Before Infrastructure: The Poetics of Paving in John Gay's Trivia

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (5) ◽  
pp. 1134-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Alff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
John Gay ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Infrastructuralism denotes an emerging field of critical inquiry dedicated to understanding the facilities, equipment, and personnel that deliver civilization's most basic amenities, including water, light, heat, waste disposal, and transportation. How did writers portray infrastructure before it became a word and concept? In his 1716 mock-georgic poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay depicted one element of eighteenth-century society's built underpinnings, the street, as an assemblage of decaying but reparable matter, a site for disparately institutionalized forms of labor, and an array of moral and navigational possibilities called ways. Listening to Trivia's representation of road making can yield both an early modern idea of the city as object of upkeep and a historicized poetics of infrastructure able to make meaning of civic enterprise present and past.

City Powd’ring

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-111
Author(s):  
James M. Bromley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Sexual Knowledge ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
City Comedy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Alternate Forms ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term positions the cloth trade as pivotal to the construction of sexuality and sexual relations in the city. Circulating with cloth in the play is queer urban sexual knowledge. Antitheatricalists feared that the theater was a site of sexual pedagogy and initiation in the early modern period. Michaelmas Term subtly embraces that role for the city comedy, and the chapter draws on queer theories of materiality to demonstrate that the play’s relentless focus on the materiality of selfhood is pertinent in querying the limits of biological determinism and essentialism that characterize mainstream politics around sexuality today. The play can prompt us to consider how alternate forms of queer ontogenesis derived from the past have affordances for the production of queer culture in the present.

The Loving Community

Caritas ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
Family Household ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
A Site

Caritas was an idea with resonance across early modern Europe, but given shape and form within particular national or religious contexts. This chapter introduces how the Scottish Kirk envisioned caritas as an embodied ethic—an experience of love that was manifested in deportment, thought, feeling, and behaviour—as well as its widespread take-up as a cultural norm. It particularly highlights that the family—the holy household—was imagined as the basis of a social order founded on caritas and introduces how the idea of caritas shaped the practice of the family-household relationships in eighteenth-century Scotland. It explores how the family was located not just as a site of patriarchal discipline, but also of peace and comfort, where fighting and quarrelling (excesses of passion) should be minimized. The family-household was not formed in private, however: its loving behaviours were interpreted and given meaning by a watching community.

Assessed taxes as sources for the study of urban wealth: Bristol in the later eighteenth century

Urban History ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 31-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Baigent
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rural Land ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Industrial History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Tax Returns ◽  
National Tax ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

Little is known of the value of eighteenth-century rates and taxes as sources for the urban historian. Corfield, in her study of eighteenth-century Norwich, stated in 1976 that ‘the stereotyped nature of eighteenth-century tax assessments precludes use of fiscal data from national sources’ and this is a fair reflection of the then and to some extent the current orthodoxy, despite Rudé's pioneering studies of the 1960s in which he used land tax and poor rate returns to estimate the wealth of the electorate of Hanoverian London and Middlesex. Schwarz, in a study of late-eighteenth-century London, could still comment in 1979 that for eighteenth-century rates and taxes ‘little is known beyond general impressions’. Recently, however, Wright has thrown interesting light on the use of the Easter books and poor rates of early-modern towns and cities, and the 1986 volume on the land tax edited by Turner and Mills, although still largely concerned with the use of rural land tax assessments, includes three chapters on the value of the assessments in urban and industrial history. The writers hope that city rate and national tax returns might play a fuller role as historical sources, but their optimism is tempered with caution because of the returns' intractability and inconsistency. It is hoped here to reinforce both their enthusiasm and their caution, to reveal additional pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them and in particular to extend the debate to the neglected pre-1780 assessments and to the city of Bristol.

Epilogue

2012 ◽  
pp. 226-230
Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Remarkable Feature ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The City

This chapter identifies the most important characteristics of poverty and welfare among the Portuguese community of early modern Amsterdam. One remarkable feature of the poor in the Amsterdam Portuguese milieu is the prominence of women, until recently hardly considered. The reasons for this were manifold: as a key group in the effort to perpetuate Jewish tradition in the peninsula, women were consistently persecuted by the Inquisition and many fled in fear of it, as well as out of the desire to live openly as Jews. Also, economic opportunities for men outside the Dutch Republic led to many women being left on their own in the city, dependent on welfare. The poor relief provided by the Portuguese community was not exceptionally generous, at least when judged by Amsterdam standards, nor was it granted permanently to all poor people. The system was hierarchical and elitist, presided over by a closed, wealthy caste who ran a strict regime. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam Portuguese community had lost its international attraction as a place of refuge.

scholarly journals Situating Pārśva’s Biography in Varanasi

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Ellen Gough
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

This study shows how Varanasi, a site that many people understand to be a sacred Hindu city, has been made “Jain” through its association with the lives of four of the twenty-four enlightened founders of Jainism, the jinas or tīrthaṅkaras. It provides an overview of the Jain sites of worship in Varanasi, focusing especially on how events in the life of the twenty-third tīrthaṅkara Pārśva were placed in the city from the early modern period to the present day in order to bring Jain wealth and resources to the city. It examines the temple-building programs of two Śvetāmbara renunciants in particular: the temple-dwelling Kuśalacandrasūri of the Kharataragaccha (initiated in 1778), and the itinerant Ācārya Rājayaśasūri of the Tapāgaccha (b. 1945). While scholars and practitioners often make a strong distinction between the temple-dwelling monks (yatis) who led the Śvetāmbara community in the early modern period and the peripatetic monks (munis) who emerged after reforms in the late nineteenth-century—casting the former as clerics and the latter as true renunciants—ultimately, the lifestyles of Kuśalacandrasūri and Rājayaśasūri appear to be quite similar. Both these men have drawn upon the wealth of Jain merchants and texts—the biographies of Pārśva—to establish their lineage’s presence in Varanasi through massive temple-building projects.

scholarly journals Treatment rates for the pox in early modern England: a comparative estimate of the prevalence of syphilis in the city of Chester and its rural vicinity in the 1770s

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON SZRETER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Rural Region ◽  
Resident Population ◽  
Comparative Estimate ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
Important Disease

ABSTRACTThis article offers an innovative attempt to construct an empirically-based estimate of the extent of syphilis prevailing in two contrasting populations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Thanks to the co-incident survival of both a detailed admissions register for Chester Infirmary and a pioneering census of the city of Chester in 1774 taken by Dr John Haygarth, it is possible to produce age-specific estimates of the extent to which adults of each sex had been treated for the pox by age 35. These estimates can be produced both for the resident population of Chester city and comparatively for the rural region immediately surrounding Chester. These are the first estimates of the prevalence of this important disease produced for the eighteenth century and they can be compared with similar figures for England and Wales c. 1911–1912.

Surat

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-238
Author(s):  
Martha Chaiklin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Port City ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The City

In the eighteenth century, Surat was perhaps the single most important port city of the Moghul empire, if not the world. Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese ships were called from Africa and Brazil to obtain Gujarati textiles, side by side with dhows from the throughout the Indian Ocean. This textile trade was underpinned by ivory, large amounts of which poured in the city both by caravan and by sea. Even though Surat, or even Gujarat, was not elephant habitat in the early modern period, Surat became a significant port for the import of ivory into India. The need for tusks of an appropriate size for bangles created symbiosis of trade between Gujarati textiles and ivory that directly affected the prosperity of Surat. The chapter thus links Surat to the Indian Ocean World through ivory and demonstrate the interconnected nature of ivory and textiles in the Gujarat region.

A Paper Tour of the Metropolis : The Architecture of Early Modern London in the Royal Magazine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Virtual Tour ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The City ◽  
Accessible Form ◽  
As If

In the middle of the eighteenth century, as the magazine trade in Britain became increasingly competitive, publications began offering their readers illustrations. Beginning in 1761, The Royal Magazine published several illustrations of buildings in London as part of ‘A Tour through the Cities of London and Westminster’. Many of these illustrations represented London buildings through perspective views, often with urban spectators shown looking at them, as if they were in the middle of their own tour of the city’s architecture. This essay explores how this series of illustrations formed a virtual tour of London’s most notable buildings, making the capital’s architecture available in a highly accessible form, as if people could move through the city while moving through the pages.

Mapping the early modern city

Urban History ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Hills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.

scholarly journals Árvaság és mártírium

2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (3–4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gergely Tamás Fazakas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

I argue that widowhood (often called “orphanage” in early modern texts) was an important metaphor of the contemporary Hungarian Calvinist Church. Several prayers, prayer books, congregational songs, jeremiads and sermons represented the martyrdom of the Church (and of the Hungarian nation as well) as a “helpless widow”, and lamented in her name. This cultural and rhetoric pattern was created and prescribed for the communities by several early modern texts, and were based on scriptural quotations from the Old Testament. (For instance: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!” Lamentations 1, 1) I examine this metaphor not only in late seventeenth century texts, but also in the eighteenth century, when authors could not write openly about the Calvinist Church because of the new and increased censorship of the Habsburgs and the Catholic settlers in Transylvania. The representational patterns of Calvinist women in the eighteenth century is explored in this study thorough the example of countess Kata Bethlen.

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