The Enlightenment Feminist Project of Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women (1810)

The nineteenth-century British historian Lucy Aikin's ambitious four-part poem Epistles on Women (1810) marks both her first important contribution to women's historiography and a compelling example of Enlightenment feminist historiography. To some extent, Aikin is building on the work of male Enlightenment historians who had evaluated the status of women in different times and places and correlated it to social progress. However, she not only restricts her focus exclusively to women, but also makes a concerted effort to resolve some of the tensions apparent in previous accounts of the relationship between women and social progress. Especially striking is her mediation of two distinct historical models of femininity, which I have called the republican and commercial models of femininity, the outlines of both of which we can trace in the work of male Enlightenment historians. By suggesting that through proper education women might combine the best aspects of each model, Aikin strategically advances the project of controversial feminists like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had taken inspiration from the republican model of femininity in their demands for improvements to female education.     

Reasonable hope: Kant as critical theorist

Sister and brother Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825) and John Aikin (1747–1822) are two famous Rational Dissenting writers who strategically appropriated republican discourse to advance the Dissenting cause. Both make the case that, far from being subversive, Rational Dissent actually granted its adherents the independence that, from a republican perspective, was considered essential to true patriotism. In a fresh formulation of republican discourse, they present the strength of the Rational Dissenting commitment to ‘free inquiry’ as security for continuing independence, enabling liberal Dissenters to act as patriotic guardians of British virtue and liberty against the dangerous effects of luxury, even as they continued to contribute towards the development of the British commercial economy and to promote the benefits of commerce, traditionally regarded with hostility by classical republicans. Effectively exploiting the classical republican belief in the central role of education, Barbauld and Aikin particularly sought to publicize the role that the Dissenting academies had played in producing patriots by making ‘free inquiry’ the basis of their pedagogical philosophy and practice.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

‘To Women in the Year 2000’: Norwegian Historians of Women,c.1900–c.1960

The lives and writings of three women who during the first half of the twentieth century wrote books on women's history are the subject of this article. Ragna Nielsen, a teacher and an amateur historian, in 1904 published her account of women's lives during the first part of the nineteenth century, stressing the sad consequences of patriarchal attitudes, but also the importance of women's contribution to the maintenance of a national identity. Anna Caspari Agerholt and Mimi Sverdrup Lunden, both with masters' degrees in history, belonged to the next generation. Agerholt is mainly remembered for her impressive book of 1927 on the Norwegian women's movement, while Lunden's books of 1942 and 1948 on women's work were important contributions to social history. The writings of these three women's historians are related to dominant positions within Norwegian historiography of their times, highlighting how they helped change central concepts by adding gender to class analysis and to the process of constructing a national identity, stressing the importance of voluntary organisations to the formation of politics and widening the concept of work.     

THE HISTORIAN AS A PUBLIC MORALIST: ON THE ROMAN ORIGINS OF A SCHOLARLY PERSONA

In her recent book, Virtus Romana, Catalina Balmaceda provides a fascinating analysis of the concept of virtus in Roman historiography. Although virtus, which translates as courage or more generally as virtue, meant different things to different Roman historians, Balmaceda shows that disagreement was never about whether historians should provide readers with examples of virtue. Historians' differences of opinion focused rather on where such models were to be found and what they should look like. This review essay summarizes Balmaceda's main arguments, raises a question about historians' own virtus, and draws some implications from the book for the study of scholarly personae. Did the persona of the historian as a public moralist, such as is known from nineteenth‐century Europe, originate in ancient Rome?     

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

Restorationist Counter‐Enlightenment: Thomas M'Crie on the Concept of Civil Liberty

Enlightenment notions for Counter‐Enlightenment purposes have not to date been used to provide a comprehensive context for Scottish religious history‐writing in the age of Counter‐Revolution and Restoration. The Evangelical historian and divine Thomas M'Crie's studies on Scottish Reformation history, Life of John Knox and Life of Andrew Melville, published in 1811 and 1819 respectively, exhibit an abundance of historiographical material for research. M'Crie was among the most renowned writers of his own time, but his historical works have been briefly passed over in recent secondary sources. The main purpose of this study is to rescue M'Crie's historical works on the Scottish Reformation past from near oblivion. This article argues that M'Crie produced an apology for the Scottish Reformation, adopting an aggressive style that attacked Scottish Enlightenment historians and thinkers such as William Robertson and David Hume, especially in the matter of their treatment of John Knox and Andrew Melville. M'Crie tried to restore his chosen past in order to influence the religious and political affairs of Scotland. In M'Crie's Counter‐Enlightenment historiography, the concept of civil liberty and Presbyterianism become interchangeable in a Restorationist religio‐political discourse. That is why M'Crie's enthusiasm for the Scottish Reformation constitutes the most representative example of the Presbyterian interpretation, which held its own against Enlightenment influence.     

Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts

The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper (Waight, 2022), and in Gross and Rutland's Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society (2021). I propose that while this is a valid public policy issue, any originalist argument actually relies upon a singular historiographical argument, namely a “Whig” historiography. However, across historians the meaning of “secular” has actually been evaluated through four different historiographies: a “Whig” progress narrative; economic materialism; critical theory; and a religious/nationalist approach. Maddox, Byrne and Waight's approaches can be characterised within a “Whig” approach to Australian education history, originally found in “The Melbourne School” of Austin and Gregory, and the textbooks of Barcan. Its revival presents a good opportunity to survey the topic of education historiography, assess the “Whig” argument, and to propose that religious/nationalist historiography provides a more accurate interpretation of the original intent of the term “secular.”     

Silences Broken,Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American History

In 1989, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham observed that African Americanists paid scant attention to issues of gender and women's historians typically ignored questions of race; she warned that this silence compromised the very analysis of US history. Much has changed since Higginbotham issued her cautionary words. Not only has Americanist literature on gender and race grown exponentially over the past ten years, African-Americanist gender historians have produced some of the most influential monographs and articles in their field. This article surveys a decade's worth of conceptual breakthroughs in African-Americanist historiography as it ponders the question of whether certain silences still remain.     

HISTORY WRITING WITHOUT CLOSURE

In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to Hayden White's work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book's seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with Pihlainen's 2013 essay on narrative truth and ending with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical constructivism (xiii). At the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains White's work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, Pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. One misconception is that constructivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. Pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same.     

The Icelandic Enlightenment as an Extended Phenomenon

The Enlightenment is a many-sided phenomenon, with different emphases in individual countries, and the period when its influence was greatest differs from country to country. In Icelandic historiography the period traditionally associated with the movement is from c. 1770 to c. 1830. This article examines how the Icelandic Enlightenment can be regarded as an extended phenomenon in that it also exerted considerable influence in the last two-thirds of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The social conditions that contributed to this long period of influence of the movement are dealt with. Among the themes given special attention are the impact of ideas of progress derived from the Enlightenment, the way in which the movement influenced the nationalistic ideas of the Icelanders, and how the emphasis of the champions of the Enlightenment on providing ordinary people with education by means of publication of educational works remained as a guiding principle.     

Feature Reviews

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published and distributed to the American public in 1787, presented his mature thoughts on politics, amid a vast array of themes reflective of his own encyclopedic studies. The diverse contents and unusual form of the work have often led modern readers to neglect its overarching political purpose. We argue that when read as a unified whole shaped by an explicit literary structure and rational method, Jefferson's Notes lays the foundation for a new science of republican politics. By engaging and revising key aspects of both the Bible and Enlightenment science, whenever either asserts authoritative claims beyond rational scrutiny that obscure or distort nature, Jefferson overturns false idols that impede our inquiry into natural laws and natural right, and the proper grounds of republican government.     

Geschichte als leitende Orientierungswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert

The nineteenth century has sometimes been dubbed “the age of historical science”, taking account of the hegemonic position occupied by historiography vis-à-vis the natural sciences and also its fellow humanities. The “historical method” was widely adopted by all kinds of Kulturwissenschaften. Moreover, public interest focussed on historiography to a quite exceptional degree since it combined scholarly inquiry and the purposes of general education and personal cultivation. Historiography reached the peak of its influence during the two decades leading up to the revolution of 1848. During this period, the ideas of historians on the national state, on the social order and on cultural affairs carried considerable weight. In the second half of the nineteenth century, historiography gradually lost its position of a “pilot discipline”. Sciences such as economics and sociology were better equipped to respond to the needs of German society in the age of industrialization.     

The history of modern and contemporary Italy: Made in France (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s)

Abstract

Over the past three centuries Italy has been the focus of numerous studies by French historians, who have taken advantage of the great wealth of sources available there. While no new synthesis has yet been achieved, we can identify certain main lines of development in French historiography. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s international relations and, especially, the relations between France and Italy were given the greatest attention, before a new focus on forms of sociability and political pedagogy began to be more common. However, the shifting of focus of historical studies to the centres of political decision making often coincided with less attention being paid to social stratification. Beyond these major themes, some researchers have reconstructed ‘global’ historical models, which have been characteristic of the renewal of post‐war French historiography.     

CONFUSING HISTORY

This compendium of fifty essays by international philosophers examines history from the point of view of its cognate disciplines, historiography and the philosophy of history. The authors often use the terms history, the past, and historiography interchangeably. Essays are grouped in four broad categories: basic problems, major fields, philosophy and sub‐fields of historiography, and classical schools and philosophers of history. The book provides useful insights, some dated by the fashion of postmodernism. The essays are largely independent of one another, and may be read in any order. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, historians, and social scientists with a theoretical bent.     

“We Have Mingled Politeness with the Use of the Sword”: Nature and Civilisation in Adam Ferguson’s Philosophy of War

Adam Ferguson’s twin reputations as the most republican of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and as one of the founding fathers of sociology make him one of the most interesting figures in eighteenth-century political thought. I argue that in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and elsewhere, Ferguson develops a novel understanding of the place of warfare in human social experience. By deploying a proto-sociological account of the naturalness of warfare between nations he proposes a normative criterion for the assessment of civilisation. This argument sets Ferguson apart from contemporaries like Kant who argued for perpetual peace as a criterion of civilisation.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

An Authoritative Voice: Jane Addams and the Oratorical Tradition

Oratory, the act of speaking in public on civic matters, remained a male prerogative in the United States until the 1830s, when increasing numbers of women began ignoring the taboo and established a female oratorical tradition. This essay outlines how American women claimed the authority to speak and then developed their tradition, which was a social reform in itself, over three generations. It then examines how the youthful Jane Addams, a member of the third generation who became a social reformer, gained her education as an orator and struggled in new ways with society’s continuing doubts about women's civic authority.