Sacred Forms and the Crowd's Guilt in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Execution Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-69
Author(s):  
Tomas Macsotay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Execution ◽  
Visual Relations

As new histories of the public execution are published, cultural perceptions of crowds are again enjoying scholarly interest. This contribution evaluates the role to be played by visual culture in crowd culture, weaving an account that draws from a closer analysis of live visual relations to explain both crowd impulses and its afterimages. A visually structured history can be navigated in order to examine the murder on 20 August 1672 of Jan and Cornelis de Wit at the hands of a street crowd, a determining event in the Dutch ‘disaster year’ of 1672. Giving close examination to contemporary prints, a drawing and a play, the contribution makes two overarching observations: first, that a Christological reading of the execution site strongly informed all of the after-images of the murders. Moreover, sacredness worked as a schema for the mob's own part during the tragedy. Second, the crowd's behaviour followed a pattern of structured theatricality and merriment that is best understood in the context of historical disturbance culture. The Dutch crowds of 1672 offered a double bill of religious and secular visual logics, blurring the limits of a judicially ordered punishment and producing in the tacit testimonies examined here a marked affective response.

Homicide in Scotland, 1800–1849: Numbers and Theories (2)

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
W. W. J. Knox
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
Common Location ◽  
Spontaneous Action

This article challenges a series of orthodox propositions put forward by historians writing on the decline in homicide levels over the last three hundred years. Firstly, there was a decline in impulsive violence; secondly, there was a shift from stranger to intimate killing; and thirdly, there was a transition of the site of murder from the public to the private sphere. It will be argued that murder remained a mainly spontaneous action, a response to highly charged or impassioned insults and words, sometimes alcohol-fuelled and while the killing of spouses and other immediate family members increased over the course of 150 years (1700–1849), the pattern established in the second half of the eighteenth century was hardly disturbed since most victims were known to their assailants as family, friends or workmates. Stranger killing became more commonly associated with drunken brawls in taverns or in the streets; homicides that involved premeditative action, such as robbery, were rarely the cause of death. It is also clear that the street rather than the home was the most common location, again reflecting the spontaneous and opportunistic character of homicide.

Early Debates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Llano
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Social ◽  
Undeserving Poor

This chapter provides an account of how organilleros elicited public anger because their activity did not fit into any of the social aid categories that had been in place since the late eighteenth century. Social aid in Spain relied on a clear-cut distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in order to rationalize the distribution of limited resources and reduce mendicancy on the streets. Organilleros could not, strictly speaking, be considered idle, since they played music, but their activity required no specific skills and was regarded with suspicion as a surrogate form of begging. The in-betweenness of the organillero caused further anger as it challenged attempts to establish a neat distinction between public and private spaces. On one hand, organillo music penetrated the domestic space, which conduct manuals of the nineteenth century configured as female; on the other, it brought women into the public space, which those manuals configured as male.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

Making a Difference: Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Alm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Primary Means

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

scholarly journals Hofrituelen en koloniale recuperatie van de Oostendse Compagnie in 18de -eeuws Bengalen en China

1970 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Wim De Winter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility

This article forms a critique on the formation ofa colonial historiography concerning theinteractions of the maritime 'Ostend Company' (GIC) in eighteenth century China andIndia. This historiography has ignored aspects of intercultural communication, whichprovided the conditions of possibility for any further interaction and exchange. The conceptualinfluence of colonialism on this discourse, and its recuperation of the OstendCompany's interactions in Bengal, are traced through its manifestations in historiographyas well as popular visual culture. This is contrasted with a source-based approach whichsheds new light on vital issues of courtly communication as a learning process involvingspecific acts and symbols.

Intersubjectivity and Intersubject

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Atanas Totlyakov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Joint Attention ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Oriented Approach

This text discusses some key points of contemporary theoretical concepts of intersubjectivity in the context of a specific group of creative practice. Emphasis is placed on the role and specificity of an area of joint attention shared between individuals, and interpersonal inclusions, which are essential for the creation and presentation to the public of objects and images. The problems of the temporary and non-permanent connection between the intentional subjects and the role of other acting forces, both quasisubjects and quasi-objects, within the framework of an art project developing in time are touched upon. The conventional contemporary critical analysis of a work of art has been replaced by ideas of visual culture and a body-oriented approach to tracing processes that are complemented from a sociological point of view.

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