Presenting “Truth” in Early Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Shef Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Ascension Island ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Early Novel

This essay clarifies the bibliographical history of the three published accounts of the sufferings of a Dutch sailor abandoned on Ascension Island in 1726 for sodomy, but is ultimately less concerned with what actually happened than with how the story was represented in each of three versions and with what those changes might tell us about shifts in expectations of fiction readers between 1726 and 1740. It also examines how later critics have responded to the story to demonstrate that ideas about credibility are relative and socially determined. While narrative theory generally argues that “the more information we have on a narrator, the more concrete will be our sense of the quality and distinctness of his or her voice,” this case study questions that relationship, at least for the early novel, when narrative techniques and readerly practices were still being developed.

scholarly journals The Parthenon, Pericles and King Solomon: a case study of Ottoman archaeological imagination in Greece

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Key Fowden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The City

What made Athens different from other multi-layered cities absorbed into the Ottoman Empire was the strength of its ancient reputation for learning that echoed across the Arabic and Ottoman worlds. But not only sages were remembered and Islamized in Athens; sometimes political figures were too. In the early eighteenth century a mufti of Athens, Mahmud Efendi, wrote a rarely studiedHistory of the City of Sages (Tarih-i Medinetü’l-Hukema)in which he transformed Pericles into a wise leader on a par with the Qur'anic King Solomon and linked the Parthenon mosque to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.

A Taste for Criticism: ‘Buon Gusto’ and the Reform of Historical Scholarship in the Early Eighteenth-Century Italian Republic of Letters

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-467
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mithen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scholarly Production

Historians of scholarship and intellectual historians have recently been paying more attention to the social and epistemic conditioning of scholarly production. Informed by the history of science, such scholarship has shed light upon how knowledge production changed over time, and how its ‘legislation’, ‘administration’, and ‘institutionalisation’ varied in different contexts. This article explores the reform of intellectual culture in the early eighteenth-century Italian republic of letters, as a case-study in the application of such emergent methodologies. From around 1700, a nexus of ethical, aesthetical and epistemological ideals began to crystallize on the Italian peninsula, codified under the concept of ‘buon gusto’ or ‘good taste’. ‘Buon gusto’ became a point of reference for individual scholars, scholarly communities and literary journals seeking to reform scholarly practice. This led to the normalization of historical criticism as the dominant scholarly mode among Italian scholars by the mid-eighteenth century.

Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
History Of Logic ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Kantian Theory

This chapter discusses certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, which comprises the Logic compiled by Jäsche, Kant’s notes on logic, transcripts of his logic lectures, and remarks about logic in his own publications. It argues for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting, and historically significant. To ensure a principled application of this method, the chapter considers Kant’s conception of history against the background of the controversy between eclecticism and systematic philosophy that shaped the German philosophical discourse during the early eighteenth century. It thereby looks for an angle to make educated decisions about how to select materials from each of the periods considered in the book and builds a historical narrative that can best inform our understanding of Kant’s theory of logic.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England

1978 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roast Beef ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popish Plot

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

Court Jews, Printers, Book Publishing, and the Beginning of the Haskalah in the German Lands: The Life History of the Wulffian Printing Press as a Case-Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Gad Freudenthal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life History ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Continuous Contact ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Guide Of The Perplexed

Abstract This article presents the history of a printing press that operated at several places near Berlin during the first half of the eighteenth century, culminating in the epoch-making reprinting of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in 1742. The press was established in Dessau in 1694 by the court Jew Moses Wulff (1661–1729), and was run by several printers, notably the convert Israel b. Abraham (fl. 1715–1752). Using the trajectory of the Wulff press as a case study, I examine the relations between scholars, patrons of learning (especially court Jews), printers, and book publishing. The inquiry will highlight the considerable role that court Jews played in shaping the Jewish bookshelf, notably by choosing which books (reprints and original) would be funded. Surprisingly perhaps, although court Jews were in continuous contact with the environing culture, they did not usually favor the printing of non-traditional Jewish works that would favor a rapprochement.

“They say I am becoming greater than my peers” : An apprentice-scribe in early eighteenth-century Amsterdam*

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Roni Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Culture

Abstract This article examines an unknown collection of 16 letters written by the 14-year-old Moses Samuel ben Asher Anshel of Gendringen found in a small booklet for Purim that he copied in Amsterdam in 1713. In the letters, written in Hebrew and Yiddish and decorated with illustrated frames, Samuel (as he calls himself) writes to his parents about his studies and ambition to become a professional scribe. This article discusses Samuel’s letters as sources for the history of Jewish book culture in Early Modern Amsterdam, and for the history of professional Jewish scribes and copyists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It does so by offering an analysis of Samuel’s descriptions of his studies and his own self-perception, and of the letters in context of their presence in Samuel’s booklet.

scholarly journals Politeness in eighteenth-century drama: a discursive approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas H. Jucker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Restoration Drama ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Behaviour

AbstractFictional texts constitute complex communicative acts between an author and an audience, and they regularly depict interactions between characters. Both levels are susceptible to an analysis of politeness. This is particularly true for early eighteenth-century drama, which – in the context of the age of politeness – established new dramatic genres to educate and edify their audiences. Characters were used to demonstrate good or bad behaviour as examples to be followed or avoided. Early eighteenth-century drama was a reaction against what was considered to be the immorality and profanity of Restoration drama of the seventeenth century. Two plays serve as illustrations and a testing ground for an analysis of fictional politeness that considers both communicative levels; the play itself and the interactions within the play. Richard Steele’s sentimental comedy “The Conscious Lovers” (1722) gives an example of good behaviour by being exceedingly polite to the audience in the theatre through characters that are exceedingly polite to each other; and George Lillo’s domestic tragedy “The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell” (1731) shows the “private woe” of everyday characters in order to warn the younger generation against wrongdoing and to propagate middle-class virtues and moral values.

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