From Bells to Cannon – The Beginnings of Archaeological Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century

This paper attempts to track the history of the chemical analysis of archaeological copper alloys back beyond the accepted origins of archaeometallurgy, and even before the pioneering work of Martin Heinrich Klaproth, as identified by Earle Cayley. It would appear that the chemical analysis of copper metal was developed in Revolutionary France around 1790 to enable the estimation of the amount of tin in the alloy as a response to the need to convert church bells into cannon. What is perhaps remarkable to our eyes, however, is that this group of scientists (including Mongez, Darcet and Dizé), who were the leading chemists of their day, were also interested in the analysis of archaeological metals. This is further evidence for the blossoming of the age of scientific enlightenment, when, shortly after the development of gravimetric methods of analysis, the entire contents of the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were the subject of scientific study by the leading savants of the day.     

‘Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century

Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate in the petitions that they passed. This did not mean, however, that petitioners were unaware of how best to represent their case in their attempts to find a home for their child. But throughout the eighteenth century, ‘proper objects of charity’ included petitioners with many different stories to tell. These were determined by the concerns and questions of the Foundling Hospital's authorities and were not unproblematic representations of poor women's mental maps, but this piece emphasises that the circumstances of their lives rarely required embellishment to convince others of their necessity. Economic need rather than shame was the all‐important criterion in the admission of a child into the Foundling Hospital. Women's accounts of their lives provided overwhelming evidence that they, rather than the fathers of their babies, were the ‘unfortunate sex’, but they were neither hopeless nor without desire. The language of the petitions was intimately related to the everyday lives of London's poor. What framed most of the accounts presented by petitioners was not seduction, shame or secrecy but misfortune.