A Series of Fifty-four Clever Drawings on Vellum: Monstrous Births in Italian ms 63

2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Cordelia Warr

Italian ms 63, now in the John Rylands Library, contains fifty-four images of monstrous births, both human and animal. The manuscript was probably completed in the mid-eighteenth century and was owned by Edward Davenport (1778–1847) of Capesthorne Hall and later by the Manchester-based physician David Lloyd Roberts (1835–1920). This article explores the possible sources for some of the images, which range from descriptions or illustrations in well-known publications on monsters, to popular pamphlets, to drawings and paintings. An analysis of the choice of subject matter and the ways in which the source material has been used places the manuscript within eighteenth-century collecting practices and emphasises the multivalency of the monstrous.

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-606
Author(s):  
CHRISTINE WALLIS

This article reports on the use of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-576
Author(s):  
Laura Engel

Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.


1982 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
G. V. Bennett

A complaint frequently voiced by historians of Jacobitism is that their subject is plagued by a breed of authors with a passion for secret agents, romantic uprisings, and princes in the heather. It is not so often admitted, however, just how intractable the professionals themselves find the topic and their substantial failure to give any coherent account of it. Jacobitism appears as the major issue in British politics in the early-eighteenth century; it was associated with wide-spread disorder, recurrent national crises, and a series of rebellions and attempted invasions; but its actual organization and the extent of its support remains surprisingly obscure. This is partly so because the source-material is notoriously difficult to handle and ranges from a mass of ciphered correspondence in the Stuart papers to the diplomatic archives of half-a-dozen European states. To study it is to enter a world both of illusion and deliberate misrepresentation. Would-be revolutionaries tended to imagine themselves perpetually on the verge of success, while it often suited the interests of the British government to assert that the nation was threatened with subversion and imminent invasion. But the weakness of Jacobite historiography is more fundamental than a problem with the sources. It lies in an addiction to detailed narrative unsupported by adequate analysis and a fixed assumption that the importance of the movement was its potential for effecting a revolution by armed force. This paper adopts a different approach. It examines the structure of the Jacobite organization and questions whether it was at any time between 1710 and 1715 capable of realising its aims; it argues rather that its activities contributed to a great popular myth, which was to be of critical significance in the struggle of men and parties which preceded the establishment of the Whig oligarchy.


Author(s):  
Michiel Van Dam

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Austrian Netherlands were plagued by politicalturmoil and social upheaval, brought forth by a reaction against the reformatory movementset up by the Habsburg government. The contestation of Joseph II's reformist policywas performed in public, as the region was flooded with polemical pamphlets, ideologicaltreatises and many other types of popular writings during (but also before and after) theperiod of the Brabant Revolution (1787-1789). Pamphlets have stood at the centre ofattention for historiography on Belgian political culture at the end of the ancien régime,yet this wide employment of the source material has not led to a comparative overview ofthe way these writings have been used in historical research. This article will attempt tofill this gap, by first providing a methodological typology of several historiographicaluses of a particular pamphlet, the Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon, written at the end of1789, and signed by the leader of the conservative opposition, Hendrik Van der Noot.Secondly, I will attempt to show how eighteenth-century pamphleteers used a multitudeof discourses at their disposal, by briefly discussing another set of (pre-revolutionary)pamphlets. This has immediate consequences for the current understanding of eighteenth-centuryBrabant political culture, which, so I argue, should not be considered discursivelymonolithic (containing one political language) but pluralist (containing multiple politicallanguages).


Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez

This chapter explores many of the domestic elements that were central to the creation of bourgeois tragedy in Georgian Britain, focusing especially on George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) and his posthumous adaptation of Arden of Faversham (1759; with John Hoadly). The chapter begins by broadening the archive of the genre’s source material, situating its eighteenth-century repertoire alongside the true crime narratives it in many cases adapted, as well as early Stuart predecessors, Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), and Restoration she-tragedy. It thereby claims that the genre represents important advances in realism as it was practiced onstage that worked to exploit the intimacy of the home and stage during the period. This chapter also examines a major theme in contemporaneous theorizations of the genre by considering what it means for a play to “strike close to home,” linking that trope to changes in affect, aesthetics, and performance during the period.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig

As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them. —Heraclitus Watery metaphors prove irresistible as I reflect on the central subject matter of this volume—Bach. The streams of prose about Johann Sebastian Bach that have emanated from the pens of myriad writers since the eighteenth century have to date coalesced in a sea of Bach scholarship that appears to be ever rising (over 73,000 titles are available in the online “Bach-Bibliographie” maintained by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig), but whose shorelines as yet remain quite firmly delineated. Or, to turn the metaphor around, Bach scholarship on the whole can still seem like a well-fortified island in an ocean of musicological and wider humanities/social sciences discourse that laps up against its shores without any serious risk of getting its inhabitants’ feet too wet. For this island territory, thankfully, existential threats in the form of floods or tsunamis remain a fairly distant prospect. A number of prestigious publication series with those iconic four letters in the title, from the ...


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
D. J. Moores

This essay is a discussion of three anonymous novels about happiness from the long eighteenth century – The Vale of Felicity (1791), Benignity (1818) and Edward (1820) – all of which seem to be written by the same author, as they exhibit striking similarities not only in subject matter but also in their aristocratic perspective on happiness, one wholly dependent upon pecuniary means. What is more, they exhibit the same artistic deficiencies, particularly in wooden characters and the rather poor handling of pacing, plotting, obtrusive didacticism and complication. The opening discussion situates the novels in the context of the abundant eighteenth-century literature on happiness, while the body of the essay is a critical analysis of the three narratives in terms of their various genres (epistolary, sentimental, didactic, Bildungsroman, circular journey, identikit, picaresque) and eighteenth-century ideas on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christian charity. The peroration and conclusion are a reflection upon the notion of happiness itself and how it has been ill-received in literary studies. The essay represents the first analysis of its kind, since there is no extant, substantial criticism on any of these novels.


1961 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 361-363
Author(s):  
Cecil B. Read

A commonly encountered criticism of present-day mathematics teaching is that we fail to take account of new developments; it is sometimes said that a mathematician of the seventeenth or eighteenth century could step into the modern class-room and be competent to teach any of the subject matter.


2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE SENELICK

The mid-eighteenth-century French théâtre clandestin, comprising more than a score of plays of foul language and obscene subject matter, presents a number of problems. It is not clear if they were actually performed and, if so, how and before what audiences. Did they serve the purpose of pornography, arousing their consumer? The language in which the plays are couched is conventional both in its literary form and its scurrility; it needed to be supplemented by pantomime and elaborate tableaux. Those elements are remarkably similar to theatrical innovations suggested by Diderot in a different context. Ultimately, however, the mere presentation of bodies in action cannot incarnate desire except superficially. The distancing element of performance as well as the communal presence of a coterie at an organized spectacle were probably counterproductive to achieving the pornographic aim.


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