On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century

The Conclusion begins by bringing the story of Dares up to the decades around 1700. It considers both changes and continuities in Dares’ afterlife over the course of the preceding millennium. It then examines the neglected role of the Destruction of Troy in two developments long linked to the eighteenth century: namely, the origins of modern professionalized classical scholarship and the advent of a sense of “disenchantment” concerning the truth-value of ancient texts and traditions. It places Dares within the so-called “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” (querelle des anciens et des modernes) and examines the commentary on the Destruction of Troy composed by the French classical scholar Anne Dacier (a partisan of the “ancients” who later defended Homer against “modern” critiques). It also discusses invocations of Dares by figures including Jean Mabillon, Giambattista Vico, and Thomas Jefferson. The Conclusion ends with broader reflections on what Dares’ reception history can tell us about the paradoxes inherent in modern approaches to antiquity.

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PROPORTIONATE MAIMING: THE ORIGINS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON'S PROVISIONS FOR FACIAL DISFIGUREMENT IN BILL 64

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society ◽

10.1017/s0080440119000069 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 29 ◽

pp. 127-151

Author(s):

Emily Cock

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Death Penalty ◽

Thomas Jefferson ◽

Facial Appearance ◽

Anglo Saxon ◽

Facial Disfigurement ◽

The Law ◽

Formed Part ◽

Facial Difference

ABSTRACTIn 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed the use of nose-cutting to punish women convicted of specific offences, and the use of retaliation (lex talionis) for anyone who deliberately disfigured another person. These punishments were intended to replace the death penalty for these crimes, and as such formed part of Jefferson's attempt to rationalise the Virginian law code in line with eighteenth-century reform principles. Jefferson drew on British laws from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Coventry Act for his bill, but his proposals contrast strikingly with British movements away from corporal marking as punishment used against their own citizens. This article examines the origins and fates of equivalent crimes and punishments in the law codes Jefferson examined, and compares the legal and wider connotations of facial appearance and disfigurement that made these proposals coherent in Virginia when they had long ceased elsewhere. Tracing examples and discussion of these intersecting cases will greatly increase our understanding of Jefferson's proposals, and the relationships between facial difference, stigma and disability in eighteenth-century America.

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The Journée du Dix AoÛt as Witnessed by a Yankee Merchant

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875810002422 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 89-101

Author(s):

WILLIAM L. CHEW

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Thomas Jefferson ◽

Grand Tour ◽

Street Scene ◽

Insight Into ◽

The French Revolution ◽

John Trumbull ◽

The Revolution

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.

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Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral Economies

Speculative Fictions ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198859130.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 75-133

Author(s):

Elizabeth Hewitt

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Economic Policy ◽

Thomas Jefferson ◽

Formal Structure ◽

Rural Setting ◽

The Political ◽

Economic Science ◽

John Taylor ◽

Political Economic

This chapter argues that resistance to Hamiltonian finance was both an economic and literary critique. The familiar opposition between Hamiltonian finance and Jeffersonian agrarianism has put the stress on the rural setting—an emphasis that has led scholars to talk about economic policy with the literary term, “pastoralism.” This chapter argues that the importance of the pastoral to Jeffersonian writers is not found in agrarianism, but on the formal structure of simplification that is essential to pastoral poetics. This same imperative toward simplicity is also located in the eighteenth-century economic science that was crucial to the Jeffersonians: French physiocracy. The chapter explains the importance of physiocracy and pastoralism to the political-economic writing of Thomas Jefferson, George Logan, and John Taylor of Caroline.

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