“Modern Biography”: Form, Function, and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Genre Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-55
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Proper Selection ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Form Function ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Periodical Essays

This essay outlines the comprehensive theory of “modern” eighteenth-century biography that was articulated throughout the century in the often lengthy prefaces to collections of lives, disseminated in periodical essays, and applied in reviews to stand-alone lives. This theory addressed the proper selection, presentation, and treatment of both individual and collected “lives.” It gave biography national, historical, commercial, and educational functions; detailed the components of its life-historical narrative and of its critical portions; set standards for what constituted “a fair and full account” of a character, life, and works; and contained in embryo virtually all aspects of biography that would later be singled out as the primary or most valued characteristic of biographical writing. This essay describes the ways biographers and theorists confronted and resolved two ubiquitous difficulties arising from their consensus that “fame or celebrity among us in their generation” was “the grand principle” on which biography was founded: first, how to “do justice” to a person on the basis of sources and testimonials that reflected the partisanship of a country “rent by faction” since the Reformation; and second, how to represent people who had been celebrated in their own time, but not in the biographer's later generation.

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.

The Anglican Hierarchy and the Reformation of Manners 1688–1738

1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Historians

Few have studied the early eighteenth-century Church. Caught between puritan triumphs and the Methodist revival, its polemics and efforts at rejuvenation have gone largely unnoticed. Those historians who have noticed describe an Anglican hierarchy lacking in talent and drive and a population devoid of piety and religious fervour. Both of these images are incorrect, as more recent scholarship has begun to suggest. Church historians now concentrate primarily on biographies of famous ecclesiastics and monographs (and articles) on some of the more lively events such as SacheverelPs trial and the Convocation controversy. But no one has systematically explored the Church's attempts to combat the decline brought about by the Toleration Act of 1689 and by its own avoidance of earlier enthusiasms.

The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi*

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

This essay explores the role that the eighteenth-century Uffizi gallery played in the invention of the Renaissance. Under the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers, and especially during the reign of Grand Duke Peter Leopold (r. 1765–90), changes to the Medici collections and the gallery’s organization transformed an early modern cabinet of curiosities, paintings, and antiquities into a space in which a historical narrative of art, inspired by rereadings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, became visible in a building he designed. A succession of Uffizi personnel was increasingly preoccupied with how to see renaissance, and more specifically Tuscan rinascita, in the collections. The struggles between the director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and his vice-director Luigi Lanzi highlight how different understandings of the Renaissance emerged in dialogue with antiquarianism and medievalism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Uffizi would definitively become a museum of the Renaissance to inspire new forms of historical writing in the age of Michelet and Burckhardt.

Reformation without end

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

The Churches and the ’45

1983 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 253-262
Author(s):  
Françoise Deconinck-Brossard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Crucial Part

The limits of this short paper will not allow me to give a full account of the question, but only to consider some aspects of the sermons preached on the occasion of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. There was a spate of sermons published at the time, not only by famous whig bishops, understandably eager to prove their zeal for the house of Hanover, but also by unknown members of the inferior clergy who felt the need to express their loyalty to the establishment. In many cases, the sermons they preached were the only ones they ever published. It is worth noting, in this respect, that the names of only five antijacobite preachers are to be found in the DNB. This phenomenon, namely the crucial part played by humble preachers, is all the more remarkable as it is in marked contrast with other fields of eighteenth-century pulpit oratory. (Charity sermons, for instance, could only be delivered by bishops or archdeacons or by well-known speakers with a good preaching reputation). Besides, nonconformist ministers were as anxious as their Church of England counterparts to be regarded as pillars of the Hanoverian cause, so that they too had many sermons printed for the occasion. From the available evidence, it is reasonable to assume that they sold well. On the flyleaf of any one of these pamphlets, John Hildyard, the York printer, with his usual advertising techniques, set out a list of other sermons published on the same theme, as an incentive to buy further books on the subject.

Religious Societies and the Origins of Methodism

1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 582-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry D. Rack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Reformation

Even the darkest accounts of the eighteenth-century Church of England have generally singled out the religious societies of (various sorts as a bright spark in the gathering Latitudinarian gloom. They included: private devotional groups (‘the religious societies’); the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (referred to here as ‘the SRMs’); the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG); and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which also supported charity schools. Taken together, these activities seem to add up to a considerable movement of religious renewal. The devotional religious societies are of particular interest because of their problematical relationship to the origins of the evangelical revival and of Methodism in particular. The present paper is mainly concerned with this question.

Is Faith a Form of Feeling?

1911 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
A. C. Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Evidential Value ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Civilized World

Like the appeal to faith at large, the tendency to conceive faith as emotion may proceed from various motives. In contrast to an arid intellectualism, or with a view to curing practical corruption, it is urged in furtherance of earnest religious experience. This was the case in the pre-reformation and the Reformation age, and again during the revival in the eighteenth century in England. In eras of doubt the faith of feeling is commended as a substitute for the halting processes of reason, with their dubious or negative conclusions. This motive also was active in the era of renascence and reform, and it has markedly influenced the religious development of later modern times. Such motives, moreover, rest upon a basis of truth. The heart has its rights as well as the head, and its deliverances possess an evidential value. In periods of intellectual change the witness of the heart gains special importance as an aid to faith until the reason can adjust itself to the new conditions. The faith which purifies and the faith which inspires is always the faith which is experienced. These principles need emphasis now less than ever before, for there has never been a period in which they have been so often advocated, and with so great authority, as in the last century and a half. In our own time, in part by voices which have only lately ceased to speak to us, they have been urged with a persuasive eloquence that has carried them throughout the civilized world. Formulated in technical fashion, they have entered into the reflection of the age until they have become one of its most characteristic and most significant philosophies of religion.

Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 106-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Professional Fields

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

scholarly journals ABSENT CADENCES

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANUTA MIRKA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Slow Movement ◽  
Incidental Music ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Rhetorical Figure ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
John Owen ◽  
Music Theorist

ABSTRACTThe slow movement of Symphony No. 64 in A major, ‘Tempora mutantur’, has long intrigued Haydn scholars on account of its absent cadences and enigmatic form. The Latin title of the symphony is thought to be derived from the epigram by John Owen, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, and it was used by Elaine Sisman to support her hypothesis that the slow movement formed part of Haydn's incidental music for Shakespeare's Hamlet. The enigma can be explained through an analysis informed by concepts native to eighteenth-century music theory. The absent cadences create instances of ellipsis, a rhetorical figure described by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and the form plays with a familiar template codified by Heinrich Christoph Koch. This analysis leads to a different interpretation. Rather than suggesting the protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedy, the movement stages a fictive composer in an act of musical comedy not dissimilar to that in Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’. The title comes not from Owen but from a Latin adage that was incorporated by Owen into his epigram. This adage had been popular in Germany since the Reformation and was then applied by one eighteenth-century music theorist to describe changes of musical conventions.

scholarly journals “The Glorious Work of the Reformation”: Andrew Fuller and the Imitation of Martin Luther

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
MICHAEL A. G. HAYKIN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Courageous Action ◽  
The Way

Abstract: While a high view of the life and work of Martin Luther was maintained only in certain quarters of Anglophone Christianity by the close of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth-century Evangelical revival led to a profound rediscovery of him. This article examines the way one such Evangelical, the Baptist Andrew Fuller, who does not appear to have read Luther directly, regularly cited him as a model to be imitated when it came to preaching and courageous action.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document