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Early modern stereotypes are often studied as evidence of popular belief, something mired with prejudices and commonly held assumptions. This volume of essays goes beyond this approach, and explores practices of stereotyping as contested processes. To do so the volume draws on recent works on social psychology and sociology. The volume thereby brings together early modern case studies, and explores how stereotypes and their mobilisation shaped various negotiations of power, in spheres of life such as politics, religion, everyday life and knowledge production. The volume highlights early modern men’s and women’s remarkable creativity and agency: godly reformers used the ‘puritan’ stereotype to understand popular aversion to religious discipline; Ben Jonson developed the characters of the puritan and the projector in ways that helped diffuse anxieties about fundamental problems in early modern church and state; playful allusions to London’s ‘sin and sea coal’ permitted a knowing acceptance of urban growth and its moral and environmental costs; Tory polemics accused of ‘popery’ returned the same accusations to Whig Protestants; humanists projected related Christian stereotypes outwards to make sense of Islam and Hinduism in the age of Enlightenment. Case studies collectively point to a paradox: stereotyping was so pervasive and foundational to social life and yet so liable to escalation that collective engagements with it often ended up perpetuating the very processes of stereotyping. By highlighting these dialectics of stereotyping, the volume invites readers to make fresh connections between the early modern past and the present without being anachronistic.
, which with riot and prodigality goes out.45 For Wilson, therefore, poor financial management had helped to create an age of projects and projectors. Such comments have a good deal in common with the analysis developed in Weldon’s Court and Character. What separates Wilson from Weldon, however, is his account of the consequences of James’s government. As we have seen, Weldon argued that James’s gratuitous expenditure had served to impoverish the people of England, while his pacifism had sacrificed the interests of the nation in order to enrich a small group of corrupt
parliamentary means, with public funds directed to support various projects, and legislation to regulate commerce, encourage manufactures, and facilitate the construction of harbours, roads and canals. During the first half of the eighteenth century the Irish parliament developed various methods of assigning public expenditure. Recent research by Eoin 115 DAVID HAYTON Magennis has done much to explain the peculiarly Irish practice of funding projects and projectors through parliamentary grants, appropriations and bounties, which in due course commentators like Arthur Young
corrupt courtiers and favourites. Over against that court was set a puritan opposition of precisely the sort conjured by Scott: an opposition in favour of parliaments and against all sorts of monopolies, patents, projects and projectors, and organised around a bluff, hot, Protestant ideology, favourable to the puritan godly and viscerally hostile to ‘popery’ in all its forms. On this view there was a simple, binary opposition between the figures of ‘the projector’ and the ‘puritan’. The former epitomised