Lost Country Houses in Lancashire: Reappraisal and Analysis

The ‘destruction of the English country house’ in the period since the late nineteenth century looms large in popular consciousness, and has received increasing attention from historians in recent years. There is no doubt that demolitions did occur on a large scale, especially in the middle years of the twentieth century, but it is arguable that most research has placed too much emphasis on the economic problems faced by estates arising from the great Agricultural Depression: the narrative so far, that is, has had too rural a focus. This article examines the phenomenon in Lancashire, a county characterized by industrialization, demographic expansion, and rapid urbanization. This regional perspective suggests reasons for country house losses that are subtly but significantly different from those pertaining in the more rural counties of England, which have been the primary focus of previous studies.     

Rex imago dei: Charles V of France and the Livre des propriétés des choses

The subject of this paper is the Livre des propriétés des choses, the fourteenth-century French translation of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum. The translation was made for Charles V of France, and the original copy is lost. Here a reconstruction is offered of the appearance of the frontispiece of the royal exemplar. The textual additions of the translator and the iconography of this frontispiece reveal a new conception of the meaning and usage of the encyclopedia, as well as a concerted attempt to draw this authoritative work into the orbit of royal aims and aspirations. The reconstructed frontispiece also allows us to correct an error, which originates with Montfaucon, concerning the illustration of the original copy of the Livre des propriétés des choses.     

Western women and imperialism: Complicity and resistance

The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson's rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.