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The French eighteenth century provides fertile ground for contemporary writers, artists, and filmmakers, offering narratives of struggle and triumph that specifically resonate today. The essays in this special issue attest to the importance of the French eighteenth century as an enduring source of cultural inspiration deriving in large part from its foundational relationship with our modernity, and in particular modern concepts of the individual in relation to society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which people imagined their suicide letters to be tools of posthumous communication, in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, and early twentieth-century Pernambuco. In examining letters from two places with very different religious traditions; at times of very divergent legal approaches to suicide; and at important points of change, this article seeks to examine both the commonalities and cultural specificities of these letters. Using 67 English and 39 Brazilian letters, it explores the suicide letter as a form of writing. It shows that, although death literally destroyed the possibility of interpersonal exchange, its imminence could make for particularly honest epistolary expressions of emotion. It also argues that, for some writers, death was envisaged as a divide which could be breached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a collection of circa 400 applications for 'begging letters' conserved in the archives of the Privy Council of the Austrian Netherlands from the late 1760s to the early 1780s. Such Lettres de Quête were issued in the name of the Habsburg monarch to subjects who had lost their possessions to fire or other natural disasters, and allowed their bearers to travel around begging. By means of a qualitative reading of the materials, the article uncovers underlying administrative procedures while throwing light on the social selectivity, practices and gains associated with this little-known phenomenon. By demonstrating that such 'begging letters' were customary policy practice, as they probably were in neighbouring countries, it signals their importance as an early modern mode of disaster relief and highlights their ambiguous role as a policy paradox in the context of increasing criminalisation of begging and vagrancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Frances Burney (1752-1840) became one of the most famous eighteenth-century English novelists after the publication of her first work Evelina (1778), which was followed by other successful novels that made her a household name in Britain. Though Burney was always very attracted by the stage and there is a close relationship between her narrative and dramatic production, her comedies and tragedies have been considerably less explored and celebrated by eighteenth-century scholars and feminism. This article examines Burney’s comedy A Busy Day; or, an Arrival from India (1800-1802), which was never performed on stage during her lifetime and was one of the author’s last compositions paving the way for her harsh social criticism in The Wanderer (1814). Like all of Burney’s works, A Busy Day contains a good deal of satire and a provoking view of the domestic ideology, colonialism and the economic interests of the family at the turn of the nineteenth century. Burney introduces an insightful analysis of vulgarity and prejudice against the middle class. By drawing on the work of several Burney scholars, gender and theatre studies, I show how gender and colonialism are interrelated in A Busy Day, which showcases an evolution from Burney’s first heroine in Evelina to a more mature woman that would continue up to The Wanderer and it turns out to be Burney’s fiercest dramatic criticism against bias based on class, race and sex.

Towards the end of 1750 Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples and Sicily, commissioned architect Luigi Vanvitelli to design a new royal palace in Caserta. In May 1751, a few months later, queen Maria Amalia of Saxony asked Vanvitelli to design a new modern city next to the king's house. In fact, the queen wanted the royal palace to rise in a comfortable urban environment, consisting of high quality buildings, uniform in architectural features and dimensions. Vanvitelli designed the New Caserta overcoming Baroque urbanism with a rational pattern of enclosed courtyards arranged in symmetrical plot. To eliminate monotony in the urban enviroment, streets and squares had to have various shapes and sizes. Tree-lined boulevards had to cut the city in cross and diagonal, directed towards the major cities of the Kingdom. The departure for Spain of Charles of Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Saxony, on 7 October 1759, caused the failure of the project. The city designed by Vanvitelli would never be built. On the contrary, during the nineteenth century the real city would have developed in a completely different way from what the architect predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frances Burney (1752-1840) became one of the most famous eighteenth-century English novelists after the publication of her first work Evelina (1778), which was followed by other successful novels that made her a household name in Britain. Though Burney was always very attracted by the stage and there is a close relationship between her narrative and dramatic production, her comedies and tragedies have been considerably less explored and celebrated by eighteenth-century scholars and feminism. This article examines Burney’s comedy A Busy Day; or, an Arrival from India (1800-1802), which was never performed on stage during her lifetime and was one of the author’s last compositions paving the way for her harsh social criticism in The Wanderer (1814). Like all of Burney’s works, A Busy Day contains a good deal of satire and a provoking view of the domestic ideology, colonialism and the economic interests of the family at the turn of the nineteenth century. Burney introduces an insightful analysis of vulgarity and prejudice against the middle class. By drawing on the work of several Burney scholars, gender and theatre studies, I show how gender and colonialism are interrelated in A Busy Day, which showcases an evolution from Burney’s first heroine in Evelina to a more mature woman that would continue up to The Wanderer and it turns out to be Burney’s fiercest dramatic criticism against bias based on class, race and sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 1772 memoir, Sarah Chapman relays an exciting tale of daring escape from her parent's home in December 1752. She was seventeen, single, and determined to join the Moravian Church, a new group originating in eastern Saxony. Women like Sarah—usually young and single—saw in the Moravians an alternative to settled life. This article explores the place of the Moravian Church as a disruptive organization which built congregations of young people who separated themselves from home and family, often dramatically retold in spiritual memoirs. Their Hussite proto-Reformation influences, combined with the charismatic leadership of the Saxon Count Zinzendorf, provided space for diverse forms of female participation. Through tales of run-away women, I argue that studying Moravian women disrupts the traditional conception of church creation as predominantly male and instead reconceives the religious fracturing of eighteenth-century Protestantism as something intimately experienced by women, even those young and single. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eighteenth century, artists in Mexico began producing sets of casta paintings. Depicting nuclear families where each member represents a different caste, these works carried a number of ideological messages; they codified a racialized hierarchy in the colony with white Spaniards at the top, advertised the abundant and exotic resources of the New World, tried to demonstrate that local administrators had control of an orderly society, and were meant to improve the social and economic status of painters. Casta paintings carried a crueler message as well. By representing Africans and their descendants as inclined to violence, deceitful, uncivilized, and close to nature, Mexican artists aided in the normalization of racism and slavery, and discouraged miscegenation. A non-white wife, they warned, was liable to attack her husband, as in the painting De español y negra, nace mulata by Andrés de Islas, or produce visibly dark-skinned children, as in the painting De español y albina, torna atrás by Miguel Cabrera. In short, casta paintings repeatedly indicated, both subtly and overtly, that Africans and their American-born offspring in New Spain were not considered fully human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The origins of comparative legal studies usually date back to the late 19th century. These kind of studies, however, were undertaken on a regular basis much earlier. Among the first serious adherents of the idea of comparing different legal systems was Thomas Bever. Bever was a civilian lawyer who successfully combined practice in the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts of England with Oxford’s fellowship and teaching duties. In the 1760s and 1770s, Bever was teaching the Civil law course on behalf of (or independently of) the current holders of the Regius Professorship. His lectures, unique in many aspects, were crowned with a set of comparative lectures. Bever was presenting the constitutional and legal systems of several European countries, including Poland, both in historical and modern dimensions. The aim of this article is to discuss Bever’s attitude towards comparative legal studies as well as to present his comparative method by reference to part of his lectures devoted to the old Polish law and constitution.

I will relate this reflection to my research journey examining Black women in eighteenth-century London.[4] My research journey began with a question I, as a London-born Black woman historian, ask myself daily: What was it like to be a Black woman walking London's streets in the eighteenth century? 13 13 Hospital Admission, 28th August 1788, St Thomas' Hospital Admission and Discharge Registers, I London Lives i , Reference LMTHRH554070145 https://www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?div=LMTHRH55407RH554070145 (accessed 4 January 2022); Workhouse Admission and Discharge Records, 1764-1930, I Ancestry i , London, England. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Cuadernos Dieciochistas is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuadernos Dieciochistas is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the role played by Augustin Calmet, a Benedictine, in the construction of the vampire. In the eighteenth century, Calmet embarked upon a thorough examination of the evidence for the existence of reported vampires in the lands of Hungary, Moravia, Serbia, and Romania. In order to complete this task, Calmet would investigate numerous incidents of apparent vampirism as well as the particular qualities that define these claims. However, Calmet’s emphasis and focus upon these features of “vampirism” would assist in the creation of an archetypal vampire, which would endure for the next three centuries.

The present paper examines patterns in the timing of widows' remarriage in the 18th-century Transylvanian capital city of Hermannstadt/Sibiu, based on a sample of 405 marriages contracted by Lutheran widows in this area between roughly 1755 and 1794. It regards this time frame as being able to reveal how factors encouraging or, alternately, discouraging remarriage after widowhood worked in practice. The study offers a descriptive analysis of the sample, focusing on the main known characteristics of the individuals involved, including the former and new spouse's social status (as measured by HISCLASS), the former spouse's age, the new spouse's migration status, and their marital status prior to contracting the marriage to a widow. Additionally, it provides a deeper understanding of potential delays in remarriage by creating a sub-sample of 131 marriage events linked to the probate inventories compiled after the first spouse's death, which offer a glimpse of the economic and familial situations in which widows found themselves at the time of experiencing this transition in marital status. A third section looks at how these factors worked together to influence widows' remarriage timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain, this article examines the understudied production of Elizabeth Helme (c. 1743-1814), who enjoyed a long and successful career as a translator, essayist, and writer of novels. Special attention will be paid to Helme’s reception in the English press and the translations of her novels into Spanish and French. It will further argue that Helme’s own practice as author, translator, and translated author configured a synergy of knowledge-building that allowed her to articulate her own style as a writer and posed a critical reflection about the art of writing in her non-fiction pieces, particularly in The Fruits of Reflection (1809) that remains largely unexplored. More generally, Helme’s eclectic approach is indicative of the ways in which eighteenth-century translation and writing practice can foster reflection on literary theory and criticism by confronting the author with the function of her own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Restoration and the eighteenth century brought great changes to the islands of Great Britain. It was a time that witnessed the Act of Union which joined Scotland and Wales to Britain in 1707. Britain achieved political stability and commercial prosperity. New standards of politeness and social behavior prevailed to distinguish between civilized and vulgar citizens. The standards of hierarchy and order helped people participate in and contribute to the emergence of the British Empire and culture. For the sake of expansion, Britain started to drive many of its population and soldiers to settle in its newly occupied territories to encourage the British hegemony in those colonies. For that reason, several English writers, critics, and poets approached the theme of political and social transformation in their literary works. Although Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” has been predominantly analyzed as a poem that mourns the death of marginalized poor people, this paper aims to put the poem in its socio-political context. Within a historical framework, this study argues that the poem does not only lament the death of England’s underprivileged individuals but that it also contains a prophecy that started to be fulfilled decades later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of Zaishengyuan, an eighteenth‐century romance authored by Chen Duansheng, who exemplifies the ways in which early modern Chinese women entered the field of prose fiction. Alienated from the vernacular novel, literary women in eighteenth‐century China were channelled into tanci, a genre of narrative fiction connected to romances and manuscript culture. With exuberant representations of female cross‐dressing and many other forms of self‐transformation, Zaishengyuan experiments with radical conceptions of individual identity as discontinuous and self‐determined. It illuminates a social ecology of fiction writing that both differs from and resonates with that in eighteenth‐century Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a revisionist history of women through the lens of anthropological gift theory by analysing how Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova used gifts to sustain her relationships, including a tumultuous friendship with Catherine the Great, and the historical narrative of her life. In 1762, Ekaterina played a key role in the coup that overthrew Peter III and installed his wife on the throne. Catherine II made the princess president of the Russian Academy of Sciences - the first European woman to hold public office. At a time when elite Russians first encountered Western society, Ekaterina played a central role in shaping and promoting Russian intellectual and cultural life. The role that gift-giving played in the princess's negotiation of her relationships and her construction of her own and Russia's history has not been considered; this article argues for greater recognition of gift-giving and visual rhetoric in women's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library's Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics' daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a 'good title' to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics' affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersection of entrepreneurial studies and queer studies as it appears in Charlotte Charke's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke , examining the relationship between Charke's queer identity and labor history. I come to the conclusion that the queer "catallactic" capitalist is an antinormative identity that queers the space around it; queer capitalism becomes a type of applied queer theory that operates in a space I refer to as the bazaar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I reflect on how tending to Indigenous plants has taught me the essential step in a cycle of healing and learning: a fallow time. I propose a fallow season as a radical step that institutions and organizations can take as part of their antiracist commitments. Providing examples of the harm done by a constant-productivity model, this essay considers what types of academic output will have to halt, and what kinds of new work can be done, in a fallow period as an investment in an antiracist future for our field, our students, our selves, and our future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After some initial enthusiasm, public sympathy for the French Revolution waned in Britain in the 1790s. Growing violence stirred suspicion that revolutionary principles were giving way to radical despotism, and that anarchy was imminent. Satirical prints captured and propagated this disillusion, caricaturing the French as grotesque and threatening. The female body proved an especially fruitful resource; a colourful cast of cannibalistic crones, haggard fishwives, and monstrous viragos allied anxieties about radical femininity with Revolutionary corruption. The breast emerged as an evocative emblem of French unnaturalness—it appeared bare, bulbous, sagging, shrivelled, and even suckling snakes. But despite its prevalence, scholarship has overlooked one of its key incarnations. This article analyses caricatures of the French breast as physically threatening—flaming, reinforced by a gun, or shooting poisonous discharges. Mobilising medical, moral, and philosophical perspectives, it shows how it was used to position France as Britain's dangerous and degenerate 'other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the reconstruction of the authorial profile of José Joaquín Benegasi y Luján (1707-1770), the work of archiving, together with other tools of historiography, is very important. The biographical information of the literary texts of the author can be corroborated or refuted by the historical documentation, whose character, in principle, is more objective. Thus, the compilation of the biographical testimonies with which other authors tried to illuminate the socio-vital profile of Benegasi, together with the discovery and examination of historical documents of certain relevance (birth certificate, living will, license of works of one of its properties...), makes possible the reconstruction of a true biographical profile that illuminates both the author’s own poetic production and the context in which it is inserted.

The article presents an account of the visual relations created by garments through their plastic formants, examining the role played by form, material, and composition in creating body hierarchies that produce prescribed behaviors between different subjects. The work dissects the concept of thematic role from Greimasian theory, investigating the manners in which an eighteenth-century wedding dress presents the chaining of programs governing materials, garments, and the body in the production of narrative interactions between subjects. The work utilizes a combination of Greimas' method with the Visual Semiotics continued by Floch and Oliveira, as well as Hammad's Semiotics of Space which permit the exam of optical relations created in the body through its clothing – relations that can be read as manifesting values that are both historically and socially determined, or in the act of apprehension of an object. The eighteenth century provides a type of "original" case, whose results are pertinent to a broader study of the relations between body and dress: the work concludes with the understanding that Fashion changes through the transit of values and roles invested in the body and dress – a set of changes closely linked to the construction of social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rigorous study of Anne Lister's personal and public identities, scholars have only minimally acknowledged the ways in which Lister appropriated the ideas and practices of others to construct the image of herself they themselves are so fascinated by. From her teenage years onward, Lister collected ideas, images, and published works that broke with the traditional, conservative ideals on which she was raised and adapted them for her own use in expanding her queer identity. Of the scholars who do investigate Lister's use of the publicly queer, even fewer have thoroughly examined Lister's method of adaptation as a distinctly queer process of recognition and replication within the communityâ€"a process that, to some extent, still exists today. This paper aims to bridge a portion of this gap by examining Lister's use of Lord Byron and argues that in her reflecting the easily visible traits of other, more public figures like Byron, Anne Lister exemplifies a tradition of queer survival methods that have created a community built on recognition and visibility within while maintaining the ability to hide in plain sight without, existing in the space between seen and unseen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eliza Haywood is an increasingly popular author to assign in eighteenth-century literature courses. But Haywood is also a prime figure to represent the eighteenth century in courses with a broader scope. This essay proposes teaching The Adventures of Eovaai in a fantasy-focused, introductory-level survey of British Literature. Identifying Eovaai as part of the fantasy tradition leverages students' prior knowledge and facilitates teaching this complex novel to first-year students. Eovaai provides a wealth of topics for class discussions and activities, including the development of the novel as a genre, identity and othering in fantasy literature, and the use of fantasy conventions like world-building and speculative technology. Moreover, considering Haywood as both representative of the eighteenth century and a pioneer of fantasy literature encourages students to broaden their conceptualizations of the early modern period, women writers, and generic conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the production of ignorance in early modern academic information circulation by focusing on the question of how information changes from being present to being absent in the medium of the learned journal—in short, how knowledge becomes forgotten. To examine the processes behind this change, I have selected four exemplary late-seventeenth- to early-eighteenth-century scholars: Johannes Braun (1628–1708), Thomas Gale (1636–1702), Adriaan Reland (1676–1718), and Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720), and tracked their reception over the course of the eighteenth century, as indicated by patterns of references to them in learned journals. To this end, I chose four exemplary eighteenth-century learned journals, the [Nova] Acta Eruditorum, the Journal des Savants, the Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt, and the Philosophical Transactions, and searched digitally for all references to the four scholars between 1 January 1701 and 31 December 1800. Each journal page bearing at least one reference to one of these scholars is treated as a textual unit for the extraction of co-citation data. These co-citation data were then used as material for a diachronic network analysis of the reference patterns. The results show that the frequency of references made to all four scholars began to decline demonstrably in the middle of the eighteenth century and that by the last quarter they had become forgotten, that is, effectively “ignored.” These processes turn out to be context-sensitive and not determined by the quality of the contributions of those who became forgotten. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Ignorance,” edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and Peter Burke.

This article aims to show how attention to the history of ignorance can bring to light salient qualities of key texts from the past, and in doing so illuminate not just the history of the book and the history of reading. The eighteenth-century saw a substantial increase in availability of printed material, but most full-length printed books were beyond the budget of the poorest. This market was met by chapbook abridgements of the most popular texts, some of which were considered by the higher ranks to be proper reading for the poor (religious classics) and some which were more controversial (fiction). However, readers on each side of this divide were often ignorant not only of how the other side was reading specific texts, but of the fact that they were not in fact reading the same text at all, since the poor were much more likely to rely on abridgements. I compare two abridgements of a key eighteenth-century religious text, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and show how both converge on a more forward looking narrative technique than the original and on a more level representation of social ranks than the original. An “approved” text for the poor, therefore, by means of ignorance, had the potential to encourage a non-approved attitude towards aesthetic innovation and social rank. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Ignorance,” edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and Peter Burke.

This article explores the need for and applications of trauma-informed teaching in eighteenth-century studies, particularly around representations of sexual trauma (rape) and consent. The prevalence of trauma guarantees its presence in our classrooms, even and especially in its absences. As the field of eighteenth-century studies continues to reframe its white, Eurocentric, male-dominated past through more intentionally inclusive research and teaching methods, particularly those that explore the intersections of eighteenth-century studies and social justice approaches to education, the presence of trauma in our classrooms will become only more significant. Keeping in mind those students of marginalized identities who are most likely to be impacted by trauma--those who identify as womxn, students of color, trans, LGBTQ+, Black, Latinx, Native, Indigenous, lower-income and first-generation--we detail strategies for support and for developing a trauma-informed classroom atmosphere that will best support all students in their learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our recent experiences of quarantine during the COVID-19 outbreak have exposed the vulnerability of poorer members of society and has highlighted their increased suffering during the period of restricted mobility. This article considers the way in which quarantine exacerbates inequalities from a historical perspective, looking at enforced periods of restricted travel and its impact on servants and lower-class British travelers of the eighteenth century in Europe. It examines both the history of representations of plague and contagion, and some of the human reactions to fears of disease, one of which was the imposition of quarantine measures. Three main sources are referred to: Patrick Brydone's A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, published in 1790; Elizabeth, Lady Craven's "A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople in a series of Letters," published in 1789; and the unpublished letters of William Fletcher, manservant to Lord Byron, from his journeys in 1811. The texts produced by these travelers from the eighteenth century offer rich material for the consideration of the impact of mobility and immobility both of and on the body and how these experiences were strikingly different depending on the social class of the traveler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]