Alexander Pope and the tracts advising women of the long eighteenth century

<p>This thesis contextualises the treatment of women in Alexander Pope's Epistle to a Lady (1743) against three conduct manuals from the eighteenth century. These three texts are The Whole Duty of a Woman by A Lady (1696), The Art of Knowing Women by Le Chevalier Plante-Amour (1732) and An Essay in Praise of Women (1733) by James Bland. The Art of Knowing Women has been paid only passing reference by feminist scholars. The Whole Duty of a Woman appears to be known solely for the compilation of recipes which forms its final section, and An Essay in Praise of Women is, as far as I have been able to discover, completely unknown. Despite the critical work on the supposed misogyny of Pope, virtually no attention has been paid to the context supplied by these advice manuals, symptoms of their age. In my reading, however, these manuals function both as sources for the Epistle to a Lady, and as subjects of Pope's imaginative satire. I begin by surveying the relevant aspects of Pope's personal history. Drawing on recent historical scholarship, I go on to outline something of the situation of women in the eighteenth century. My comparative study follows. I take each manual in turn, comparing its ideological content and rhetoric with those of Pope. By contrast with these tracts, Pope's poem emerges as far from misogynistic. Indeed, it conveys a nuanced, complex and sympathetic attitude towards women.</p>

Alexander Pope and the tracts advising women of the long eighteenth century

<p>This thesis contextualises the treatment of women in Alexander Pope's Epistle to a Lady (1743) against three conduct manuals from the eighteenth century. These three texts are The Whole Duty of a Woman by A Lady (1696), The Art of Knowing Women by Le Chevalier Plante-Amour (1732) and An Essay in Praise of Women (1733) by James Bland. The Art of Knowing Women has been paid only passing reference by feminist scholars. The Whole Duty of a Woman appears to be known solely for the compilation of recipes which forms its final section, and An Essay in Praise of Women is, as far as I have been able to discover, completely unknown. Despite the critical work on the supposed misogyny of Pope, virtually no attention has been paid to the context supplied by these advice manuals, symptoms of their age. In my reading, however, these manuals function both as sources for the Epistle to a Lady, and as subjects of Pope's imaginative satire. I begin by surveying the relevant aspects of Pope's personal history. Drawing on recent historical scholarship, I go on to outline something of the situation of women in the eighteenth century. My comparative study follows. I take each manual in turn, comparing its ideological content and rhetoric with those of Pope. By contrast with these tracts, Pope's poem emerges as far from misogynistic. Indeed, it conveys a nuanced, complex and sympathetic attitude towards women.</p>

Distinction

“Distinction” identifies the often-tortured efforts by Britons to have their gold and wear it too. Mayors, liverymen, admirals, peers, and royals conspicuously brandished gold well into the nineteenth century, while belittling foreigners and status-hungry nouveau riches for wearing wealth. The ideal and reality did start to converge after 1820, when doctors started to trade in their gold-headed canes for stethoscopes, watches lost their gold chains, and gold-laced hats gave way to felt derbies. Increasingly, wearing gold appeared in conduct manuals and novels as resoundingly atavistic; and once it had been consigned to the past it could be safely enjoyed in historical settings, as when Victoria and Albert presided over costume balls bedecked in Elizabethan embroidery. More generally, Britons carefully carved out exceptions—including servants, military officers, and members of the royal family—that proved a general rule against wearing gold.

Civil Vengeance

Civil Vengeance offers a new way of conceptualizing early modern revenge and its relationship to civility. In its attention to what constitutes vengeance, the book makes visible a more comprehensive spectrum of retaliation and examines quotidian acts of revenge that support sociality and enhance the power of civil institutions. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, the book uncovers how facets of civil society—church, law, and education—rely on the dynamic of revenge to augment their power. Through its innovative readings of conduct manuals, medical tracts, legal writings, and sermons, the book proposes a revised lineage of revenge literature and places these texts alongside traditional revenge plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance theorizes anew the manner in which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.

The Preudomme

Gender expectations were a major part of the medieval social habitus, and they were conveyed by an idealized superior male (called in French a preudomme, in German the biderbe man), a concept applied across the social spectrum to laity and clergy alike and the subject of conduct manuals. The preudomme offers in fact a contemporary and widely accepted European medieval definition of masculinity, so far ignored by gender historians. He was very much crafted to assist success in courtly society. This chapter defines and analyses the concept and offers a new avenue into the study of medieval gender which to date has concentrated on data drawn from clerical sources.

Claire Weeda, 'Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts'

Latin and vernacular urban panegyrics, describing the ideal city and its residents, mushroomed in the twelfth century. Painting a utopian view of the city that mirrors the heavenly Jerusalem, they rhetorically conveyed ideals of urbanity for aspiring members of the body politic to emulate. This chapter explores the ways in which the cityscape constructed in these texts, and residents’ behaviour (as influenced by conduct manuals and regimes of health), appear embedded in a natural environment reflected through the lens of Galenic medicine. Evoking the benefits of cleanliness and beauty, these concepts of health and hygiene accorded closely with issues of social status. The disciplined quest for moderation and balance offered spiritual and physical health, as well as enhanced personal repute.

“The Heaven’s True Figure” or an “Introit to All Kind of Lewdness”?

There are no extant English dancing manuals from the Shakespearean period, but there are abundant printed and manuscript sources that mention dancing. However, these sources convey mixed messages. The theoretical conceptions articulated by dance’s opponents and proponents in the “debate on dance” do not always correspond well with the evidence of customary practices. While early modern religious treatises decry dancing for encouraging illicit sexual liaisons, court records reveal a greater concern with irreverence and disorder than with wantonness. This chapter utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine a variety of primary sources—from conduct manuals and anti-dance treatises to consistory court depositions. Aggregating archival evidence elucidates general trends that can help scholars assess and contextualize isolated dance references, specific moments of dancing, and the dance scenes and stage directions of Shakespeare’s plays and those of his contemporaries.

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

Early Debates

This chapter provides an account of how organilleros elicited public anger because their activity did not fit into any of the social aid categories that had been in place since the late eighteenth century. Social aid in Spain relied on a clear-cut distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in order to rationalize the distribution of limited resources and reduce mendicancy on the streets. Organilleros could not, strictly speaking, be considered idle, since they played music, but their activity required no specific skills and was regarded with suspicion as a surrogate form of begging. The in-betweenness of the organillero caused further anger as it challenged attempts to establish a neat distinction between public and private spaces. On one hand, organillo music penetrated the domestic space, which conduct manuals of the nineteenth century configured as female; on the other, it brought women into the public space, which those manuals configured as male.

The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620

This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners, and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 1550–1624, and its role in discourses to do with social regulation, negative evaluation and moralizing. The other is to undertake a detailed comparison of Della Casa’s Galateo and, in particular, Brown and Levinson (1987). The major finding here is the close similarity between the two. Along the way, the paper also airs some theoretical distinctions relating to notions of politeness, notably the distinction between first- and second-order politeness, and touches on some of the features of the social context of Early Modern England.