L'Age de l'Eloquence. Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.     

Rapin,Hume and the identity of the historian in eighteenth century England

Paul de Rapin-Thoyras's History of England (1725–1731) has hitherto occupied a marginal position in most accounts of eighteenth-century historiography, despite its considerable readership and influence. This paper charts the publication history of the work, its politics and style, and the methods through which Rapin's British translators and booksellers successfully proposed the work as the model for new historical enquiry, and its author as the model for a modern historical writer. It is further argued that David Hume's writings and letters relating to his History of England (1754–1763) suggest a direct and critical engagement with Rapin's work, and with the identity of the historian, as it had been constructed through Rapin's success. By focussing on the mechanisms of production and circulation, and the impact which these had on the practice of historical writing in the eighteenth century, the paper aims to demonstrate the value of applying social–historical methods to the study of historical writing.     

Le Danger des liaisons: Censoring Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses

When Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses first appeared in late March 1782, it was an immediate succès de scandale. Laclos’s focus on his characters’ libertine psychology and his creation of a “monstrous” female villain, Merteuil, distinguished the novel from mainstream eighteenth-century French works. As an analysis of the novel’s reception demonstrates, Laclos’s suggestive portrayal of female sexuality and empowerment—and, specifically, of Merteuil—led first to the text’s association with dangerous works known as “mauvais livres” or “livres philosophiques” such as the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791) and the anonymous Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier de Chartreux (1741), and later contributed to its classification as a pornographic work at the time the concept was invented in the early nineteenth century—and, ultimately, to its censorship in 1823. If the novel was devoid of explicitly sexual scenes, it nonetheless elicited such images in the minds of (at least some of) its readers and thereby caught the attention of the authorities. Les Liaisons dangereuses may be one of the most prominent historical cases of a book being banned not for what was depicted in its pages, but for the fantasies it inspired—providing a compelling twist to the adage that “pornography is in the eyes of the beholder,” or the mind of the reader.     

CHILD PATIENTS,HOSPITALS AND THE HOME IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Abstract

This article seeks to map out some of the principal pathways to medical care used by the parents of poor children. We focus on the most formal provider of healthcare in eighteenth-century towns, the voluntary general hospitals, but we use these institutions as a prism to consider the way that the treatment of child sickness was managed more generally in five local settings. Utilising eighteenth-century hospital admissions and discharge registers we find that not only were children consistently treated as patients; but that these institutions also operated as part of a wider medical network which included domiciliary care, poor law services, and other medical charities. The boundaries surrounding hospital treatment in eighteenth-century towns were thus considerably more porous than is usually thought, and suggests that they operated as part of a wider medical network accessed by poor families for their children.     

Party-Coloured Plaid? Portraits of Eighteenth-Century Scots in Tartan

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of a series of portraits of eighteenth-century Scots in which the sitters — men of élite social status and, in some instances, elevated military rank — are shown dressed in different painterly representations of tartan. Focusing on portraits produced in Scotland, London and Europe by artists including Pompeo Batoni and Allan Ramsay, it seeks to offer an alternative account to the production and consumption of tartan as a tangible textile or a worn item of masculine dress, to give an art historical overview of its mutability as it is represented in eighteenth-century portraiture. Casting tartan as a potent agent in the pictorial representation of identity, the article argues that it literally enveloped its sitters in a textile that was variously political (as an idiom of rebellion and loyalty), cultural, social and economic. The portraits, both surviving and lost, are discussed in conjunction with contemporary travel literature of visits to Scotland and unpublished correspondence so as to represent the many discursive threads of tartan in the eighteenth century.     

John Maynard Keynes and The Royal Swedish Academy

This paper examines John M. Keynes’s relationship with Gustav Cassel and Eli Hecksher and puts together the events related to his being awarded the 1939 Söderström Gold Medal by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The correspondence between these economists during the interwar years is detailed, with emphasis on their personal approaches to economic theory and history. Cassel’s and Heckscher’s critical reviews of Keynes’s General Theory are outlined as well. Lastly, an account is provided of the grounds for conferring the award on Keynes while also drawing attention to the conflict-laden proceedings within the Academy when the issue was under consideration by the institution. The final remarks ponder why Keynes received the prize despite the controversy among Swedish economists over the General Theory at the time.     

Defences of classical learning in St. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana and Erasmus's Antibarbari

New information technology can be an invaluable aid to research in the history of ideas provided it is built on scientific foundations. This article discusses the case of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and analyses its use of earlier dictionaries (the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Chambers's Cyclopaedia and Moréri's dictionary). It also shows how neglect of existing research in the history of ideas and ignorance of how these eighteenth-century European publications were elaborated, combined with inappropriate use of software for detecting plagiarism, have led to totally mistaken findings. These findings, widely publicised thanks to the Internet, constitute a real danger for future research. The article concludes that the intellectual community urgently needs to invest seriously in the digital humanities in order to safeguard future research.     

The Dragoman and the Scholar: Two Polish Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān

This article discusses two Polish translations of Sa?di’s Golestān, prepared by Samuel Otwinowski and Wojciech Biberstein-Kazimirski (alias Albert Kazimirski de Biberstein) and published in 1879 and 1876 respectively. Though edited at the end of the nineteenth century, Otwinowski's translation had been originally completed in the first half of the seventeenth century and is assumed to be the first one or one of the very first renderings of Sa?di's work into a European language. The question that remains unresolved is whether or not Otwinowski's translation, despite being unpublished, was known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish poets. One can find some stories and motifs “picked” from Sa?di’s Golestān in their poetry, but they seem more likely to have been influenced by non-Polish renderings. This article describes the different translation strategies adopted by the two translators, the literarily gifted dragoman Otwinowski and the nineteenth-century philologist Biberstein Kazimirski.     

SOME QUANTITATIVE INDICATORS FOR EXPLAINING AND EVALUATING NATIONAL POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Based on the information found in probate estate inventories, this article examines patterns of spousal preference and marital mobility in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu, located in northern Anatolia. For this purpose, we introduce quantitative techniques and categories of analysis specifically designed for Ottoman sources, primarily postmortem estate inventories (terekes), allowing us to measure how various socioeconomic groups established marital associations and to what extent they married other groups. The article also compares marital and intergenerational mobility patterns in eighteenth-century Kastamonu.     

The Art of Contested Histories: In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] and the Pacific Legacy

ABSTRACT

European artists of the eighteenth century framed an exotic textual and visual narrative of the Pacific, drawing largely on knowledge gained from exploratory journeys of the 1760s and 1770s. Visual representations of the Pacific became socially fashionable and commercially successful. The French wallpaper manufacturer, Dufour, captured this commercial potential in a dramatic, panoramic wallpaper that told stories of European encounters with Pacific peoples: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804). Yet it was selective, defining the Pacific by moments of contact with Cook and other explorers. Lisa Reihana's In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] (2015–17) dramatically interrogates the eighteenth-century narrative of the Pacific, responding to Dufour's wallpaper in a complex, panoramic work. By attending to ways in which the factual and speculative are brought together in Enlightenment artefacts and Reihana's restaging of them, we explore how art might be put to use in the service of historical interpretation.     

Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding,being, and the critique of metaphysics

In many ways, the 1707 Act of Union encouraged various practices of literary nation-building and the search for authentic ’British’ voices. In their desire to assert the politeness of this newly constituted British identity, writers such as Joseph Addison, Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson shared a preoccupation with a quality which Addison termed ‘majestick Simplicity’. The implicit codification of polite manners and taste in the Spectator might at first appear to contradict this literary fascination with the search for exemplars of native British simplicity. This article explores the continuity of these concerns in the writings of Addison, Blackwell and Macpherson, suggesting some of the ways that authenticity and politeness exerted conflicting demands on the eighteenth-century literary culture of Britishness.     

Jacob Vernet and ‘The Religious Enlightenment’: ‘Rational Calvinism’, the Pastors of Geneva and the French philosophes

Summary

In this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence.     

Hegel's critique of the enlightenment

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race Chris J. Chulos and Timo Piirainen (eds.), The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation: National Identities in Russia Edward E. Cohen, The Athenian Nation Michael Jacobsen and Ole Bruun (eds.), Human Rights and Asian Value: Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representations in Asia Ronaldo Munck and Purnaka L. de Silva (eds.), Postmodern Insurgencies: Political Violence, Identity Formation and Peacemaking in Comparative Perspective Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations Athena S. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: the Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth‐century England and France Umut Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: a Critical Introduction     

CHARACTERIZATION OF 18TH‐CENTURY MEISSEN PORCELAIN USING SEM–EDS*

Analytical investigations of fragmented Meissen porcelains well dated to between 1725 and 1763 have been carried out using SEM–EDS. The aim of the analysis was to characterize elements in bodies, glazes and overglaze enamels in order to create a baseline data set of materials used in the manufacture of porcelain at the Meissen factory, Saxony, during the 18th century. Analyses indicate body and glaze compositions to be consistent with a post c.1720–30 date, when a change from a lime‐rich flux to a potassium‐rich flux is documented to have occurred. Overglaze enamel compositions are shown to be consistent with contemporary accounts of enamel preparations at Meissen. Overglaze enamel compositions show that mixtures of pigments, in addition to documented enamel 18th‐century preparations, were in use at Meissen between c. 1725 and 1763.     

Unrolling time. Christiaan huygens and the mathematization of nature

At the end of the eighteenth century, the new revolutionary authorities in France made history one of the most important school subjects in their central schools. In order to teach this subject, the revolutionaries prescribed all teachers to use Claude-François-Xavier Millot's Élémens d’histoire générale (1772-1773). In this article, the characteristics that molded the narrative of this textbook will be analyzed. What form did the composition of this book, especially recommended because of its ‘philosophical plan’, take? How did its historiography relate to that of other enlightened historians such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Mably or Goguet? And how was it that Millot's textbook was still considered useful for history teaching almost twenty years after its publication date?     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

Reception,wit, and the unity of Virgil's Georgics 1

This essay considers the ways in which the reception of Virgil's Georgics in eighteenth-century English verse may inform, enrich and complicate present-day readings of Virgil, focusing on questions raised by readers’ detection of wit or humorousness in Virgil and by the critical aim of discovering poetic unity in the Georgics.