published in 1740), and the edition of George Buchanan (1506–82), published in 1725. In the Sylloge, for example, Burman focuses on letters that show how eminent scholars thought about the correct reading of classical texts, while a ‘popularizer’ like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) is criticized. Valois’s work was used as a starting point to reflect on what Burman and his nephew Pieter Burman the Younger (1713–78) saw as the downfall of French textual criticism. Finally, Burman’s own interest in the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of texts also allowed him to avoid involvement in politically sensitive matters, as was the case for Buchanan’s views in contemporary Scotland. The final example discussed in this chapter is the prefatory material written by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) for the edition of Erasmus’ Opera omnia (1703–6), in which Le Clerc dwells on the relationship between the study of ancient literature and other academic disciplines such as philosophy and theology.

Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-220
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter confronts the question of the politics of Gothic architecture in the long eighteenth century. Exploring manifestations of its Whiggish appeal, the argument also points to a number of notable Tory appropriations of the revived Gothic style. If the political significance of the Gothic was thus open to dispute, notions of improvement and repair were almost uniformly inflected with intimations of political radicalism, particularly after the French Revolution of 1789. Exploring the political meanings of improvement, repair, and ruination in the work of John Carter, the discussion extends this into a reading of political discourse of the 1790s, tracing political writers’ extensive appropriations of architectural metaphor. The chapter concludes with a reading of 1790s political Gothic fiction, showing how radical writers of the decade engaged with the politics of Gothic architecture while questioning the extent to which chivalry, romance, and other aesthetic ‘remains’ of the Gothic past could serve the needs of the present.

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