The Importance and Impossibility of Manhood: Polite and Libertine Masculinities in the Urban Eighteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Carr
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Time Of Day ◽  
James Boswell ◽  
The Continuum

This chapter explores the continuum of polite and libertine expression of manhood in eighteenth-century Scotland through an examination of violence, independence, sexuality and friendship, drawing particularly on life writing by men such as James Boswell and the minister Thomas Sutherland. Shifting ideals of behaviour and sentiment served to assert manhood among different men and individuals could adopt different manly personas ranging from the polite gentleman to the libertine depending on locale and time of day. Among the issues discussed are changing responses to duelling, amended definitions of honour, the importance of economic credit and independence, varied attitudes to the sexuality of women, and the conflicting pulls of virtuous self-governed manhood and the opportunities for sexual licence, both heterosexual and homosexual, provided in the growing towns of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Dissenting Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Commercial Publishing

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.

Continuity and Intuition in Eighteenth-Century Analysis and in Kant

2020 ◽  
pp. 158-186
Author(s):  
Daniel Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Analysis ◽  
The Continuum ◽  
Interesting Account ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, relying on relatively recent reassessments of the history of analysis, it will attempt to bring forward a more accurate account of intuitive representation in 18th century analysis and the relation between British and Continental mathematics. Second, it will give a better account of Kant’s place in that history. The result shows that although Kant did no better at navigating the labyrinth of the continuum than his contemporaries, he had a more interesting and reasonable account of the foundations of analysis than an easy reading of either Kant or that history provides. It also permits a more accurate and interesting account of how and when a conception of foundations of analysis without intuitive representations emerged, and how that paved the way for Bolzano and Cauchy.

Defining Man as Animal Religiosum in English Religious Writing ca. 1650–ca. 1700

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Rational Animal ◽  
Cambridge Platonism ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Subsequent Incorporation ◽  
The Continuum

This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's relationship with God; then its subsequent incorporation into the discussion over the theological consequences of arguments in favor of animal rationality, as well as its uses in anti-atheist apologetics; and then the sudden disappearance of the definition of man as animal religiosum at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article hopes to make a useful contribution to our understanding of changing early modern understandings of human nature by reasserting the significance of theological writing in the dispute over the relationship between humans and beasts. As a consequence, it offers a more wide-ranging account of man as animal religiosum than the current focus on “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism” allows.

Recording the History of Secret Thoughts in Early Modern France

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Modern France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Registers

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.

I PUNTI DI ZENONE: UNA PREISTORIA VICHIANA

Nuncius ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-425
Author(s):  
PAOLO ROSSI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Strong Line ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
The Continuum

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title This study considers the reasons for the radical incompatibility between atomist theses and the conclusions reached by the Council of Trent on the sacrament of the Eucharist. The texts of several seventeenth century Jesuits - Suarez, Pereira, Arriaga and Oviedo - are examined here. Present in these texts is an attempt to develop a natural philosophy alternative to the Aristotelian one, capable of retaining its distance from impious atomism, but, nonetheless, adopting certain central aspects concerning belief in discontinuity and indivisibles. A strong line of demarcation between Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians can be traced through their differing conceptions of the continuum. Zenonism (which regards the continuum as composed of points) was defended on various occasions in the Jesuit context, and was also repressed and condemned a number of times. In the background to these problems, the atomism of Galileo is reconsidered, and the "atomism of points" described theoretically by Boscovich is examined. Even during the seventeenth century, however, mention was frequently made of a particular type of atomists who regarded atoms as without extension. Many Vico scholars regarded his profession of Zenonims (central to his De antiquissima of 1710) as a "philosophical invention of Vico". In reality, however, Vico had a Zenonist Jesuit as his teacher, and his entire discussion of "metaphysical points" is linked to a specific and very little known philosophical tradition. In the whole of Europe between the middle of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century, Zenonist was a term in common use, and was readly comprehensible, like Scotist, or, in more recent times, Popperian.

scholarly journals FINIS: Objects of the End of Time, Afterlife Writing and Situation of Graves

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D313-LW&D343
Author(s):  
Jane Wildgoose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Graphic Work ◽  
Final Work

Focusing on Hogarth’s last graphic work, The Bathos, this essay examines the ways in which the vanitas themes it represents are bound up with events that occurred towards the end of the artist’s life. Drawing on life writing (including elements of Hogarth’s autobiographical notes) that accompanied the cataloguing of his works in the years following his death, it discusses a number of controversies that drew scathing criticism of his work, his character, his politics, his ideas about English art and his standing as an artist, during his final years. Focusing on textual and visual images employed by Hogarth’s detractors to belittle him, it explores how these metaphors may be connected with the iconography he employed in The Bathos, and the extent to which the work may be ‘read’ as a representation of the artist himself, and his view of his reputation at the end of his career. Contrasting the pessimistic image Hogarth presents in his final work with the afterlife writing of his achievements by his contemporaries, it concludes with reflection on the role that his grave continues to play in celebrating his life and his status as one of the most talented and innovative artists of the eighteenth century.

News, Biography, and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
News Writing ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Key Aspects

Celebrity was not invented in the eighteenth century, but it was transformed by the new publics, and the new media that emerged to cultivate and maintain these publics, from the mid-seventeenth until the later eighteenth centuries. Celebrity is therefore best understood as a certain kind of fame rather than a phase in the history of fame. Contemporaneity, publicity, and personality are key aspects of the kind of fame one may identify as celebrity. This chapter argues that attention to genre in the process of celebrity formation makes it possible to distinguish between regimes of fame as constituted by the media available and the ways in which public personalities were variously constructed. Two genres were particularly influential in shaping the development of the new celebrity of the long eighteenth century: news writing and life writing. The contributions of news and biography to eighteenth-century conceptions of celebrity are explored in detail.

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