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Honour was a gendered phenomenon for the eighteenth-century English social elite; scholars have argued that for women, honour was mainly equated with chastity. By problematizing the concept of chastity as well as chastity's relation with women's social reputation, this article questions the widely adopted view of the crucial importance of female chastity for maintaining honour and social status. A critical examination of eighteenth-century discourses of feminine propriety shows that even though chastity was presented as an internal feminine feature, it was evaluated by external signs, making it less dependent on physical continence than on public display of purity. Chastity should thus be seen as a negotiable performative identity rather than a stable state of sexual virtue. Moreover, the relation between chastity and social reputation is more complex than hitherto supposed; even a public loss of chaste reputation did not necessarily lead to the social disgrace threatened by eighteenth-century writers, but could often be compensated through other performative means. The article concludes that not only was chastity's role in the construction of female honour ambiguous, female and male honour also resembled each other more than has been assumed, since they were both based on an external spectacle of proper honourable appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers British society's response to the suspension of cash payments in February 1797. Although this event marked the beginning of the so-called Bank Restriction Period, during which the Bank of England's notes were inconvertible, there have been no detailed studies on the social and political situation surrounding the suspension. This article provides an in-depth examination of the events leading up to and immediately following the suspension. It questions existing accounts of the suspension as a smooth transition into the nationwide use of paper money and describes the complex process that came into play to avert a nationwide financial collapse. The decision to suspend the Bank's cash payments stemmed from deep-rooted financial instability, exacerbated by recurrent invasion scares that heightened after the French attempt on Bantry Bay, Ireland, in December 1796. Under such circumstances, national support for drastic financial measures could not be taken for granted. The article demonstrates that the declaration movement, which was a form of consolidated and visualized trust in the financial system, played a crucial role in the 1797 suspension crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eighteenth-century architect-builders were a small group, but important for understanding the market strategies of knowledge-based experts in an age of rapid growth in technical information before the creation of modern professions. This article confronts a teleological historiography of emerging professionalization. It is focused on Robert Mylne and several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh and London, including a number of successful London-based Scots who were active as architects, builders, engineers, and surveyors, and self-styled in all these areas when it suited them. It supplies an account of what it took for building experts to establish themselves and flourish in big cities and the ways in which such experts navigated, controlled, and accommodated an environment of unregulated expertise that largely suited contemporary practitioners. Individual, family, and collective market strategies are examined in detail and the final section is a close analysis of the activities of the Architects Club in the 1790s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that, in order properly to understand the process by which the attitude of the educated towards magical beliefs became prevalently sceptical between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, we need to re-examine the affiliations of ‘sadducism’ and its role in relation to orthodox thought. In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, articulate scepticism about witchcraft and related phenomena seems to have become widespread in free-thinking circles, especially in London and predominantly in oral form. Because of the taint of irreligion with which such attitudes were associated, orthodox thinkers were inhibited from adopting them for a generation, while a vociferous minority mounted a counter-attack. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, however, it gradually became apparent that scepticism about such phenomena was less dangerous than it had initially appeared, and the orthodox began more cautiously to advocate such views themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines evidence that has been used to claim that British foreign secretary Lord William Grenville supported a French royalist plot to assassinate the Directory in the 18th century. Collapse of the British secret service's counter-revolutionary plans in France; Communications difficulties associated with undercover secret service activities in the era.

Investigates the circle of writers working for pro-government newspapers during the age of Whig supremacy under Sir Robert Walpole from the 1720s to the 1740s. Misinterpretations of Walpolean political thought; Three philosophical questions addressed in defense; Objectives of pro-government response to Walpole's corruption of political system and betrayal of Whig values.

Looks at the political role of the royal prerogative to create and promote British peers in the period 1760-1784. Argues that during the first two decades of his reign, George III maintained his original intention that peerage creations should be few in number and isolated from short-term political influences, but during the prolonged political crisis at the end of the American War of Independence, the king's power to create peers became deeply embroiled in politics.