Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm

Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles

Chapter Six considers the networks surrounding Sally Wesley, John Wesley’s niece and Charles Wesley’s only daughter. Wesley was at the center of a network of latter day Bluestockings who produced and circulated material around the turn of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest to this diverse group was the nature and influence of evangelical feeling and enthusiasm on British life and letters. Analysis of Wesley’s network reveals members from all social and religious backgrounds debating and discussing the proper role of religious enthusiasm—arguing for the importance of a well-regulated enthusiasm to the creation and distribution of literary work. Specifically, it explores how other women in Wesley’s circle, particularly Mary Tighe, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Spilsbury, addressed the issue of religious enthusiasm. Based on this evidence it considers the question of how religion and theology helped women like Sally Wesley structure and inform their artistic production in conversation with the shifting roles for women in Regency society and artistic movements like Romanticism.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Baron

This chapter discusses three impediments to proper use of science in the creation of public policy. First, citizens and policymakers follow moral rules other than those that involve consequences, yet the main role of science in policy is to predict outcomes. Second, citizens believe that their proper role is to advance their self-interest or the interest of some narrow group, thus ignoring the relevance of science to policy issues that affect humanity now and in the future. Third, people fail to understand the nature of science as grounded in actively open-minded thinking, thus giving it an advantage over some alternative ways of forming beliefs.


1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Topham

As is widely known, theBridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation(1833–36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756–1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. Less widely appreciated is the extent to which theBridgewater Treatisesrank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and ‘celebrity’, resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series ‘encouraged other competitors into the field’, most notably Charles Babbage's unsolicitedNinth Bridgewater Treatise(1837). As late as 1882 the political economist William Stanley Jevons was intending to write an unofficialBridgewater Treatise, and even an author of the prominence of Lord Brougham could not escape having hisDiscourse of Natural Theology(1835) described by Edward Lytton Bulwer as ‘thetenthBridgewater Treatise’.


Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Alyce A. Jordan

France numbered second only to England in its veneration of the martyred archbishop of Canterbury. Nowhere in France was that veneration more widespread than Normandy, where churches and chapels devoted to Saint Thomas, many embellished with sculptures, paintings, and stained-glass windows, appeared throughout the Middle Ages. A nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in the martyred archbishop of Canterbury gave rise to a new wave of artistic production dedicated to him. A number of these modern commissions appear in the same sites and thus in direct visual dialogue with their medieval counterparts. This essay examines the long legacy of artistic dedications to Saint-Thomas in the town of Saint-Lô. It considers the medieval and modern contexts underpinning the creation of these works and what they reveal about Thomas Becket’s enduring import across nine centuries of Saint-Lô’s history.


Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and in a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, such as when African Americans were—and sometimes still are—told that their bodies are “not right” for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when nineteenth-century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe to investigate what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. The chapters in the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists, or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith

This chapter examines the role of money and its management, the origins of what is known today as monetarism. It first provides a brief history of money, focusing on the steps that accorded money its separate and distinctive personality, including the establishment of banks; borrowing and the resulting act of money creation; and the realization by kings, princes and parliaments that the creation of money could be used as a substitute for taxes or as an alternative to borrowing from financiers. It then considers the significance of the institutions and experience surrounding money, along with the economic thought and controversy that money has evoked. In particular, it looks at precipitating factors that shaped American attitudes on money in the nineteenth century, including the Greenbacks and silver. Finally, it describes the role of money in facilitating exchange by taking into account the equation of exchange introduced by American economist Irving Fisher.


Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Sandra Kemp

This essay analyses the role of museums in the creation of futures imaginaries and the ways in which these are embedded in socio-political narratives over time (narratives of nation, empire, power, consumption, and home). The essay tests its hypotheses through charting the evolution of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the soirée—exhibitions and events showcasing technological, scientific, and cultural innovations of the future—from their heyday in the mid nineteenth century to their demise in the early twentieth century. In particular, the essay explores the social, spatial, and temporal organization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century soirée display spaces as carriers of future worlds. It argues that the creation of futures imaginaries depends on interrelationships between people and objects across space and time, and that the complex web of relations established between words, objects, spaces, and people in exhibitions provides catalysts for ideas, ideologies, and narratives of the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-68
Author(s):  
A. Bravin ◽  

Problem statement. This paper traces the role of hermeticism and alchemy in the artistic production of conceptual poet Dmitry Prigov. Among the different cultural traditions that characterize his project, hermeticism plays a very important role, and especially alchemy, which provided Prigov with material at varying points throughout his artistic career. Purpose of the article. Through several examples taken both from Prigov’s verbal and visual works and from his theoretical texts, the aim of this article is to illustrate not only how the artist managed to use and modify motifs and themes relevant to the alchemical tradition, but also how he retrieved certain philosophical and aesthetic ideas of this hermetic doctrine. Conclusions. As a result, Prigov’s project should be considered a sort of alchemical “Great Work”, which responds to the need for a renewal of culture, the creation of a new concept of art and for a transformation of the role of the artist itself.


Author(s):  
Neil G. W. Curtis

This chapter aims to show that ideas of the sacred, the numinous, and the contested, rather than of the rational, are most important in understanding how the meanings of material culture are formed and the role of museums. It considers how museums have offered rich contexts in which the changing, conflicting, and multiple meanings of material culture have developed. Scottish national identity, contested and unsettled, is shown in the contribution of museums and objects to discussions about a link between the Classical past and Scottish history in the early nineteenth century, the creation of a national museum in the second half of the nineteenth century, a temporary exhibition of Scottish history as part of a Great Exhibition in 1911, and two repatriation cases at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Recent developments in museum practice are discussed, including the impact of both growing professionalism and the recognition of the rights of groups in museums. The chapter concludes by arguing that objects generate and embody meanings that are shared, entangled, and co-constitutive. Instead of attempting to identify the “correct” meaning, it is therefore the responsibility of museums to explore the range of personal and shared rights that objects engender.


Popular Music ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy C. Davis

Although known as the ‘Naughty Nineties’, the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects deeply conservative, not only in bureaucratic responses to these sexual controversies but also in the creation of political organisations to represent and lobby for conventional moral values. Social purity campaigners' efforts to eradicate indecency in music-hall performance fits into this pattern, and provides insight into the continuity between the class politics of leisure reforms, control of artistic production and hegemonic sexual mores.


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