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This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.
The Open Graves, Open Minds project discussed in this book relates the undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption and social change. The story of vampires, since their discovery in eighteenth-century Europe, is one of transformations and interbreedings of genre, which mediate shifts in ways of knowing and doubting. It is marked by metamorphoses of the vampire itself, from monstrous to sympathetic, but always fascinatingly Other. Certain tropes, such as optical figures, and particularly that of reflection, recur throughout, calling attention to the preoccupation with epistemology in vampire narratives. The book focuses on various aspects of these themes as the story unfolds to the present day. It shows how the persona of Lord Byron became an effective vehicle for the vampire of fiction as a transformed Gothic mode, and grapples with the figure of the non-reflecting vampire who casts no shadow, moving deftly between Dracula and Wilde's Dorian Gray and the 'vampire painting' and installations of the contemporary artist David Reed. The book gives a luminous account of early vampire cinema as a 'Kingdom of shadows', and explores the undead at the interface, where knowing becomes problematic: 'unsettlement'. The book also unearths the folklore roots of vampire fiction and offers a glimpse of how contemporary writers adapt the perennial figure.
Communities of readers 2 . Publishing reason: John Toland and print and scribal communities T OLAND did more than simply read and write books: he was a key agent in disseminating ideas around the elite salons of early eighteenth-century Europe. In the last chapter Toland’s involvement in a world of learning and the library was explored. One of the intentions was to underscore the social dimensions of this world of learning: gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of a man’s library was a means of getting inside his head. In locating Toland in this milieu we
Cohn, that metropolis and colony were brought into a unitary epistemological field. In introducing this idea, he has argued elegantly that the eighteenth-century European state established its authority by codifying and controlling representation of the relationship between the past and the present. 3 The accumulation of vast amounts of information on finance, trade, health
flesh and the mind. Throughout eighteenth-century Europe, epistolary consultations constitute an important archive in which to explore the experience of any illness in the Enlightenment. An educated person might write to a physician, usually a famous one, to get relief if they were suffering from multiple and long-lasting ailments that required the judgement of an expert and had consulted many other healers without success. Samuel Tissot, a famous physician practising in Lausanne (Switzerland) during the second half of the eighteenth century, received more than 1
political authority. In his example we can see how ideas worked in the period. Far from being detached intellectual exercises, the evidence of the composition, circulation and reception of his texts shows that ideas could have serious instrumental purchase in political life. One man and his pen – with the right support in powerful places – really could make a difference. Toland’s affinity with men like Eugene illustrates the role his ideas played in the elite circles of early eighteenth-century European politics. It also indicates how receptive political and intellectual
Medicine was transformed in the eighteenth century. Aligning the trajectories of intellectual and material wealth, this book uncovers how medicine acquired a new materialism as well as new materials in the context of global commerce and warfare. It studies the expansion of medicine as it acquired new materials and methods in an age of discovery and shows how eighteenth-century therapeutics encapsulates the intellectual and material resources of conquest. Bringing together a wide range of sources, the book argues that the intellectual developments in European medicine were inextricably linked to histories of conquest, colonisation and the establishment of colonial institutions. Medicine in the eighteenth-century colonies was shaped by the two main products of European mercantilism: minerals and spices. Forts and hospitals were often established as the first signs of British settlement in enemy territories, like the one in Navy Island. The shifting fortunes on the Coromandel Coast over the eighteenth century saw the decline of traditional ports like Masulipatnam and the emergence of Madras as the centre of British trade. The book also explores the emergence of materia medica and medical botany at confluence of the intellectual, spiritual and material quests. Three different forms of medical knowledge acquired by the British in the colonies: plants (columba roots and Swietenia febrifuga), natural objects and indigenous medical preparations (Tanjore pills). The book examines the texts, plants, minerals, colonial hospitals, dispensatories and the works of surgeons, missionaries and travellers to demonstrate that these were shaped by the material constitution of eighteenth century European colonialism.
Americans did not initially view the Constitution’s commitments to freedom of speech and press as individual, counter-majoritarian rights, standing over and against the structural, democratic directives of the American constitution. Instead, they held an alternative theory: to have the status of a free person (a liber homo) is to live in a free state, such that one has a set of fundamental liberties secured from relationships of dependence, which in turn requires some exercise of control over one’s government so that the institutions necessary for one’s political independence (e.g. courts, legislatures, executives) do not themselves become sources of oppression. Political liberty, they argued, is rooted in an analysis of what it means to speak of being a free person, a member of a free society living in a free state. In making this argument, Americans were reaching back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European debates regarding freedom of speech and press within free states, in contrast to monarchies, but doing so in a revolutionary context and expanding public sphere. The effect of inserting this argument into the American ratification debates was to establish for Americans the premise necessary to justify continuous, organised, oppositional political speech. Where political parties and the speech of factious men were once viewed as antithetical to responsible republican self-government, the development of the idea of legitimate contestatory, fiery speech, as part and parcel of party opposition within a constitutional democracy, marked a new turn in the history of American political thought.
(after 1701). They did so for a number of reasons. Louis XIV, Louis XV and Philip V all sympathised with their cousins’ plight. As James III and VIII was his godson (something that really mattered in eighteenth-century Europe) Louis XIV also felt a responsibility to look after him. Philip V liked James personally and wanted to help him get home. 7 More pragmatically, supporting the exiled Stuarts was useful from a domestic political point of view for all three kings, for it was a cheap and easy way of demonstrating their Catholic piety and support for ideological
its underlying conception of RATTANSI 9781526105875 PRINT.indd 19 24/05/2017 13:19 20 The dark side of modernity odernity, than is often realised. But there is one fundamental m difference that prevents any assimilation of the ‘modernity’ at play in the two discourses: while modernisation celebrated modernity, the new perspectives problematised modernity. Far from seeing in modernity the basic contours of the good society, postmodernists sought to debunk its claims. And in this critique, the Enlightenment movement that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe