Marketing Mathematics in Early Eighteenth-Century England: Henry Beighton, Certainty, and the Public Sphere

2002 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Costa
2015 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Liam Mac Mathúna ◽  

Seán Ó Neachtain (c. 1640–1729) and his son Tadhg (1671–c.1752) were at the centre of a network of some thirty Irish language scholars which existed in Dublin in the early eighteenth century. The modernising tendencies demonstrated by Tadhg in his manuscripts continue to attract considerable academic attention. The poem beginning Sloinfead scothadh na Gaoidhilge grinn / dá raibhe rém rae i Nduibhlinn, composed by Tadhg in 1728/29, celebrates some 26 scholars connected with the city at the time, while six of his manuscripts contain commonplace entries and incorporate many contemporary newspaper accounts of events in Ireland and abroad, both in Irish translation and in the original English, alongside more familiar material associated with the Gaelic literary tradition. This paper sees the versified catalogue of scholars in Dublin and the manuscript interaction with news from the public sphere in Dublin and abroad as relating to new understandings of information, coupled with the urge to record, tabulate and interact. Among other sources which will be considered are Tadhg's list of family events (births, deaths) (in Irish), an inventory of books and manuscripts lent out (in English) and poems celebrating his father's creative works and listing the subjects and teachers who provided his son Peadar's schooling (both in Irish). Finally, an attempt will be made to situate Tadhg Ó Neachtain's interaction with information and knowledge with other aspects of the Gaelic tradition.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.


2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.


1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Carnell

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Brontë's narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.


PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Flint

An enormously popular narrative device, speaking objects were used frequently in eighteenth-century British fiction to express authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere. Relating the speaking object to the author's status in a print culture, works featuring such narrators characteristically align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. The objects celebrate their capacity to exploit both private and public systems of circulation, such as libraries, banks, booksellers' shops, highways, and taverns. Linking storytelling to commodities and capital, they convey an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination, economic exchange, and public use appear homologous. But as object narratives dramatize, such circulation estranges modern authors from their work. Far from mediating between private and public experience or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, these narratives record the indiscriminate consumption that characterizes the public sphere in a print culture.


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