Mopping Up Spilt Religion: The Problem of Enthusiasm1

2009 ◽  
pp. 0 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Mee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Case History ◽  
Final Section

Abstract"Enthusiasm" is a term to which Romantic criticism is blind. Where it is noticed, it is usually assumed that over the course of the eighteenth century it was rehabilitated. Whereas it had been associated with the violence and excess of the sects in the Civil War, it came to be identified with the healing powers of emotion and imagination. This essay argues for a more complicated understanding of the term's trajectory. The prohibition of enthusiasm found, for instance, in Locke comes to be replaced by a more regulatory discourse. From this perspective, its benefits had to be harnessed, but there remained a powerful awareness that poetic or noble enthusiasm could easily degenerate into its vulgar and dangerous avatar. These fears were intensified in the 1790s by Burke's representation of revolutionary transparence as a throwback to seventeenth-century puritanism. Poets such as Coleridge, whose case history provides the final section of this essay, inherited this complex understanding of the term. Coleridge came increasingly to distinguish a healing "enthusiasm" from the "fanaticism" of the mob, but desynonymization could never quite eradicate the fear that the fountains within of the former were deeply linked to the destructive energies of the latter.

Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet the work remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the accuracy of the surviving scores cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris provides a detailed consideration of the many theories that have been proposed for the opera’s origin and chronology. She re-evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer and examines the work’s historical position in Restoration theater. She also offers a detailed discussion of Purcell’s musical declamation and use of ground bass. The final section of the book is devoted to the performance history of Dido and Aeneas from the eighteenth century to the present.

Colonial Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Stephen Conway
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
Colonial Government

This essay begins by examining the establishment of English political systems in the North American colonies in the seventeenth century. It then goes on to look at eighteenth-century developments, and particularly at the conditions that allowed the colonial assemblies to assume increasing importance in colonial government. The final section considers the efforts made by ministers and officials in London to check the power of the assemblies and assert more control from the imperial center. It sheds fresh light on the great constitutional dispute between London and the colonies that formed an important aspect of the American Revolution.

READING, FAMILY RELIGION, AND EVANGELICAL IDENTITY IN LATE STUART ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW CAMBERS ◽  
MICHELLE WOLFE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
Evangelical Identity ◽  
Stuart England

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

Dissent and Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Burden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dissenting Academies

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.

Bringing Rain and Protection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend J. ter Haar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Supreme Deity ◽  
Do So

Deities were thought to help and protect people, heal them from illnesses, and sometimes also to punish them. And yet, a worshipper was not free to decide what to ask for, but had to work within a collectively created and transmitted paradigm of expectations of the deity. In Northern China, Lord Guan was often requested to provide rain, and everywhere he was asked to assist in the fight against demons and other types of outsiders (barbarians, rebels, or otherwise), or even appeared of his own accord to do so. From the early seventeenth century onwards, Guan Yu was seen as the incarnation of a dragon executed at the command of the Jade Emperor for bringing rain out of compassion to a local community sentenced to extinction by the supreme deity. Finally, his loyal image inspired his rise as a God of Wealth in the course of the eighteenth century.

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