Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
War Memoirs ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
William Robertson

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. In this century prescriptive literature increasingly urged history upon women as reading matter intellectually and morally superior to novels and romances. The great triumvirate of British historians, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, wrote expressly for female readers. Their “philosophical” history, with its shift of emphasis from political to social and cultural subjects, appealed to women, as did their experiments with the narrative techniques of sentimental fiction. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Mrs. Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership.

The Concept of Opposition in Early Stuart England

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Zaller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Revolution

To Clarendon, the English Civil War was an exercise in folly, pride, and the tragic corruption of the species. Since then, many a thesis has been advanced to explain the Great Rebellion, only to fall before fresh generations of skeptics, each demolishing a predecessor's orthodoxy to set up their own. But old notions die hard. They linger in the words and concepts that once expressed them, which remain impregnated with the old meaning even when the nominal definitions have changed. Such a concept is that of the “Opposition” in early Stuart England. Its history is virtually coextensive with the historiography of the English Revolution, and it remains today at the center of the debate on the origins and meaning of the Revolution.The concept of an Opposition in prerevolutionary England can be traced back to the eighteenth century. David Hume, writing of the 1620s, saw party conflict as an inherent and fundamentally progressive element in the clash between privilege and prerogative. The “wise and moderate,” he asserted, “regarded the very rise of parties as a happy prognostic of the establishment of liberty.” Here already is the germ of the Whig interpretation, which emerges full-blown a century later in Macaulay: [W]hen, in October of 1641, the Parliament reassembled after a short recess, two hostile parties, essentially the same with those which, under different names, have ever since contended, and are still contending, for the direction of public affairs, appeared confronting each other. During some years they were designated as Cavaliers and Roundheads. They were subsequently called Tories and Whigs; nor does it seem that these appellations are likely soon to become obsolete.

Blair, Hugh (1718–1800)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
William Robertson

Blair was the foremost literary critic and preacher of the Scottish Enlightenment. He participated in the thriving cultural life of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and along with William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and other enlightened Moderate party clergymen was a close friend of that city’s greatest philosopher, David Hume.

Writing History: Domestic Papers, Biographical Writing, and Public Histories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Family Member ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life Writings

Many who lived through the English Civil War penned memoirs of their experiences, some of which were published after their deaths, such as Richard Baxter’s life writings and Thomas Fuller’s accounts of the worthies of England, or wrote and published topical public histories, including John Milton’s history of Britain. Samuel Pepys’s and John Evelyn’s diaries are among the most important sources about the Restoration years. Others such as Lucy Hutchinson wrote memoirs for their family or, like Margaret Cavendish, to defend the reputation of a family member. There was also interest in the history of foreign cultures, past rulers, and antiquarian topics.

Part I: Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Connected Group ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Contemporary Practice

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard.

1977 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
James L. Nichols ◽  
David Herbert Donald
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
War Memoirs

English Civil War / War of the Three Kingdoms

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Social History ◽  
Book History ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Gerrard Winstanley

The civil war between Charles I and his parliament broke out in England in 1642; rebellions were already underway in Scotland from 1637, and in Ireland from 1641. The conflict culminated with the trial and execution of the king in 1649. Through the 1650s Britain was governed as a republic, then as a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell from 1653. But the regime unraveled after Cromwell’s death in 1658, ultimately leading to the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II in 1660. The civil wars were fought on the page as intensely as on the battlefield, producing an outpouring of rich and diverse literature, including (to barely scratch the surface): the poetry and prose of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, the cavalier poets, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Hobbes, the Earl of Clarendon, Marchamont Nedham. This vibrant and important body of writing was, for much of the 20th century, neglected and poorly understood. The closure of the theaters in 1642, the collapse of royal court culture, and a critical fashion that dismissed writing sullied by political engagement: these factors all produced the illusion of a hiatus in the literary tradition, a “cavalier winter.” These misplaced assumptions, however, have been overturned since the 1980s by a new wave of scholarly interest, galvanized by a renewed recognition of the value and excitement of politically engaged writing. Scholarship informed by different branches of historicism, combining literary criticism variously with New Historicism, with the history of political thought, with social history, and with book history, have all transformed our appreciation of civil war literature. As such, work by historicist critics—and by historians—is inescapably central to this bibliography, and fundamental to our understanding of the period’s literature. But, as will become apparent, plenty of space remains for a diversity of approaches including gender studies, queer studies, critical theory, reception studies, and formalism. This bibliography is organized thematically, rather than around major individual authors, of whom there are many, most of whom appear in multiple sections. For this reason, no attempt has been made to include scholarly editions, though reader-friendly anthologies are listed, many of which make valuable scholarly contributions. Key studies on politics and literature appear in Literature and Politics: Essential Studies, followed by more focused sections on royalism, cavalier poetry, republicanism, and Cromwellian writing. Other sections cover scholarship on printing and pamphleteering, on radicalism, on women’s writing, on gender and sexuality, on drama, and on international and colonial contexts.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

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