Officers and Gentlemen

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-61
Author(s):  
Noelle Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
Disease Focus ◽  
Sexual Promiscuity

This chapter asks what imaginative representations of venereal disease say about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward gender and sexuality. It does so by considering the portrayal of venereal infections in men. It is no coincidence that many of the positive representations of the disease focus on male rather than female subjects. It has been suggested that the sexual double standard (whereby men were applauded for sexual promiscuity and women punished for it) played some role in shaping imaginative representations of the infection. However, so too did a culture that linked infection to manliness and male power. While historians working with medical texts from the early modern period have tended to conclude that the disease was seen as originating with, and spread by, women, many eighteenth-century literary and artistic works imagine venereal disease as male—as a condition predominantly experienced by men, caused by male sexual indiscretion, and passed on by philandering husbands to their faithful wives and innocent children.

The Pox and Prostitution

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-113
Author(s):  
Noelle Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Many ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter examines the broad range of connections between venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century literature and visual art. It suggests that this period's imaginative conceptions of the relationship between female sexuality and venereal disease were both more nuanced and more complex than a blanket charge of misogyny allows. If the many sympathetic portraits of infected wives discussed in Chapter 1 constitute a challenge to the scholarly commonplace that women were blamed for the disease, then so too do the many neutral, and even positive, representations of infected prostitutes in this period. While some writers and artists clearly did vilify or ridicule diseased streetwalkers, some sympathized with them or campaigned for them; some celebrated them as examples of social mobility, sexual vigor, or physical resilience.

Free Trade before Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Free Trade Zone ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
Intellectual Legacy

Chapter 8 situates Livorno amidst a larger picture of competition in the central Mediterranean. It analyzes the spread of free ports by considering the two axes along which Italian ports liberalized during the early modern period: hospitality toward merchants and openness toward goods. Despite much institutional variation, a maritime free trade zone was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century. The intellectual legacy of free ports such as Livorno was nonetheless ambivalent. Though some Enlightenment thinkers used free ports to formulate general theories of free trade, others believed they promoted the subjection of state policy to foreign merchants.

Baroque Opera

2018 ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
Downing A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Social World ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Nested Structures ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Baroque Opera

The fundamental assumption of commentators from the early modern period is that tasteful music functions simultaneously to express sentiment and to move listener-spectators. The three core elements of the baroque operatic spectacle—poetry, music, and dance—are defined by their ability to express and convey passion. Commentators point to the particular ability of musical language—and its combination with poetry and movement—to represent that which is out of reach of spoken language, or below the threshold of linguistic representation. Although both dramma per musica and the tragédie en musique arose and were fundamentally grounded in monarchical cultural worlds, both also endured successfully as public art forms. Aesthetically, baroque opera exhibits and revels in nested structures, manifested in plays within plays and in references that place the operatic moment within a social world outside the opera. Opera left this aesthetic behind as it moved into the second half of the eighteenth century, influenced by the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the works of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck among others.

A Note on the Shipbuilding in Bengal in the Late Eighteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhaswati Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Shipbuilding Industry ◽  
The North ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.

scholarly journals Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700–1800: A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

ICAME Journal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irma Taavitsainen ◽  
Turo Hiltunen ◽  
Anu Lehto ◽  
Ville Marttila ◽  
Päivi Pahta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Medical English ◽  
Late Modern

scholarly journals The Dramaturgy of Female Gender  in Early Modern English Theatre:  An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Gender Boundaries

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

Respectable Mistresses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

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