Libertine and Libertinism: Polemic Uses of the Terms in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English and Scottish Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Cavaillé
2021 ◽  
pp. 130-185
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock

This chapter focuses on literary and cultural works dealing with Scotland's attempt to colonize Darien, at the Isthmus of Panama, in the 1690s. It establishes Darien as a central trope in Scottish literature by analyzing works from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including novels, poetry, drama, songs, and political treatises by William Paterson, William Burnaby, Eliot Warburton, Douglas Galbraith, David Nicol, Alistair Beaton, and anonymous female authors. It illustrates how these depictions interact with other political and ideological trajectories in Scotland and the UK, including Jacobitism, Anglo-Scottish relations, and revisionist historical writing. The chapter establishes images of Darien gold and material possession as central structuring devices of Scottish colonial literature, which stand in conflict with depictions of Scotland's alleged kindness towards the indigenous populations of Panama. The chapter argues that narratives of benevolence together with narratives of gold and material possessions turn the colonial utopian tradition into a full-fledged myth of the Scottish Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth century. The mythologization of the colonial sphere together with the mythologization of the Scottish settlers functions as an aesthetic instrument to enter the competition over power in the late-seventeenth-century Atlantic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 80-129
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock

This chapter focuses on Scottish Atlantic literature from the 1660s to the early 1690s. It explores how colonial utopian writing broadened in the mid-seventeenth century to include drama, life writing, legal sources, and abolitionist texts, including not only literature directly linked to Atlantic expansion but also texts usually associated with domestic Scottish literature, such as Thomas Sydserf's Tarugo's Wiles: Or, the Coffee-House (1668) or Archibald Pitcairne's The Assembly; Or, Scotch Reformation (1691). Engaging with recent works on Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery and the Black Atlantic, the chapter seeks to broaden understandings of how Scottish literature and culture participated in the development of the Black Atlantic and Eurocentric thought. The chapter further looks at legal and governmental sources relating to New Jersey and the Middle Colonies from the 1680s onwards, at abolitionist writings, and texts that pertain to the Six Nations and indigenous populations of the Americas. All of these bring out the paradoxes of possession versus dispossession and of freedom versus enslavement in Scottish colonial literature. They illustrate how aesthetic devices of utopianism work towards spatializing the colonial sphere and trying to stabilize boundaries between colonizing and colonized subjects.


Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock

Scottish Colonial Literature is a comprehensive study of Scottish colonial writing before 1707. It brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial literature before the Union of Parliaments. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. Offering case studies relating to colonial undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and at the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s), Scottish Colonial Literature explores how literature and culture shaped Scotland's colonial ventures in the seventeenth century. In addition, it considers works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic so as to illuminate how the Atlantic shaped seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. One key question running through the book is the relationship between art and ideology. Textual narratives were powerful instruments of empire-building throughout the early modern period. This book focuses on utopianism as a framework that authors used to claim power over the Atlantic. In the Scottish context, the intersections between utopianism and colonialism shed light on the ambiguous narratives of possession and dispossession as well as internal and external colonialism in Scottish colonial writing of the seventeenth century. Scottish Colonial Literature enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature.


1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Cohen
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


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