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This book explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’s experiences with and responses to the surgical reconstruction of the nose, and the concerns and possibilities raised by the idea of ‘nose transplants’ in this period. Challenging histories of plastic surgery that posit a complete disappearance of Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s reconstructive operation after his death in 1599, the book traces the actual extent of this knowledge within the medical community in order to uncover why such a procedure was anathema to early modern British culture. Medical knowledge of Tagliacozzi’s autograft rhinoplasty was overtaken by a spurious story, widely related in contemporary literature, that the nose would be constructed from flesh purchased from a social inferior, and would die with the vendor. The volume therefore explores this narrative in detail for its role in the procedure’s stigmatisation, its engagement with the doctrine of medical sympathy, and its attempt to commoditise living human flesh. Utilising medical research and book histories alongside literary criticism, the project historicises key modern questions about the commodification and limits of the human body, the impact of popular culture on medical practice, and the ethical connotations of bodily modification as response to stigma.
This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularization to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain.
This collection of essays is set up to explore the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century Britain, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, and politics in the localities, and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The fundamental goal is to foster a dialogue between two prominent strands within recent historiography, and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. Chapters by leading historians of Stuart Britain examine how the state worked to communicate with its people and how local communities, often far from the metropole, opened their own lines of communication with the centre. The volume then is not meant to be an exhaustive study of all forms of political communication but it nevertheless highlights a variety of ways this agenda can be addressed. At present there is ongoing work on subscriptional culture across the nation from petitioning to Protestation, loyal addresses, lobbying and litigation to name but a few. It is hoped that this volume will provide a reminder of the gains to be made by placing political communication at the heart of both social and political history and to provide an impetus for further scholarship.
This volume samples from the best current scholarship on religion and politics in early modern Britain in order to highlight one future line of inquiry for the field. The goal is to draw attention to practice as an organizing category and focal point. The volume is also meant to honour Peter Lake, perhaps the most important inspiration for the project sketched here. The book therefore joins the focus and purpose of a Festschrift to a broader scholarly agenda. Each chapter, written by one of Lake’s former
, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashagte, 2004); J. Peacey, ‘News, Pamphlets, and Public Opinion’, in Knoppers (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, pp. 173–89; J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); J. Raymond, ‘The newspaper, public opinion and the public sphere in the seventeenth century’, in J. Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 109–40; J
This chapter introduces the problem posed by Taliacotian rhinoplasty by examining corporal legibility and the types of bodily modification imagined, available, accepted, or ridiculed in early modern Britain. It explores the fine line between styling and falsifying the body as the limits of accepted body work, and the representation of such techniques in early modern British literature. I argue for a persistent suspicion about the capacity of identity to be masqueraded even at the level of the skin and flesh, enabling the individual to pass for a member of a
controversial. This chapter is concerned with a third type of prophecy: sayings attributed to figures from Europe’s past, enlisted to make claims about Europe’s future. Most scholars have reserved the term ‘political prophecy’ for these pronouncements, following Rupert Taylor in his 1911 catalogue of them. 2 Several collections of these prophecies circulated in early modern Britain. Attributed to seers like Robert Nixon and Mother Shipton, they exhorted people to embrace political causes. 3 Scotland had the most famous compilation. Constructed in the sixteenth century
's De decoratione (Frankfurt: 1587), which included an explanation of the procedure from Tagliacozzi. Among these witnesses, I pause on the Plymouth surgeon James Yonge, whose flap amputation technique – as he begrudgingly conceded – shared technical and conceptual ground with Tagliacozzi's use of skin flaps to rebuild the nose, lip, or ear. Distinguishing between the success of Yonge's method and the derogation of Tagliacozzi's can help to show the particular problems faced by surgeons sympathetic to Taliacotian rhinoplasty in early modern Britain. Chirurgorum
The subject of Britain reads key early seventeenth-century texts by Bacon, Daniel, Drayton, Hume, Jonson, Shakespeare and Speed within the context of the triple monarchy of King James VI and I, whose desire to create a united Britain unleashed serious debate and reflection concerning nationhood and national sovereignty. This book traces writing on Britain through a variety of discursive forms: succession literature, panegyric, union tracts and treatises, plays, maps and histories. Attending to the emergence of new ideologies and new ways of thinking about collective identities, The subject of Britain seeks to advance knowledge by foregrounding instances of fruitful cultural production in this period. Bacon’s and Hume’s pronouncements on the common ancestry, the cultural proximity of Britain’s inhabitants, for instance, evinces Jacobean imaginings of peoples and nations joining together, however tenuously. By focusing on texts printed in not just London but also Edinburgh as well as manuscript material that circulated across Britain, this book sheds valuable light on literary and extra-literary texts in relation to the wider geopolitical context that informed, indeed enabled, their production. By combining the historical study of literary and non-literary texts with the history of political thought and the history of the book broadly defined, The subject of Britain offers a fresh approach to a signal moment in the history of early modern Britain. Given its interdisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to literary historians and historians of early modern Britain as well as undergraduates and postgraduates.
The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi’s popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe. Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest. This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English imperial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.