scholarly journals 'Weighty Celebrity': Corpulency, Monstrosity, and Freakery in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Conjoined Twins ◽  
Fat Studies ◽  
Additional Input ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
English Society ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Source Materials

Obesity seems to have become prevalent in English society in the eighteenth century, likely as a result of changes in the country's diet such as an increasing consumption of sugar. With the greater incidence of corpulence in the population came more fat individuals on England's lucrative show circuit, joining the conjoined twins, hermaphrodites, dwarfs, giants, and individuals of different ethnicities who had peopled London's pubs, coffee houses, and exhibition halls for centuries. This article contextualizes historical corpulency in terms of early modern monstrosity and nineteenth-century freakery, with additional input from the modern Fat Studies and Disability Studies movements, in order to explore public consciousness about and fascination with particularly obese individuals, epitomized by the fattest men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the 616-pound (279 kg) Edward Bright and the 739-pound (335 kg) Daniel Lambert. Using a variety of source materials—newspaper articles, dieting pamphlets, medical and scientific essays, advertising leaflets and etchings, and popular histories about the lives of famous individuals—this essay argues that, though extremely corpulent individuals needed to exist in the first place in order to be incorporated into the show circuit, it was society's fascination with these new, unusual bodies that allowed them to rise into prominence as an entertainment feature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

scholarly journals Феномен самоубийства в России XVIII в.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Александр Каменский
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Emotional Perception ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

The history of suicide in Russia, especially prior to the nineteenth century, remains understudied. While in most European countries the process of decriminalization and secularization of suicide was underway, in Russia, with the introduction of the Military Article of 1715, it was formally criminalized. On the basis of the study of more than 350 newly examined archival cases, this article examines how the transfer of suicide investigations to secular authorities also entailed secularization, while the peculiarities of the Russian judicial and investigative system, as well as lacunae in the legislation, actually led to the gradual decriminalization of suicide. At the same time, although among Russians, as well as among other peoples, a number of superstitions were associated with suicide, there is no evidence in the archival documents studied in this article of a particularly emotional perception of suicide. The phenomenon of suicide in eighteenth-century Russia, when compared to early modern Europe, did not have any significant, fundamental differences. However, the features of the Russian judicial-investigative system made this phenomenon less public, less visible and less significant for public consciousness.  

Post-Byzantine hermeneiai zographikes in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in the Balkans during the nineteenth century

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Moutafov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.

The Missing Rabbis of Eastern Europe

2010 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ashkenazi Jewish ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter examines the east European rabbinate. The rabbinate in modern eastern Europe was not significantly different from the rabbinate in other Ashkenazi Jewish communities up to the eighteenth century. In the following years, many aspects of rabbinical authority changed in almost every country of Europe. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of developments altered the conditions of rabbinic authority in eastern Europe in unique ways, and also made the selection of communal rabbis more complex than previously. Many of these changes contributed to a weakening of the power and status of the rabbinate — a power and status that were not exceptionally strong to start with. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns of the east European rabbinate were far from the traditional Ashkenazi model because the community, as a body that collected taxes and had internal authority, had ceased to exist.

scholarly journals The Making of the “Malay Pirate” in Early Modern European Thought

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Stefan Eklöf Amirell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
European Thought

This article traces the long historical background of the nineteenth-century European notion of the Malay as a human “race” with an inherent addiction to piracy. For most of the early modern period, European observers of the Malay Archipelago associated the Malays with the people and diaspora of the Sultanate of Melaka, who were seen as commercially and culturally accomplished. This image changed in the course of the eighteenth century. First, the European understanding of the Malay was expanded to encompass most of the indigenous population of maritime Southeast Asia. Second, more negative assessments gained influence after the mid-eighteenth century, and the Malays were increasingly associated with piracy, treachery, and rapaciousness. In part, the change was due to the rise in maritime raiding on the part of certain indigenous seafaring peoples of Southeast Asia combined with increasing European commercial interests in Southeast Asia, but it was also part of a generally more negative view in Europe of non-settled and non-agricultural populations. This development preceded the notion of the Malays as one of humanity’s principle races, which emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. The idea that Malays were natural pirates also paved the way for several brutal colonial anti-piracy campaigns in the Malay Archipelago during the nineteenth century.

Early Modern Jansenism

2015 ◽  
pp. 435-450
Author(s):  
Ephraim Radner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Reformation Movement

This chapter presents Jansenism as an originally seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation movement with a key commitment to a certain theology of grace. This had several pastoral consequences that were broadly influential among both Catholics and Protestants, especially in the areas of scriptural study and devotion. Jansenist interest in the Augustinian tradition, however, proved a losing cause within the evolving modern church. Three papal bulls condemned certain Jansenist ideas and provided the impetus for the conflict with Rome, the French monarchy, and other institutions. The major political aspects associated with the movement in the eighteenth century eventually overwhelmed its theology and hopes. By the nineteenth century, the movement’s final political phase was seen as an amalgam of anti-papalism, anti-Jesuitism, conciliarism, republicanism, and nationalism.

The Affair of the Pigeon Droppings: Rural Schoolmasters in Eighteenth-Century France

Rural History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN E. CARTER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Pigeon Droppings ◽  
Rural France ◽  
The Village

AbstractThis article examines the role played by village schoolmasters in eighteenth-century rural France. Although schoolmasters were not supported or regulated by the state, as they would be a century later, they were able to navigate successfully the complex network of social relationships that existed within early modern rural society. Using the journal of one schoolmaster, Pierre Delahaye, the article demonstrates that in addition to teaching, schoolmasters also worked as record keepers for village notables, as clerks for the parish, and even cleaned the churches and belfries. The schoolmaster's position afforded him a much greater social position than might be assumed from knowledge of only his income and background, and even allowed him to serve as a mediator between the village and the curé. Thus it can be argued that schoolmasters of the eighteenth century were as important to rural society as their state supported counterparts of the nineteenth century.

‘Wee be black as Hell’: Ritual, Disguise and Rebellion

Rural History ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alun Howkins ◽  
Linda Merricks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Random Event

This essay began from a continuity, or perhaps a persistence. Working as historians and cultural critics in very different periods, early modern England and the nineteenth-century countryside, we have both been struck for some years by continuities of behaviour in situations of riot or disorder. At one level this was first pointed to in the work of E.P. Thompson and George Rude in relation to eighteenth-century riot. Both these writers argued that far from riot being a spontaneous, anarchic and random event it was nearly always structured and organised. Thompson in particular introduced, through the notion of ‘moral economy’, the idea that rioters shared ideas about ‘right’ which Were related to an earlier customary social and economic order. From a very different, but equally important perspective, we have both been profoundly influenced by the flowering of cultural studies associated with the work of Mikhail Bahktin, and cultural anthropology growing from the work of Victor Turner and Pierre Bourdieu. In these Writers we found arguments about boundaries and structures which were both erected and transgressed by rituals of various kinds. Finally, a very few historians working on riot and popular disorder have been struck by the same continuity, notably, Michael Beames in his study of Whiteboyism, and very recently, Andrew Charlesworth in the Pages of this journal. This brief essay will seek to illuminate our notion of continuity, using some of these ideas. It is offered not as a definitive piece, but rather as an interpretation of some of these materials.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Self ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The Introductory chapter discusses the overarching question of the book: how did it all begin? Since when did the self-defined Great Powers of the nineteenth century––Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia––come to assume responsibility for providing security in the Levant. Why? The Introduction traces the answer of these questions to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and maintains that Great Power interventions in the nineteenth-century Levant need to be considered not only in reference to their immediate causes, theatres, and implications. It is essential to take into account the continuity that European and Levantine actors saw in regional affairs from the late eighteenth century through until at least the mid-nineteenth. There is a need to foreground the persistent patterns or cultures of security within which violence was generated and sustained, and how the quest for security acted as an organizing principle of international relations. It also discusses the importance of considering these interventions in the fabric of the Eastern Question. It invites the readers to view the latter not only as a European question, as the existing literature has us believe, but also as an Ottoman question, whereby the agency of the Ottoman ministers and other local actors was more central than has been documented.

scholarly journals POLICING PEDDLERS: THE PROSECUTION OF ILLEGAL STREET TRADE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH TOWNS

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELLE VAN DEN HEUVEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

AbstractStreet vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

Tajuro's Jacket: A Story of Japanese Castaways, Russian Ambassadors and a Remarkable Early Nineteenth-Century Sailor's Jacket

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-265
Author(s):  
Tyler Rudd Putman ◽  
Matthew Brenckle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Japanese Men ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This article examines the historical and material context of a rare sailor's jacket, c. 1804, probably produced in England and worn by a Japanese castaway named Tajuro (among the first Japanese men to circumnavigate the globe) during a Russian expedition to Japan. We place Tajuro's jacket in the longer history of garments worn by sailors and labourers. Because it is the only surviving example definitively used at sea by an identified seaman on a particular voyage, from the long eighteenth century, Tajuro's jacket provides a glimpse into what European, Russian, and American sailors wore in this era. It is an invaluable addition to the scanty material archive of common sailors’ clothing with a story that shows the global possibilities of early modern travel.

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