Eighteenth Century History

The character and reputation of Frederick, prince of Wales, have long divided historians. His apparently piecemeal efforts at opposition have been dismissed as lacking in focus, while his mercurial character and early demise have left him difficult to assess. The aim of this article is to attempt once more to reappraise the Prince both as a man at the head of a specific political interest but also more broadly as the symbolic figurehead of a wider patriot movement within society. Through analysis of the contemporary press, and of some of the key members of the Prince's own household, this essay will argue that Prince Frederick was more than just a figurehead for the patriots, if impeded by circumstances and occasionally distracted by his own protean tendencies.

From the foundation of the Order of St John in 11th century Syria as a community of lay brethren intent on providing shelter, care and assistance to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, the destiny of the Hospitaller Knights was irremediably moulded for most of the next millennium. Geography, circumstance, religious ideology, and the pursuit of wealth all conspired to transform the future of the Hospitallers into a violent one, in keeping with the surrounding environment of the Middle East and the rest of the Mediterranean. The Order’s attitude to conflict changed, however, when the theatre of war shifted from the Mediterranean to mainland Europe. The acquisition of property on a Euro-Mediterranean scale - a practice initiated in the Order's years in Latin Syria -  helped chart the course of Hospitaller history, rendering the Order sensitive to events on the continent. Any land property in Europe was at risk of intrusion, occupation or exploitation by armies on the move, and the Hospital’s property was no exception. This study is an analysis of the Order of St John’s contrasting attitudes to violence, and the geographical, political, religious, and historical situations that generated such an approach.

PLEASE NOTE:
1. (albeit sparing Christian and Venetian merchants..) should read (albeit not sparing Christian and Venetian merchants..), although it must be stated that this generally contravened the Order's Statute and the prohibitions stated on letters patent for piratical activity issued in Malta, and HJA Sire (1996) elaborates on this, underlining how, in principle, the Order was against such practice.
2. The 'deeply-rooted divisions' mentioned in the text are a reference to enduring confessional animosities fostered by recurring confrontation spanning centuries, starting with the Arab invasions of the 7th-9th centuries. Very obviously they do NOT exclude encounters. If anyone is DAFT enough to interpret it otherwise, please let him.

This article examines the fashion for dressing à la grecque among elite women in late Directorial and Consular France. The discourse on Greek fashion served multiple, competing agendas. Neoclassical fashion presented opportunities for women's self-fashioning and agency as well as for reifying and essentializing femininity. Laying claim to the political and artistic virtues associated with the grandeur of classical antiquity, women who adopted neoclassical dress took on roles as arbiters of taste and aesthetics and as works of art themselves.

Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his "science" of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's "Butlerian" assessment and rejection of the "anti-social" doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

This chapter analyses a caricature, produced in 1753 by the watercolourist Paul Sandby entitled Burlesque sur le Burlesque. This caricature attacks the painter William Hogarth, in particular, his recently published aesthetic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, and his stance in the English Academic debates of the 1750s – a series of events in which English artists debated whether or not they should migrate from private artistic academies to publicly funded and hierarchically organised arts academies on the continental model. The chapter explores the way in which Sandby targets his object, and through iconographical analysis, demonstrates how caricature operates visually as a literal puzzle that forefronts certain criticisms, and veils others.

The First of the Modern Ottomans blends biography with intellectual history. On the one hand, it is the story of an Ottoman life – the life of the scribe, ambassador, and prolific historian Ahmed Vâsıf (ca. 1735-1806), a man who improbably rose from obscurity in Baghdad to travel the empire, fight its wars, advise its sultans, and, in time, write its history. As a full-scale biography, the book is a rarity for the field of Ottoman history and reconstructs Vâsıf’s life, career, and opinions through meticulous research in both Ottoman and European sources. On the other hand, The First of the Modern Ottomans is also one of the first detailed intellectual studies of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Weaving together Vâsıf’s life and thought with the larger intellectual currents of the day – especially at the court of Sultan Selim III in Istanbul – it explores central debates among the Ottoman ruling elite over Europe, political reform, war and peace, justice, and the empire’s renewal. Vâsıf’s life reveals a vital response to the empire’s challenges at the turn of the nineteenth century – one that was novel and deeply enmeshed in Islamic philosophy, ethics, and statecraft.

This paper aims to account for what I describe as the gentrification of the humanist tradition by strengthening the bond between the epistemic merger of virtue theory and the still emergent category of political economy in eighteenth-century discourses. I use Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) to trace the shifting relation between character and currency to historical transformations in transatlantic slavery and the development of an innovative line of rhetoric capable of registering the historical novelty of ‘creditable’ yet ‘unreal’ value. I argue that the text articulates contemporary fears that the growth and diversification of character through the process of commodity production and exchange rendered virtue in a politically paradigmatic form archaic and remote. In other words, Austen's narrativized account of the advent of paper money and public credit dramatizes how these linguistic transformations resulted in a wider cultural unease about the socially determined indicators of value, character, and race, and meant that not merely the functioning, but the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reification. Yet I caution that the novel's conclusion signals that the success of this program remained anxiously unsettled at the close of the eighteenth century and that it instead acknowledges how the modern dialects of credit precariously subsumed grammars which had traditionally given shape to the material or otherwise ‘real’ foundations of civic personality and virtue.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

Distortion is the moment at which the physical means of transmitting a text irrupt into a reader's experience of it. I will discuss distortion here as a phenomenon occurring in printed materials, but I do not wish to exclude other recognisable instances such as static in a radio signal, or white noise on a cathode-ray-tube television screen. To speak of distortion as an impairment, however, is to confirm the Platonic priority of another book-object. As textual scholars have shown, locating this authoritative ur-text can be, to say the least, difficult. Distortion is not a condition befalling individual textual artefacts (‘book-objects’) here and there: there is no non-distorted reading. In fact, a belief in non-distorted reading amounts to believing in pure, transparent mediation that leaves no trace of itself on the mediated. Leaving aside for the purposes of this essay the profound political implications of placing the labour of mediation under erasure, I will offer here a heuristic of distortion. Absent such a heuristic, ‘distorted’ book-objects and their texts will always be treated as degraded derivatives. The corollary of that treatment is to elevate an unknown, possibly non-existent ur-text to a position of unimpeachable authority, and to degrade both the experience of reading and of the embodied text and reader. We can solve the problem of distortion by placing the irreducible phenomenological singularity of the book-object at the centre of our experience of a text. This is existential reading: you are reading what you are reading and not anything else.

Symposium: The Staatskapelle Berlin at 450 – A Review

“Crisis and Prosperity: The Development of Prussian Court Music from 1713 to 1806“

Venue: Staatsoper im Schiller Theater
Date: 7th- 9th October 2016

Call for Papers
Deadline: 1st April 2016

From 7th- 9th October 2016, the Staatskapelle Berlin will hold its second international symposium, in cooperation with the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Berlin-Brandenburg. The Staatskapelle celebrates its 450th anniversary in 2020, making it one of the oldest orchestras in the world. Ahead of this occasion, the Staatsoper is holding a series of annual symposia devoted to the history of the Staatskapelle Berlin and its international significance. This year’s topic, ‘Crisis and Prosperity: The Development of Prussian Court Music from 1713 to 1806’, places a focus on the 18th century, from the dissolution of the Prussian Court in 1713 to the collapse of the ‘old’ Prussia in 1806.

[EN] Nobiles pauperes: The Clientele of the Congregation of the Mission Hospital in Eighteenth-Century Vilnius
In 1695, Jan Teofil Plater and his wife Aleksandra founded a hospital for six impoverished nobles in Vilnius. Situated near the newly built church of the Ascension and the convent of the Congregation of the Mission in the Subocz suburb beyond the city walls, this hospital was the first and, until the end of the eighteenth century, the only charitable institution providing care for individuals of particular social status. The article, based on the hospital’s registry book and other sources, examines the quantitative, as well as qualitative characteristics of the institution’s clientele, such as its fluctuations in size, its social composition, and the causes of its inmates’ impoverishment. The research revealed that, despite the demand for care, the overseers managed to maintain a stable number of inmates, rarely admitting more than one or two persons every year, and thus ensuring a steady operation of the hospital (see table 1). However, in contrast with other charitable institutions in Vilnius, the clientele of the Congregation of the Mission hospital changed frequently because of expulsions (39.6 percent of all cases) and inmates leaving the hospital on their own initiative (20.1 percent) already in the first year of their stay. The mortality of inmates (27.8 percent) affected the size and turnover of the clientele to a much lesser extent than observed in other hospitals. Although there are no reliable data on the inmates’ age and health, such statistics show that they probably were younger and healthier than the clients of other charitable institutions in Vilnius. Moreover, the Congregation of the Mission hospital’s inmates differed from the clients of other institutions in respect of social composition. Impoverished petty
nobles, originating mainly from the districts of Lida and Oszmiana, constituted the majority (56.25 percent) of the hospital’s inmates whose social status is noted in the registry book (62.5 percent). The nobles became clients of the Congregation of the Mission hospital either because of old age, disability, as well as other accidental causes, or because of increased social vulnerability outside mutual aid networks, comprised of family members, kin or neighbours. The article argues that the foundation of a hospital designated to provide care primarily for impoverished nobles shows that the poverty of nobles was recognized by contemporaries as a social problem that should be tackled.

Depuis le début du XVIIIe siècle, le concept d’un lieu situé à l’abri de tous les regards et voué aux plaisirs du libertin a envahi la littérature romanesque et théâtrale (Diderot, Sade, Crébillon, etc.). Les rapports de police et les chroniques scandaleuses regorgent également d’anecdotes piquantes à ce sujet, contribuant ainsi à créer le mythe de la « petite maison ».
Cependant, il faut attendre les années 1750 et la construc- tion du pavillon La Bouëxière pour voir émerger un nouveau type architectural dont le programme s’élabore peu à peu. S’initie alors une vague de réflexions sur ce nouveau mode d’habitat et tous les quartiers périphériques de la capitale se couvrent d’édifices aux allures diverses mais répondant aux mêmes critères architecturaux : renouvellement des dispositifs conventionnels, réduction de la taille des appartements, adoption du plan massé et situation dans un environnement paysager.
La multiplication de ces petites maisons illustre par ailleurs l’émergence d’un nouvel art de vivre et les aspirations d’une société en mutation qui use de toutes les ressources des arts (architecture, jardin, peinture, sculpture...) pour créer de véritables écrins qui ne laisseront pas indifférent le public de l’époque.
Remontant jusqu’aux origines de l’habitat pavillonnaire, cette étude vise à montrer que si le phénomène des périphéries pavillonnaires a jusqu’alors été plutôt attribué aux retombées de la révolution industrielle et à la création de cités ouvrières, les prémices se font sentir dès la fin du XVIIIe siècle.
Un ouvrage ambitieux et richement illustré qui sollicite l’histoire de l’architecture et des jardins, mais également l’histoire des idées, de la littérature et du théâtre, de la politique et de la ville.

Charlotte Lennox (c.1729-1804) was an eighteenth-century London author whose most celebrated novel, The Female Quixote (1752), is just one of eighteen works published over forty-three years. Her stories of independent women influenced Jane Austen, especially in her novels Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility.

This biography places Lennox in the context of intellectual and cultural history and focuses on her role as a central figure in the professionalization of authorship in England. Lennox, who lived in America as a young person, participated in the most important literary and social discussions of her time, including debates concerning female authorship, the elevation of Shakespeare to national poet, and the role of periodicals as didactic texts for an increasingly literate population. Lennox also contributed to making Greek drama available for English-language audiences and pioneered the serialization of novels in magazines. Carlile’s work is the first biographical treatment to consider a new cache of correspondence released in the 1970s and reveals how Lennox was part of an ambitious and progressive literary and social movement.
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The 1727-30 mortality crisis was, excluding the Civil War, perhaps the second most severe in England since the Black Death. This regional study of the crisis charts its course and impact in Lancashire, testing whether (as contemporaries suggested), it caused greater devastation amongst the old, the rural population, and amongst the poor.

In 1795 the old Republic of the Seven United Provinces collapsed, and Dutch revolutionaries founded a new, ‘‘Batavian’’ Republic. This essay reexamines the Batavian appreciation of the example of the American Revolution by focusing on one specific political phenomenon that troubled both the American and the Batavian minds: the problem of faction in republican states. I will show how the Batavians were introduced to the now famous Madisonian theory of faction by the Dutch federalist Gerhard Dumbar, a supporter of the American Constitution who wrote a Dutch anthology of the Federalist Papers. Subsequently, I will trace the Batavian understanding of factionalism as it was displayed in the parliamentary debates of the Dutch National Assembly and in the political weekly De Democraten. In the last section, I will turn to the Dutch revolutionary events of the year 1798 and their relevance for the Batavian answer to the problem of faction, which will lead me to conclude that the American alternative to an understanding of faction was ultimately rejected by all sides in the Dutch revolutionary debate.

Slaap. Hoewel slapen en sluimeren belangrijk aspecten waren van het dagdagelijkse leven in vroegmodern Europa, weten we er omzeggens niets over. Diverse cruciale vragen (zie hieronder) blijven daarbij onbeantwoord. Roger Ekirch is zowat de enige onderzoeker die over het onderwerp letterlijk artikelen en boeken vol heeft geschreven, hoewel het thema nu ook zijdelings tussen andere onderwerpen opduikt. Door enkele van Ekirch’s uitgangspunten nog eens kritisch onder de loep te nemen – pre-industriële mensen sliepen langer, maar minder continu, tot de opkomst van artificieel licht onze slaapcultuur voorgoed veranderde – willen we het debat weer aanwakkeren. Door in te zoomen op een lokaal bronnentype (namelijk juridische verslagen) kunnen we meteen ook de publieke belangstelling voor die lokale archieven weer een duwtje in de rug geven. Het zijn immers onvermoede schatkamers om het dagelijks leven in het verleden te reconstrueren.

In the eighteenth century dried pasta 'as made in Genoa and Naples' was a luxury food accessible only to the wealthiest segment of the population. Durum wheat flour was necessary to produce this type of pasta, but in the venetian territory only common wheat grew, which the 'lasagneri' used to make fresh pasta. Archival sources testify that, during the eighteenth century, several landowners made numerous attempts, with the help of specific government legislation, to plant durum wheat on their land in order to initiate local production of dried pasta, which they wished to introduce into Venice's consumer market. The article sets out to investigate the reasons for the failure of local production of dried pasta, reconstructing the events that led up to this failure.

"Enlightened Monks investigates the social, cultural, philosophical, and theological challenges the German Benedictines had to face between 1740 and 1803, and how the Enlightenment process influenced the self-understanding and lifestyle of these religious communities. It had an impact on their forms of communication, their transfer of knowledge, their relationships to worldly authorities and to the academic world, and also their theology and philosophy. The multifacetedachievements of enlightened monks, which included a strong belief in individual freedom, tolerance, human rights, and non-violence, show that monasticism was on the way to becoming fully integrated into the Enlightenment. Ulrich L. Lehner refutes the widespread assumption that monks were reactionary enemies ofEnlightenment ideas. On the contrary, he demonstrates that many Benedictines implemented the new ideas of the time into their own systems of thought. This revisionist account contributes to a better understanding not only of monastic culture in Central Europe, but also of Catholic religious culture in general.

Reviews:
 
"Lehner is nothing if not a thorough and industrious scholar, and the wealth of information he has amassed alone makes this book a valuable resource. But he is also a fluid writer, with an eye for piquant details and arresting stories, ensuring that the narrative is enlivened along the way by a great number of vivid and sensitive portraits of individuals."
Darrin McMahon, The Catholic Historical Review

"This book is of the same calibre as Derek Beale's magisterial work about monasticism during the Ancien Régime."
Rainald Becker, Francia Recensio

"No scholar interested in early modern monasticism or Catholicism, the Catholic or German enlightenments, or religion and the Enlightenment can afford to overlook this book ... This book deeply contextualizes intellectual and religious history. One of its great virtues is the way it combines monastic responses to new historical, legal, philosophical, and theological ideas with concrete attention to monastic material culture, social practices and institutional innovations."
Brad S. Gregory, Theological Studies

"Beautifully written and cogently argued, Lehner’s book makes a thoroughly convincing case for – what those clinging to a Voltairean Enlightenment will hardly believe – enlightened monks."
James Lees, Eighteenth Century Studies

"This fascinating book … might stimulate monastic communities today to ask whether they too could learn from the Enlightened Monks."
James Leachmann, Benedictine Culture

"This book is highly entertaining."
Johannes Reich, Erbe und Auftrag

"A stimulating book that will leave no one indifferent!"
Daniel Misonne, Revue Benedictine

"Many of the ideas and reforms of these eighteenth century Benedictines are in many ways strikingly similar to the radical changes in monasticism after the Second Vatican Council. … It is the great merit of this book to have saved these enlightened Benedictines from oblivion and to have unearthed a monastic culture that was characterized by its openness to modernity."
Klaus Schatz, Theologie und Philosophie


"Engagingly written, deeply researched, and seriously engaged with current research, Lehner’s work demonstrates that the Enlightenment was far more than a secular movement pitted against an obscurantist religious outlook. It was, rather, a multi-faceted trend to reconcile science and reason with matters of faith. Enlightened Monks illustrates how, paradoxically, an institution known most as a relic of the medieval past actually stood on the front lines of this endeavor."
from the Gilmary Shea Prize Committee

"This little summary doesn’t do justice to the book’s range and depth of research. Lehner offers, among other things, an excellent description of mo- nastic prisons, as well as deftly drawn portraits of various savants, rogues, and dreamers in and out of the mon- asteries. Enlightened Monks also pro- vides important context for the later German revival of theology centered in nineteenth-century Tübingen. Despite its somewhat recherché title, this is one the most interesting books I’ve read this year."
Lawrence S. Cunningham, Commonweal

"This very learned and highly original book, based on little-known and often obscure sources, reveals the existence of a remarkable subculture of Enlightened, even revolutionary, monks who had personal as well as literary and philosophical connexions with the non-monastic world."
Journal Ecclesiastical History, Derek Beales, Cambridge

Lehner's work marks a significant step in original research. His extensive citation of archival sources offers a new perspective on European religious culture... The book's content appeals to a wide range of scholars and is not reserved for the narrow musings of the specialist. The sociologist and historian will be intrigued as will the philosopher and the theologian.
Journal of Church and State

"Far from idle malingerers or enemies of Enlightenment, Lehner recounts how these monks interacted with and contributed to the Enlightenment. Lehner's monks voraciously consumed Enlightenment-era scholarship, supported reforms that would relax monastic duties in favor of a life of knowledge, invoked the language of natural rights to call for freedom of conscience and privacy from their abbots, corresponded with other luminaries, gave public lectures, produced original research on sacred and secular topics, and thus fully participated in the Republic of Letters. As such, Lehner has proffered a convincing argument that the German Benedictines might be counted not only as constituents of the Catholic Aufklärung, but as figures who existed squarely within the Enlightenment itself."
Religious Studies Reviews

"As a model of contemporary historiography and engaging scholarship, Enlightened Monks is about as good as it gets." J. Yegge, catholicbooksreview.org

"Die zunaechst als Praemisse begruendete besondere Affinitaet des Benediktinerordens zur Aufklaerung wird ueberzeugend nachgewiesen, katholische Aufklaerung erhaelt ein weiteres Profil."
S. Benz, Historische Zeitschrift"

Was the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty of Brunswick to the throne of Britain and its empire in 1714 merely the final act in the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89? Many contemporaries and later historians thought so, explaining the succession in the same terms as the earlier revolution-deliverance from the national perils of 'popery and arbitrary government'. By contrast, this book argues that the picture is much more complicated than straightforward continuity between 1688-89 and 1714. Emphasizing the plurality of post-Revolutionary developments, it explores early eighteenth-century Britain in light of the social, political, economic, religious and cultural transformations inaugurated by the 'Glorious Revolution' and its ensuing settlements in church, state and empire. The revolution of 1688-89 was much more transformative and convulsive than is often assumed; and the book shows that, although the Hanoverian Succession did embody a clear-cut reaffirmation of the core elements of the Revolution settlement-anti-Jacobitism and anti-popery-its impact on various post-Revolutionary developments in Church, state, Union, intellectual culture, international relations, political economy and empire is decidedly less clear.

ABSTRACT in English (résumé en français plus bas): "Artillery and the art of the 'petite guerre': a long progression"
In 1744, for the first time in France, some pieces of artillery are associated to a unit of light troops from its inception. Indeed, the regiment of the harquebusiers of Grassin, a mixed body of infantrymen and cavalrymen, received two pieces of the light cannon known as "à la Suédoise" (in the Swedish way). With examples, the article shows on the one hand that narrative sources make it possible to identify a use of cannons in the "petite guerre" – the tactic in which light troops are specialized – from the War of the Austrian Succession in Flanders (1744-1748) onwards. But on the other hand, it is observed that only the theoretical treatises of the "petite guerre" published after the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) seriously consider the use of artillery in this area and encourage it. To clarify this discrepancy, we must return to the tactical and technical developments as well as to the political choices during the 18th century.

RESUME en français :
« Artillerie et art de la petite guerre : un long cheminement »
En 1744, pour la première fois en France, des pièces d’artillerie sont associées à un corps de troupes légères dès sa création. Le régiment des arquebusiers de Grassin, corps mixte de fantassins et de cavaliers, se voit en effet attribuer deux pièces du canon léger dit « à la suédoise ». L’article montre d’une part, exemples à l’appui, que les sources narratives permettent d’identifier un usage du canon à la petite guerre – la tactique de spécialité des troupes légères – dès la guerre de Succession d’Autriche en Flandre (1744-1748). Mais, d’autre part, on observe que seuls les traités théoriques de petite guerre publiés après la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763) envisagent sérieusement le recours à l’artillerie dans ce domaine et l’encouragent. Pour éclairer ce décalage, il faut revenir sur les évolutions tactiques et techniques ainsi que sur les choix politiques au long du XVIIIe siècle.

This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, the Scottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the major eighteenth-century aesthetic trends in all three countries, the Natural Genius craze, which culminated in highland primitivism in Scotland and England, and in the Sturm und Drang in Germany. Kord's analysis of the peasant women's works and the bourgeois response enables us to find new answers to questions that have centrally influenced our thinking about what makes art Art. Kord's book provides a fresh look at some of this fascinating literature, and at the roles and attitudes of the lower classes and of women in the Art world of the day. It also advances a revolutionary thesis: that the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant cultural class not primarily, as is commonly held, in opposition to aristocratic culture, but more importantly through its dissociation from and suppression of lower-class art forms.

Courtney Weikle-Mills’s Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 expands this reductive understanding of the evolution of U.S. citizenship by demonstrating the significance of the child and the child reader as a necessary component within democratic theory. Weikle-Mills’s compelling argument analyzes a wide array of early American texts up to and including the Fourteenth Amendment to show how literature enabled children to imagine and understand themselves as citizens, even though they existed in a nation that denied them a direct political voice. “Imaginary citizens,” then, were those individuals who lacked the right to exercise their civil rights but were nonetheless prominent figures within citizenship literature (6). While this lens of childhood was used to explain citizenship’s limits for non-rights-bearing members of society including women, minors, and slaves, Weikle-Mills argues that it moreover informed a powerful body of literature that caused “crises of legitimization” as it helped Americans confront, question, and challenge the rights and limits of what it meant to be “We the People” (25).

Review of:

Evgenii Viktorovich Anisimov, Gosudarstvennye preobrazovaniia i samoderzhavie Petra Velikogo v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka [State Reforms and Peter the Great's Autocracy in the First Quarter of the 18th Century]. 331 pp. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1997. ISBN 5860070632.

Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great. xii + 187 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. ISBN 0847696383. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN 0847696391. $17.95 (paper).

Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725. xii + 485 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 521805856. $85.00.

Lindsey Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography. xv + 285 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0300094264. $35 (cloth). ISBN 030010300X. $18.00 (paper).

Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. xxix + 602 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN 0300075391. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0300082665. $23.00 (paper).

Dmitrii Olegovich Serov, Stroiteli imperii: Ocherki gosudarstvennoi i kriminal´noi deiatel´nosti spodvizhnikov Petra I [Builders of Empire: Essays on the Governmental and Criminal Activities of Peter I's Companions]. 262 pp. Novosibirsk: Izdatel´stvo Novosibirskogo universiteta, 1996.


Republished in a condensed version in Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, November/December 2005.
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Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This chapter on fancy in drawing manuals is part of the Voltaire Foundation - Liverpool University Press - Oxford University Studies in The Enlightenment book Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture edited by Melissa Percival and Muriel Adrien

In the eighteenth century, the African American community began a process of forming an identity using experiences of shared oppression and physical appearance.  Communal bonds were incomplete and often fragile due to the variance of skin color that shaped black interactions with the larger world and in turn with one another.
The historical lens reveals the formation of individual identity as a process that interacts with common political and economic goals among people who shared cultural and/or ancestral ties.  In the eighteenth century, the African American community formed a cohesive and physical appearance.  However, these communal bonds were incomplete and often fragile.  The focus on the commonality of ethnic Africans facing the rigidity of the binary black/white identity obscures the conflict within ethnic African communities that resulted from a divergence of political and economic possibilities.  Although ethnic Africans shared space and identity they were arrayed in a variety of skin colors.  Skin color acted in a larger society, as well as within African American communities, to divide peoples.  I argue that within eighteenth-century ethnic African communities there were multiple identities based on skin color that shaped how individuals viewed and interacted with each other and the larger world.