Originality, Plagiarism, and Posthumous Publication: Grace Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
Complex Methods ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This article explores early modern ideas of originality by reconsidering the critical treatment of one of the first printed female-authored volumes of essays in English: Grace, Lady Gethin’s Misery’s Virtues Whet-stone. Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699). Previous scholars of Gethin’s work have used her unacknowledged intertextual borrowings from writers such as Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall to deride her work as unoriginal, plagiaristic, and uninteresting. By comparing Gethin’s essays to her source texts, this article reads Reliquiæ Gethinianæ’s intertextuality as a revealing insight into practices of commonplacing, the literary tastes of early modern women, and the importance of attending to unexceptional readers. It also attempts to reconstruct the intentions behind newly uncovered post-print editing of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ by Gethin’s mother. Manuscript citations made by Frances, Lady Norton in carefully selected copies of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ demonstrate the complex methods used to cultivate and maintain the integrity of Gethin’s posthumous reputation: highlighting her immersion in prestigious scholarly sources, and tactfully downplaying her reliance on Madeleine de Scudéry’s less reputable epic prose romance Clelia (1654–1660).

Anne Conway’s Response to Cartesianism

2019 ◽  
pp. 706-720
Author(s):  
Christia Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical Ideas ◽  
Insight Into

Anne Conway (1631–79) was an English philosopher whose only work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously in 1690. Conway’s arguments against Descartes’s account of matter constitute a cutting criticism of his views and offer significant insight into an important and under-studied anti-Cartesian trend in the second half of the seventeenth century. Conway’s response to Descartes helps us discern some of the more original and radical ideas in her philosophy. Like so many other significant early modern women, Conway was left out of the history of philosophy by later thinkers.

Putting the auto in the auto de fe

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-247
Author(s):  
DALE SHUGER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Spanish Baroque ◽  
Creative Self ◽  
Insight Into

Buried in the miscellaneous writings of Capuchin abbess Sor María Ángela Astorch (1592-1665) is a curious spiritual exercise the author calls ‘teatro santo’. In it, Sor María, never herself investigated by the Inquisition, imagines herself as a priest being sentenced to death in an auto de fe. The exercise is practised in total solitude, but also requires props and costume. Sor María inhabits various identities and voices in her account, moving freely between genders and roles, as well as between her embodied identity and her imagined ones. This article argues that the ‘teatro santo’, while singular in its particulars, may give insight into how a female public reacted to the diverse genres of performance that characterize the Spanish Baroque. Sor María’s identification with multiple ‘characters’, and her creative self-insertion into the narrative, shows how early modern women could cultivate creative freedom within, and without disturbing, the most restrictive spaces.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

THE EARLY MODERN ORIGINS OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-54
Author(s):  
Richard Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Behavioral Psychology ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
The Social

AbstractFor all the recent discoveries of behavioral psychology and experimental economics, the spirit of homo economicus still dominates the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology. Turning back to the earliest chapters of political economy, however, reveals that pioneering figures such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith were hardly apostles of economic rationality as they are often portrayed in influential narratives of the development of the social sciences. As we will see, while all three of these thinkers can plausibly be read as endorsing “rationality,” they were also well aware of the systematic irrationality of human conduct, including a remarkable number of the cognitive biases later “discovered” by contemporary behavioral economists. Building on these insights I offer modest suggestions for how these thinkers, properly understood, might carry the behavioral revolution in different directions than those heretofore suggested.

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