Traditions of learning around the English Battle of the Books

This article calls for a reassessment of the Battle of the Books by arguing that the dispute did not simply oppose imitators of the ancients and supporters of modern critical scholarship, but that many scholars and critics were also attempting to support the authority of the ancients through their philological methods. A deep undercurrent of concern about the methods of philology can be traced in the development of biblical and patristic scholarship in the late seventeenth century. The article further emphasizes how the satirists (Swift especially) were aware of this strand of criticism, and yet how they hid their debt to it in order to portray textual criticism as a whole as a pedantic exercise. The Battle of the Books should therefore not be seen as a straightforward opposition between “supporters of the ancients” and “supporters of the moderns,” but as contention between doctrine and reason.     

The Odyssey Case: press,public opinion and future policy

The Odyssey Case refers to the dispute between Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OME) and the Kingdom of Spain in the US courts to determine the ownership of more than 500,000 coins, as well as other artefacts, that OME recovered from a wreck‐site it had code‐named Black Swan. However, the process was much more than a dispute over the coins. It reflected many of the components involved in the protection of underwater archaeological heritage, especially when economic and political interests are at stake. Written from the perspective of an archaeologist working for the regional authority responsible for developing archaeological policy, this paper tries to assess the case's impact on future policy development.     

Act and idea in the Nazi Genocide

The opening reference to masturbation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) provides evidence of not only an embedded cultural commentary on the masturbatory tendencies of modernity but also specific contempt for the novel as a masturbatory literary form. The same point is made elsewhere in Swift’s poetry and his parody of the erotic scene of female masturbation that continued to be a staple of amatory fiction. Yet the same body of writing reveals Swift’s recognition that he too was guilty of producing literary fuel for masturbation, as were the Ancients themselves whose works continued to invite a sexualized response from readers. As such, Swift reveals an ironic point of agreement with female authors of amatory fiction such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who represent instances of the poetry of the Ancients being put precisely to this use, providing tacit excuse for their own erotically charged writing. In his later notorious diagnosis of Swift as a chronic masturbator literary physician Thomas Beddoes is arguably responding at least in part to Swift’s own sense of entrapment within masturbatory modernity.     

The Dwarf,the Goetzen and C. S. Forester’s African Queen: A Reassessment of Naval Operations in First World War Africa

Public awareness of the African theatre in the Great War stems largely from C. S. Forester’s 1935 novel The African Queen, and its subsequent 1951 film adaptation. Long thought to have been inspired by British activities on Lake Tanganyika, Forester’s novel more closely resembles events in Cameroon where German missionary Alphons Hermann attempted to sink HMS Dwarf using homemade torpedoes.     

James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state

James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as ‘The Drapier’. Writing under the name ‘Hibernicus’, he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725–26). They can be read as a ‘polite’ Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.     

Archaeological research on HMS Swift: a British Sloop-of-War lost off Patagonia, Southern Argentina, in 1770

HMS Swift was a British sloop-of-war which sank off the coast of Patagonia, Southern Argentina, in 1770. Since 1997 the Underwater Archaeology Programme of the National Institute of Anthropology has taken charge of the archaeological research conducted at the wreck-site. This article presents an overview of the continuing Swift project and the different research lines comprised in it. The latter cover aspects related to ship-construction, material culture and natural site-formation processes.
© 2006 The Authors     

The Debate in the House of Lords on 'No Peace without Spain', 7 December 1711: A New Source

The debate in the house of lords on 'No Peace without Spain' in December 1711 was the first test of the strength of the administration of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, in the upper House. Though there are more sources for this debate than is normal for proceedings in the Lords, few can claim to be by eyewitnesses. A newly 'discovered' anonymous letter from an eyewitness found in the papers of the lord great chamberlain's office in the Parliamentary Archives gives a detailed account of this important debate.