Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
1
John Dixon Hunt (University of Pennsylvania)
Fruit from the 'Inlightened' Tree: The Royal Society, History & the Picturesque
The usual perception of the picturesque in the late 18th century was that
it had developed an interest in painterly technique and employed it on
making and viewing landscapes. Today even those emphases have been
lost in a largely journalist and banal use of the term. But the picturesque
was essentially a tool for comprehension, for learning how to look, how
to seize the substance of a place, to parse what you saw, and learn about
its components. For that skill, one could certainly learn from looking at
carefully composed landscape paintings, and that scrutiny (that ‘tutorial’)
sharpened the mind in its other inquiries beyond paintings. But I will
argue that the real impetus for the picturesque came from the emphasis
on ‘histories’ by members of the Royal Society in the later 17th century.
Its members' concern for reading and understanding the land – its
history, its monuments and topography, even the texture of what the
landscape offered to the enquiring eye and mind of the traveler. And it
was this that energized at least the early years of the 18th-century
picturesque and arguably even some of its later exponents.
2
Erika Naginski (Harvard University)
Impossible Design: Porsenna’s Tomb and French Visionary Architecture
3
Jeffrey Collins (Bard Graduate Center, New York)
From Ditch To Nitch: Making The Hall Of The Muses
'Undoing the Ancient' Keynote
Jeffrey Collins is Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at the Bard Graduate
Center, New York, where he specializes in the visual and material culture of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas. He is the author of
Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge,
2004) and a principal contributor to Pedro Friedeberg (Mexico City: Trilce, 2009) and
The History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400-2000 (Yale, 2013).
Educated at Yale and at Clare College, Cambridge, Collins is a Fellow of the American
Academy in Rome, a past Getty Scholar, and the recipient of grants and fellowships
from the Andrew W. Mellon, Fulbright, and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundations and
the American Philosophical Society. He has published widely on early modern
through contemporary painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism, book illustration, furniture, and film; his
new project explores the intersecting cultures of archaeology and museology by tracing the changing form
and fortunes rediscovered near Rome in the 1770s and enshrined at the new Vatican Museum.
4
Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Virginia)
The History of Choice: An 18th-Century Subject
5
Stephen Bending (University of Southampton)
Pleasure Gardens and the Problems of Pleasure
'Global Sensibilities Group' Keynote
Drawing on theoretical, practical, and historical works from the period, but also on guidebooks, popular
fiction, poetry, and in particular on letters and diaries, the paper explores an experience of pleasure which
might sway at any moment from easily moralized or politicized narratives of significance and use to
something far less neatly subsumed within, or contained by, such agenda. Focusing on the problem of
pleasure—too much, not enough, the wrong kind, the wrong place—the paper asks what access we might
have to the eighteenth-century individual imagining themself in the world. How might that individual draw
on, resist, or re-interpret the powerful assumptions of public expectation; how might individual experience
help us to understand the larger operations and experiences of ideology?
6
Enlightenment Senses: Light, Sound and Virtuality
7
Nonetheless, everywhere during this period one finds a perhaps troubling overreliance on simulation. Man
in a state of nature to explain the emergence of government and social hierarchies, Royal Society
publications that recounted pristinely exemplary experiments that in fact never happened or failed to turn
out, novels that purported to give direct access to the minds of others—enlightenment thought, for all its
rationality, was simply willing to accept forms of virtuality as evidence for real-world phenomena. This
disconnect between the technologies of enlightenment thought and the world that they purported to
describe and explain is the focus of my presentation. I will discuss the role of print in creating the illusion of
epistemological access, and in particular the ways in which print was used to simulate experiences of
phenomena thought to exist in the world but of which no individual had actual experience.
8
Representation and the Female Body
Yet Vallayer-Coster’s complex and sensual still lifes, or natures mortes, are characterized by unusually bold
brushwork, complex allegorical structures, and an apparent interest in floral and faunal taxonomies - all of
which warrant further study. In this paper, I will discuss Vallayer-Coster’s Marine Still Life with Coral and Sea
Shells (1769, Musée du Louvre) within the context of an emerging conchological discourse, as well the
established tradition of collecting and displaying shells in curiosity cabinets. Furthermore, I will argue that
Vallayer-Coster’s natures mortes are paradoxically enlivened by a throbbing, embodied femininity
(exemplified by the fleshy-pink conch shells and tufts of coral in Vallayer-Coster’s Marine Still Life, which
manifestly evoke the female body).
The “preliminary,” safe mood and facile manner of rococo images accorded with what French authors
characterized, in memoirs and pornographic tales, as inconsequential, unthreatening female-female
intimacies that bore no stigma of cuckoldry. With this in mind, the paper then focuses on images of Diana,
goddess of chaste corporeality, adopted often as a persona for the portraits of noblewomen (including royal
mistresses), and popular as a subject when coupled with beguiled Callisto. The masquerade of insignificance
enabled the true mask, the nonchalant disguise of innocence, which nevertheless luxuriated in sensuality.
9
Jessica Fripp (Parsons The New School for Design)
Femmes au-delà des règles: growing old in public in eighteenth-century France
As recent scholarship has shown, longer life expectancy during the eighteenth century led to a growth of
interest in aging and an increase in representations of the elderly in art and literature. But while the figure of
the old man shifted from someone to be mocked to someone to be respected, aging women were not
treated as kindly. This was, in part, because the life cycle of a woman did not match that of a man,
traditionally broken down into infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age. Menopause, as a liminal phase
between child-bearing years and full-on old age, posed a problem for understanding how women aged and
their changing roles in society as they grew older. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier noted: “a woman in Paris is
never forty years old, she is always either thirty or sixty; and since no one says otherwise, the forty-year-old
woman does not exist.” This paper examines visual representations of women in the eighteenth century as
they reached middle age, focusing specifically on women who had what might be called a “public life,” such
as salonnières (Madame Geoffrin), queens (Marie Leszczyńska) and mistresses (Madame de Pompadour).
During a time in which menopausal women were perceived at best as without purpose and at worst as
deviant and deceptive, how did women in the public sphere negotiate this transitional period? How
wereideas about the passage of time enacted through the representation of the aging woman’s body?
10
The Philippines in the Long Eighteenth Century
The development of colonial science in the 18th century was brought up by the need to improve the
agricultural situation in the Philippines, as part of the Bourbon monarch’s plan of economic industrialization.
The scientific enlightenment in Spain influenced by the French and English thinkers hastened the transfer of
ideas from the Iberian metropole to its periphery across the Atlantic, up to the colonies in the Pacific. In the
Philippines, this was concretely manifested by different flora expeditions sponsored by the government and
scientific enterprises initiated by private individuals.
On the other hand, in the 19th century, given the cash-crop trade of the colony pushed by British and
American investors, merchant vessels and sea trade became an essential facet of the colonial economic
system. With this, typhoons that cause shipwrecks and land inundations must be kept in the watch of the
state. During this era, a new form of science, initiated by the Jesuits, offered a new mode of service by
lessening the effects of typhoons and its epiphenomenal hazards.
11
Aaron Mallari (University of the Philippines Diliman)
The Spanish Enlightenment and its ripples to penology: Notes on the History of the Prison in the
Spanish Philippines
The Enlightenment brought revolutionary ideas that changed the ways we view society and make sense of
the world. For the history of punishment, this period also signaled the rise of the prison as the primary
institution of punishment eclipsing the harsher methods that are done in public as a spectacle. Michel
Foucault had argued that the period of the Enlightenment shifted the focus of punishment from harming the
body to rehabilitating the soul. In a sense, that turn was not necessarily to punish less, but to punish better.
From the 18th century on, the world saw the prison at the forefront penal practices.
This piece reflects on the rise of the prison in the Philippines in the context of the Spanish Enlightenment. It
will attempt to present the flow ideas on penology from Europe to the Americas and eventually to the
Pacific, the Philippines in particular, culminating in the rise of the prison in the 19th century attested by the
completion of the Bilibid Prison in Manila in 1865. Furthermore, the paper follows the idea of David Garland
in treating punishment as a social institution; seeing prisons and modes of punishment as “cultural artifacts”
that house a web of cultural meanings. With this view, a history of punishment in the Philippines will be
presented albeit in broad strokes to show how the history of punishment can be a lens to view the changing
landscape of Philippine society under the colonial context from the 16th to 19th centuries.
12
Remapping the Enlightenment
Drawing on a range of sources from Philippines and Spanish archives, this paper explores the idea of the
crusade and the specific ways in which it shaped the Spanish colonial regime in the Asia from 1750 to 1762. I
demonstrate that in this period, Manila became the staging point for multiple military and spiritual wars of
conquest in the Pacific world. The Spanish colonial government and its indigenous allies waged a long and
bloody war against Islamic communities in the southern Philippines that aimed to subdue the “infidels” and
convert them to Catholicism. At the same time, the colonial government experimented with various
initiatives that attempted to make Catholics out of Chinese people in the Philippines as well as Mainland
China. The desire to evangelise was the driving force behind Spanish imperialism in Asia.
Recovering Iberian crusades in the eighteenth century Pacific world challenges the popular theory that
Manila was primarily a commercial colony sustained by Spanish imperial policy to facilitate trade with China.
This project also disrupts perceptions of European imperial expansion in the Pacific as a scientific enterprise,
and broader narratives of the Enlightenment in the Pacific.
13
Louis Kirk McAuley (Washington State University)
"the whisker’d vermine-race" - or, Ideas about Biological Invasion in Eighteenth-Century
Caribbean Literature
In the “Preface” to his West Indian georgic, The Sugar-Cane (1764), Scottish poet and physician, James
Grainger predictably emphasizes the novelty of his Caribbean environs, the artless re-presentation of which
he humbly suggests “could not fail to enrich” British poetry. Ironically, however, the lengthy annotations
that accompany Grainger’s imperial landscaping (poetry) frequently focus on not merely indigenous (or New
World) organisms, but invasive species: Old World people, animals, and plants, including the rats – or
“whisker’d vermine-race” – that Samuel Johnson insisted were unpoetical by nature.1 That is, the New World
discourse that Grainger marshals in his “Preface” effectively serves to preserve an antiquated idea of the
Atlantic Ocean as a boundary separating Old and New Worlds, while his annotations register the
considerable extent to which, by 1764, the formerly “virgin soil” of the Caribbean had become irreversibly
transformed through a series of global biological transfers.2 Accordingly, my presentation will focus on the
psycho-geographical confusion of Old and New World ecologies in Caribbean ‘empire writing’ – including the
local newspapers and magazines, such as Robert Baldwin’s Weekly Jamaica Courrant (1718), that made it
possible for the sugar islands to cohere and flourish. I argue that such confusion serves to measure the
environmental impacts of the sugar trade. Essays that appeared in The Jamaica Magazine – works such as
“An Account of Some Trees of Prodigious Dimensions in Scotland” – beg to be read in light of widespread
deforestation (the “yearning for lost landscapes” that figures in much postcolonial Caribbean literature).3 I
read this early Caribbean literature as not merely “environmentally oriented” (Buell), but preoccupied with
what ecologists today commonly refer to as invasion biology.4
1. See James Boswell, The Life of Johnson (1791) (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 614-615.
2. Stuart McCook, “The Neo-Columbian Exchange: The Second Conquest of the Greater Caribbean, 1720-1930,” Latin American
Research Review, Volume 46, Special Issue (2011), 13.
3. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert, “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures,” Postcolonial Ecologies:
Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99.
4. The publication of Charles Elton’s The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants in 1958 marks the formal beginnings of invasion
biology. See Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), 19-21.
14
Satire and Enlightenment
Haywood’s dialogic engagement with Henry Fielding in the short-lived but vibrant London theater
community of the 1730s has already received some foundational work to illustrate the range of her gender-
focused satiric talents, but a larger evaluation of satire’s influence across her career will be the focus of my
research here, from her earliest efforts in the amatory fictions such as Love in Excess to her capstone novels
at the end of her career such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Haywood’s engagement with cultural
and intellectual discourse of the period, including her use of classical modes of satire prevalent at the time,
will inform my analysis.
This is not a new story. The novelty I hope to bring to the debate is part of an argument about the emotional
effects of satire. Taking some cues from cognitive analyses of the emotions, I want to study how Gay’s
operas function as containers for the spectacular dissent of Scriblerian satire, focusing particularly on the
way they deploy laughter to channel anger, contempt, and disgust. These emotions situate subjects in
different ways towards the material satirized, and Gay’s opera’s will be analysed particularly for the ways
they express and mobilise contempt.
The larger argument is that Scriblerian satire has political consequences of a more paradoxical nature than
has often been recognized. One of the things that happened during the long Eighteenth Century in Britain
was the development of robust and more-or-less tolerated public dissent against the current regime. The
attacks on the Walpole government in the 1720s and 1730s provide a crucial stage in this process. Satires
like Gay’s seem to have had little direct impact on policy, but it is the emotional effects of catharsis – of
15
venting and containing potentially rebellious emotions – that needs further analysis for a literary history of
political emotions.
16
Biography and the Visual
The work portrays an actress whose private and public lives were equally intriguing, one of a few highly
successful women whose celebrity status enabled their radical upward mobility. Her life provides its own
commentary on one of the most controversial and memorable scenes in Shakespeare’s plays, the moment
when Hermione ‘comes to life.’ Creating the illusion that its subject, Elizabeth Farren, is before us, this life-
size depiction provides a further gloss on the theme. Through a range of visual and textual examples, the
paper will explore how portraits transformed and augmented theatrical personae in the late eighteenth
century. It will review depictions of Hermione in the visual arts and the context for Zoffany’s remarkable
reinterpretation, including its unusual and significant classical references. Lastly, new evidence about the
provenance of the work will reveal the dramatic, perilous and sometimes poignant contexts for such
portraits, as revealed in the lives of its owners and the estate that housed it until the early 20th century.
17
style and composition. Although depicted in rich court dress, Don Luis is shown against a neutral background
unusual for Mengs’ portraits of royalty and more characteristic of his Grand Tour portraits. In 1778, Mengs
took the painting with him back to Rome. When he died the following year, it was listed in his probate
inventory as incomplete. An almost literal copy, also cited in the inventory, is now in Cleveland and it was
this version that was sent to Don Luis in Spain, despite also being deemed unfinished. This paper explores
the relationship between the two versions and their place within Mengs’ oeuvre as portrait painter. It also
looks at Don Luis as patron—he employed the cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini and was an early
supporter of the young Goya—and as a contentious figure at the court of Carlos III, ultimately exiled for his
licentious behavior at the exact time that Mengs was painting his portrait.
18
Performance and Pleasures
This paper answers this question by examining pantomime in the 1740s. This decade witnessed an increasing
number of pantomimes performed at the fairground theaters and the Comédie-Italienne. However, the
pantomimes performed at the Opéra and at Versailles have been underestimated. In the prologue of
Mondonville’s pastorale‐héroïque Isbé performed at the Opéra in 1742, the personification Amour is
threatened by a newcomer Fashion, who captivated Paris with the “tumultuous pleasures” through
pantomime. Amour, represented by social dances, feels defeated and leaves Paris. The opposition between
pantomime and social dance played out again during the wedding festivities of the Dauphin’s marriage in
1745. In the middle of the War of Austrian Succession, Louis XV wanted to distinguish France by creating an
unprecedented type of spectacle that includes comedy. The emboldened composer Rameau thus designed a
pantomime in his Platée (1745, 1749) that mocked social dance and experimented with this dance pairing
again in Pygmalion (1748). This paper shows how Louis XV’s politics of spectacle complicated Louis XIV’s
politics of dance and provided favorable political conditions for pantomime as the ballet of the
Enlightenment.
19
Josephine Touma (Art Gallery New South Wales)
Of Momus and Monkeys: Watteau's theatrical arabesques at the Hotel de Nointel
Amongst the vast volume of scholarship on Antoine Watteau, the artist’s painted decoration of a small room
in the Parisian Hôtel de Nointel (c. 1708) has received scant interpretation. Although few of the arabesque
wall panels survive, and only the ceiling remains in situ , these surviving fragments can be reconstituted with
engravings after lost panels to reveal a sophisticated iconographic assembly, dominated by Momus (god of
satire) and Bacchus (god of wine), crowned with a ceiling of anthropomorphic monkeys. This paper examines
the Nointel scheme in light of established and emerging theatrical tropes of the opening decade of the
eighteenth century. Rich in symbols of satire and parody, these playful vignettes indicate Watteau’s specific
interest in the physical and mimetic functions of theatre. I consider the work as a microcosm of the artist’s
broader engagement with contemporary theories and practices of performance and spectatorship.
20
Women Crossing Boundaries
This was an unusual role for a woman. While it was common for women to play an important role in shop-
keeping families, including in keeping the books, and although some single women and widows managed
significant businesses, Darcel’s role was exceptional. Yet in other respects she was a typical Paris bourgeoise,
with fairly conventional religious and social attitudes. She bore eight children and managed the household.
This paper uses her letters to Oberkampf to ask how, as a woman crossing boundaries, she presented and
negociated her double identity. She systematically portrays herself, even while reporting on financial
matters, as a dutiful wife and mother. This was itself, I shall suggest, one of a number of rhetorical devices
that she used both to strengthen the partnership between her husband and Oberkampf and to influence
business decisions without appearing to overstep the limits imposed by her gender.
Still, it was a long way from established customary norms for a young woman of from the provinces to be
educated by a tutor, travel to another region to study, to receive a university degree at the age of 18, to be
civically feted on returning and to spend her life engaged in public teaching and the activities of her home
town Academy and other learned academies. That her subject matter was the new Newtonian physics
makes this all the more unusual.
This paper contributes to our understanding of the participation of women in the development of
Enlightenment knowledge by examining how this woman, who was one of the first to receive a university
degree, was able to pursue the new knowledge within the socially codified roles prescribed for women and
how she negotiated her place.
21
form a celebrated poetry salon at her villa in Batheaston. At the heart of the salon was an Italian marble urn
bought during Lady Miller’s travels and styled as ‘Tully’s vase’ because it allegedly once belonged to Cicero.
Poems on selected themes were placed in the vase and the winners were given myrtle wreaths in the
tradition of the Academy of Arcadia in Rome. Through her salon Lady Miller offered ‘middling’ women such
as Anna Seward, Jane Bowdler, and Mary Alcock an entry point into the commercial marketplace and she
published seven annual collections of verse under the title Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath.
However, Lady Miller’s efforts to prove herself as a public authority on taste also led to derision from the
literary elite and the vase itself became a regular target of satire in London’s newspapers. My paper will
examine how Lady Miller used her Grand Tour souvenirs as performative self-fashioning devices to
transgress boundaries and negotiate a public role for herself unachievable prior to her trip. Nonetheless,
much of Lady Miller’s fame came from her contemporaries utilising the unsuitability of her material show to
question her presumption of a literary reputation. Therefore, as a middling women, the very items that
allowed Lady Miller to achieve commercial success compromised her professional achievement.
22
Secularization
It is becoming increasingly clear that, during the enlightenment, the secular and the religious were much
more tightly and complexly entwined than scholars have previously recognised. That is clear from major
surveys like those by Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet but also from a number of more local studies.
Indeed, in this recent body of research, the account of the enlightenment, which joins it to a triumphalist
account of secularization, is increasingly under contestation. This panel aims to contribute to this discussion
by thinking about the secular/religion entanglement specifically in relation to English literature. It does so by
offering four papers: Alison Scott considers the textual hybridity of Bacon’s “Of Atheism” in order to argue
that the Essays effect what David Martin has spoken of as a process of driving faith back into the secular
from a new perspective, thereby reconceiving the conditions of belief; Brandon Chua examines the
pressures placed on conventional poetic idioms by the institutionalisation of religious toleration in the wake
of the repeal movements of the late 1680s; Lisa O’Connell examines the relations between sentimentalism
and the Christian virtues in order to argue that sentimentalism can be understood as a vehicle for
the revitalisation of the cardinal virtues; Simon During offers a conspectus which suggests
that “secularisation" itself is perhaps not a useful concept/paradigm for literary history in the period.
23
freedom. Reexamining Dryden’s dialogues with Virgil, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, as well as the structural
importance these postures of conversation occupy, this paper will argue for the poem’s investments in
theorising and critiquing the contours of a religious and discursive landscape secured by diversity rather than
conformity.
24
Mobilizing Ideas
This panel investigates images and objects as a means for inscribing and mobilizing ideas across societies and
cultures during the long eighteenth century. Whether visual, textual or architectural, the arts serve as a
medium through which ideas may be constructed and conveyed. Thanks to dramatic developments in
scientific knowledge, technologies of production, economic systems, and global movement and
communication, the ways in which people interacted with, imagined and recorded themselves and others
expanded and evolved markedly during the long eighteenth century. Visual and material culture was central
to this process, as modes of engagement with the physical and represented world evolved as well. Prints,
books, textiles and decorative objects, in turn, figured prominently in the movement of information and
ideas within and across cultures, as visual or written material often served as metonymic substitutes or
performative contexts for a foreign other.
This panel includes papers that explore the movement of ideas within and across societies and cultures as
expressed through visual and material culture, broadly conceived. Possible themes include (but are by no
means limited to):
Our investigation will focus on the Thirty-six Views of Bishu Shangzhuang (c.1714) engraved by the Italian
Jesuit Matteo Ripa with the assistance of local artists, in response to the Kangxi Emperor’s request to have
his new palace documented with Western-style prints. This volume is the first to document a Chinese royal
palace and its gardens from multiple sites and perspectives with a combination of text and image, and the
striking similarity between this album and the views of French palaces gifted to Kangxi strongly suggests
iconographic and conceptual borrowings from the French precedent. This paper will facilitate a more
25
nuanced understanding of cross-cultural artistic exchange developing out of diplomatic gifts between Louis
XIV and the Kangxi Emperor.
Combining the history of architecture with the history of technology, this paper examines the invention and
use of the galiote à bombe in the context of what I call “mobile fortifications.” In light of Pierre Bouguer’s
1746 treatise on ship design, the transmission of technological advancements and precise positioning of
architectural elements redefined how mobility became embodied within naval geometry. French, British,
and American administrators and builders appropriated and altered the original Dutch design of the galjoot
to suit their own purposes. More importantly, with the demise of static edifices such as fortresses, such
naval vessels articulated a type of architecture designed for portable modes of engagement that came to
define prevailing military strategies.
26
Antioh, then sovereign (hospodar) of Moldavia (1705-07) and for his wily and illiterate father, Konstantin,
himself a former hospodar of Moldavia (1685-93).
The proposed paper will discuss a late chapter in that history garden design, one that extends across the
“late Early Modern” of the long 18th century. It will consider two landscapes designed by Maximilian of
Habsburg (1832–67): the park of Miramare, his residence in Trieste, on the Adriatic coast, begun in 1856,
and the park of Chapultepec, in Mexico City, developed from 1864, when Maximilian became First Emperor
of Mexico.
Highlighting the crucial semantic function of both parks in supporting Maximilian’s ideological agenda, the
paper will examine Miramare and Chapultepec as transcultural gardens.
In Maximilian’s attempt of representing the Habsburgs’ imperial power on the Adriatic coast, the complex of
Miramare evoked a connection between the Germanic and the ancient Mediterranean culture: it was built
on the site of a Roman villa and its design was inspired by Karl Friedrick Schinkel’ projects. The great
parterre, the main feature of the garden, however, anticipated Maximilian’s political role as future emperor
of Mexico. It was designed in the Gardenesque style and displayed a collection of plants from Central and
South America, thus combining the dominating European models with an admiration for the American
landscape.
When Maximilian reached Mexico City, in 1864, he resided in the Chapultepec Castle at the top of
Chapultepec Hill, a site where the first Aztecs arriving in the Valley of Mexico settled. He designed there a
park in the European fashion, with regular parterres, and connected the palace to the city with a boulevard
in the Parisian style. To legitimize his role as emperor, Maximilian used a range of cultural references that
mixed the history of the site with European culture and garden aesthetics.
27
Women, Biography and History
Mary Casey (Casey & Lowe, Archaeology & Heritage/University of Sydney)
Elizabeth Macquarie (née) Campbell - A Governor’s wife and a Designing Woman
The biography of Elizabeth Macquarie is hampered if we only concentrate on her words, as so few of them
survive, or the words of others, as they could be deceptive. To understand Mrs Macquarie we need to place
her within the context of the cultural landscapes of Scotland and how these were expressed in colonial New
South Wales (1810-1820). By interrogating some of the surviving documents, her abilities and interests can
be acknowledged and explored to locate her as a key figure in the remaking of the landscapes of Sydney and
Parramatta. Elizabeth, as patron, was a central figure, with her husband the governor, and they were
assisted by others. The remaking of these landscapes and the choice of building styles were for many
reasons, but importantly as a testimony of national identity, a means of making New South Wales ‘British’,
an expression of a older past, a ‘patina’ of age to British settlement which it was barely beginning at the
edge of wilderness. By exploring Elizabeth’s biography, through documents, paintings, maps and plans,
archaeological places, architectural styles, the sublime and the picturesque, new layers of her life are
revealed which challenge received interpretations of her as the governor’s ‘amanuensis’. Elizabeth, in
partnership with her husband the governor, remade the landscapes of colonial Sydney and Parramatta, and
they survive as some of our most significant cultural places.
28
whether, in fact there are some differences between the choices they make and how significant these may
be.
Betham was the well-read, poorly educated, artistic daughter of a Church of England clergyman. Anna
Gilchrist (2004) states that: ‘Family circumstances and poverty affected Betham’s mental health’. She was
admitted to an insane asylum in 1819 and on her release hid from her family because she feared they would
return her to an asylum. Hays came from a family of rational dissenters and was a member of radical circles.
She was especially close to Mary Wollstonecraft and shared her views on education for women. She did not
attend her funeral because William Godwin has arranged an Anglican service. Both Betham and Hays were
unconventional women and in each of these books set about the improve the status of women in society.
Shane Greentree
Writing Against Sophie: Mary Hays’ Female Biography as Enlightenment Feminist Critique of Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s Emile
Mary Hays’ Female Biography (1803) is now regarded as a highly significant example of collective biography,
and a landmark text in women’s history writing. Scholarly debate continues on whether this epic text is a
continuation of Enlightenment feminism or a retreat from 1790s radicalism into early nineteenth century
domesticity. In this paper I wish to re-examine this question and argue for Female Biography as continuous
with 1790s feminist thought by reading it as a response to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1763). Rousseau’s
restrictive ideal of female education was widely repudiated by 1790s feminist writers, and it is possible to
read Hays’ work in this light as also written in opposition to Rousseau, and to see her biographies as
presenting an almost entirely opposed view of the proper education of women. To this end, I examine Hays’
innovative depiction of childhood education, and the frequent use she makes of carefully cataloguing her
subjects’ reading and intellectual development. In contrast to Rousseau she argues for the importance of
rational education for women to highlight their true potential and overcome sexual prejudice. To further
examine this contrast I make special reference to ‘Catherine Macaulay Graham’, an original biography that is
among the most important statements of Hays’ rationalist feminism. Through reading the upbringing of the
republican historian as represented by Hays, Macaulay emerges as an example of a female subject who
prospered by consciously refusing a Rousseauian childhood, an apt symbol of Hays’ broader vision.
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Political Economy & Science
Starting from some unpublished stories and experiences of scientists, the paper will propose a consideration
on the importance of travel and visit in Paris, the cradle of the Enlightenment, as opportunity necessary to
the development of human and professional experience, that is essential for the creation of a network of
relationships between nations.
It is well-known that the intellectual Lombard environment of the eighteenth century had a major role in
the maturation of the Political Economy as we know it today. It has also been rightly pointed out that the
relationship between economic knowledge and mathematical method within the «Milanese School» were
characterized by great originality.
The paper I propose will show that the analysis and projects of the leading exponents of the Lombard
Enlightenment were thoroughly permeated by the reception and admiration towards the scientific method
which had been consolidated in the ongoing dialogue between different areas of Europe in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The reading of some places of the learned periodical Il Caffé, in particular, allows
us to capture with immediate evidence the admiration of the Lombard illuministi for the tradition of
mathematics, physics, astronomy and, more broadly, philosophical and scientific ideas of Galileo, Bacon,
Newton, Harvey, Petty and many other protagonists of the «Scientific Revolution».
As, however, I shall try to demonstrate, the admiration of the leading exponents of the Lombard
Enlightenment for the main methodological and scientific innovations of the previous decades did not
become sterile acceptance of easy quantitative schematizations, nor trivial establishment of mechanistic
readings and interpretations of the economic and social systems. In my opinion, it was, indeed, the very
mature epistemological distinction between theories and objects of study of the natural sciences on the one
hand, and the social and ecomomic science on the other, to mark the intellectual originality of the Lombard
Enlightenment. Here, in fact, the natural-scientific method was not applied to the social sciences with the
30
same uncritical enthusiasm that, in same era, characterized the fledgling science of political economy in
other areas of the European continent.
Yet, though the impact of On Crimes and Punishments both in 1764 and throughout the centuries as it
became a becon of humanitarian thinking, is undeniable, this success has blinded the historical discipline to
the greater subtleties of Beccaria’s writings. Too often treated retrospectively by intellectual historians, keen
to illustrate the intellectual legacy traceable back to Beccaria’s seminal treatise, this case is symptomatic of
wider problems of intellectual history and its methodologies. Such sclerosis has left Beccaria’s contribution
to alternative Enlightenment discourses significantly undervalued, prompting this paper to shift focus from
reception histories to contextual readings.
Drawing attention to the pervasive scientific climate in eighteenth century Italy and the popularisation of
scientific methodologies within a broader intellectual milieu, it will be argued that Beccaria in his role as
state administrator, recognised the value of “science” for the advancement of public utility. Using state
documents from his time in office, as well as personal correspondence pertaining to the creation of Milan’s
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Veterinary School, this paper will illustrate that Beccaria, “father of modern criminology”, engaged with
discourses much-detached from the law; discourses of Newtonianism, utility, public happiness and
sensationalist epistemology. Overall, this paper will claim that Beccaria’s adoption of vocabulary,
understandings, and methods, derived from the practical sciences and the cultural transfers of scientific
methodologies into Italy, was part of a wider trend by those advocating social and institutional reform.
32
History of Emotions
David Hume’s 1742 essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ transformed this debate by introducing a
deliberate comparison between enthusiasm’s religious character (almost wholly negative) and its political
effects (paradoxically positive, since enthusiasm encouraged a fierce attachment to liberty). From Hume
onwards there emerges a new current in the debate on enthusiasm, which increasingly links the traits
associated with religious enthusiasts with the characters, dispositions and convictions of political ‘zealots’
and extremists of different kinds. This current arguably reaches its zenith around the years of the French
Revolution, and particularly involves the association of French Revolutionary leaders (and their British
supporters) with a new species of specifically political enthusiasm – which, while being political, still retain
key emotional features of the older religious variety: the conviction that Providence has been made manifest
through one’s own person. This paper traces the emergence of this new combined religio-politico-emotional
concept of enthusiasm over the middle-latter eighteenth century.
33
Aleksondra Hultquist (University of Melbourne)
From Pleasure to Power: The Passion of Love in Delarivier Manley’s The Fair Hypocrite
Although Delarivier Manley’s work has begun to garner much-deserved attention in the last two decades,
The Power of Love in Seven Novels (1720) remains surprisingly underexplored. Because it is an adaptation,
tales extracted predominantly from William Painter’s 1566 The Palace of Pleasure, the collection is often
dismissed. Ros Ballaster, for example, has pointed out that Manley used the trope of the rediscovered,
translated, adapted text in her political fictions, such as The New Atalantis, in order to both “conceal and
signify political intent” (Seductive Forms, 153). For Ballaster and many other critics such as Toni Bowers and
Rachel Carnell, The Power of Love lacks textual complexities and therefore integrity because the source
material is borrowed rather than Manley’s own. Recent adaptation critics like Linda Hutcheon, however,
have shown that adaptations should be taken seriously as individual works. In The Power of Love, Manley
adapts an actual translated, rediscovered, and reconstructed source to capitalize on its textual ambiguity.
Adaptation allows her to convert Painter’s narrative into a sophisticated statement about the importance of
the passion of love to individual self-discovery as well as to political stability. While the passion of love is
something to avoid in Painter’s version, Manley’s adaptation converts it into something to correctly embrace
and understand.
Classical through Early Modern conceptions of the passions understood emotions to be internal movements
of the soul that should be harnessed and controlled for the benefit of public and social structures: thus for
Aristotle, anger should be exploited for political and military gain; for Hobbes, fear was the impetus for
organized government. The passion of love was discussed—in a nearly compulsive manner—in the female-
authored, early novels of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Ballaster and Bowers have
usefully argued that the politics of seduction in such works acts as a metaphor for political disaffection, but
adaptation theory allows a different view of Manley’s technique and ideological purpose. As I argue,
Manley’s late work emphasizes the importance of romantic love in and of itself, not as metaphor for political
conflict, but as a significant passion for the individual. Amatory authors, including Manley, are tolerant of
protagonists who follow their passions, especially when they pursue romantic love. In fact, the evidence
suggests that for the protagonists of early eighteenth-century fiction, pursuing passionate love is necessary
to achieve maturity.
In this paper, I examine the use of the passion of love in The Fair Hypocrite against its construction in
Painter’s “The Forty-Fifth Novell. The Duchesse of Savoie.” In Painter’s version the Duchess’s inability to
control her desire for a lover causes political disruption for the Dukedom, but Manley’s version is
sympathetic to her protagonist. Manley suggests that successful pursuit and achievement of the right
romantic love pairing is necessary for individual self-actualization as well as political stability. The lack of
understanding of love causes disruption, where the full understanding and acceptance of passionate love
creates political stability. When Manley adapts the pleasures of love in to the power of love, she
demonstrates this passion is not something to avoid, but something to correctly embrace and understand.
34
Cultural Meaning of Plants and Vegetation
The paper will analyse diplomatic gifts of plants from the Netherlands, Turkey, and England. It will argue that
these gifts went beyond the ideas of rarity and preciousness to be used as vessels for promotion of the
sender’s country, flattering Maria Fedorovna and improving Russian life. The paper will decipher the hidden
messages behind the inclusion of certain plants into the consignments so as to convey different meanings for
Maria Fedorovna, a person who knew botany and geography very well.
The paper will also explore some of the botanical innovations developed during this time including the ways
to preserve the plants during their long transit to Russia as well as insights into how the plants were used in
Russia. This will give important information about the significance of those gifts for the Russian economy and
for botany in general.
Taking into account representations of mosses, vines, buds, and creepers, this paper will explore some of the
ways in which the tangled state of plant morphology at the end of the eighteenth century was being
imagined – particularly in two remarkably influential and verdant texts of 1791, William Bartram’s Travels
and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden. Through diverse rhetorical means, most boldly in Darwin’s case
through tropes of love, leaning, and binding, these texts make the idea of vegetable networks and
35
assemblages visible, and in doing so suggest how vitality might overflow its boundaries, or repose in hybrid
forms.
36
Afterlives of the Eighteenth Century
In response to this question, this paper proposes that the canonical text of early art historians should be
revisited for this task of appraising the beauty of digital, sculptural form in architecture. Specifically, this
paper revisits the 1753 text, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of
Taste, by the English painter and printmaker William Hogarth. Like most digital architecture today, his
approach emphasized the geometry of topological, shell-like surfaces which formed volumetric bodies. In
this book, Hogarth attempted to define beauty in nature, and distill this concept into what he termed as the
‘line of beauty.’ This method of defining beauty will be explored as a means to re-frame and analyze the
curved digital surfaces in contemporary architecture.
37
bilingual method of composition which counteracts the building of national literatures that intensified during
the nineteenth century.
Noting that of the ‘traditional formulations of the uses of the work of art’ – to teach, to move, to delight –
the first has been ‘eclipsed from contemporary criticism and theory’, Fredric Jameson (1990) has argued a
revival of its pedagogical function.
The Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Revolution and of Taste. Intellectual enquiry was
contextualised in volatile ongoing and overlapping political and artistic milieus that generated popular and
public debates. Knight’s work offers lost insights into the role and responsibility of the art of landscape
design in particular to provide illuminating provocations. Far from appealing to an apolitical or
antiintellectual art, Knight begs a higher plane for debate, deriding easy partypolitical, nationalist and other
factional labelling of motives. Similarly, Jameson’s ‘cognitive art need not raise any of the old fears about the
contamination of the aesthetic by propaganda or the instrumentalization of cultural play’. Knight and
Jameson are argued to share similar urgent regard for art’s capacity to teach. They discuss the sorts of
lessons that may be learnt and critique the complex contests of their contemporaries. Exposing fashions of
commercialised correct practice and equally saleable escapist immersions, they value the creative rigor of
finding ideas in the visible.
Knight, Richard Payne (2nd ed. 1795) The Landscape, A Didactic Poem in Three Books addressed to Uvedale Price Esq. Printed by W.
Bulmer & Co. : sold by G. Nicol
Jameson, Fredric (1990) ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (ed.s) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
University of Illinois Press
38
Political Economy
39
Christine Zabel (University of Duisburg-Essen)
Dealing with Uncertainty: Speculating on the Future in the Age of Enlightenment
Whereas the term “speculation” is most often used nowadays to describe the attempt to make profit out of
price-fluctuations, speculation in the Age of Enlightenment had a much broader sense. According to
Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Spekulation was a mode of thinking that went beyond empirical
knowledge, in order to enquire about the nature and conditions of existence (Dasein). In this sense,
speculation entailed a metaphysical component. Similarly, the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie
française (1694) defined speculation as a means to predict and to know more about an already planned and
foreseen, yet ultimately unknown and unknowable, future. By emphasizing the “speculation des astre. belle,
profonde, continuelle speculation,”1 the Dictionary made clear that there was uncertainty about the future,
even ignorance of future events, but that there was also a supreme being determining fate. The fifth edition
of the Dictionnaire of 1798, however, adds a new component to the metaphysical definition of speculation
by referring for the first time to economic speculation, defined as clear reasoning and calculation of chances
and risk, a “raisonnemens, des calculs […] en matière de banque, de finance, de commerce“.2 At least in
economic matters, the future now seemed to be calculable. Fate in this sense became a factor of risk-taking
that could be calculated as well.
By following a series of debates about the term speculation conducted in 18th-century Germany and France,
the paper will not only historicize the use and definition of the notion and show how the philosophical-
ontological term received its economical-calculating component in the Enlightenment, but will also raise the
question of how contemporaries faced uncertainty of future events. The paper will therefore further explore
the concepts of the future that lay behind these different uses of the term speculation.
1. Académie Française, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, Paris 1694, see art. speculation.
2. Académie Française, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, Paris 1798, 5th edition, see art. speculation.
40
American Landscapes
My subject, Elizabeth Coates Paschall(born in 1702) was married to Joseph Paschall, a merchant who was
active in the Quaker community: he was a member of the Common Council, a justice of the peace, and with,
Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the Union Fire Company in 1736. Widowed at 40, and despite the
fact that her husband’s estate was valued at over L 3900, she continued to run her husband’s shop . Paschall
died a relatively wealthy woman in 1767 leaving an increased estate of L 5,000. Paschall is a fascinating and
understudied figure.
My examination of her receipt book (and of business records left in archives in Delaware) will examine how
these works show the complex world and network of a woman in Quaker Philadelphia. As I will show,
Paschall’s life and archival records shed new light on the conditions of women’s work in the colonies,
thereby accessing what Caine calls important “subjective understanding and experience”(3) of this colonial
world. Through these pieces, I will also examine the network of intellectual sources (international such as
Herman Boerhaave , famed physician, local such as Philadelphia botanist John Bartram, and Indian lore local)
41
on which she drew to carry on her practice of domestic medicine. This examination will illuminate the
intellectual biography of an ordinary person.
Despite this recent growth in scholarship, and the identification of such important themes in Brown’s work
as knowledge production, relatively little attention has been paid to Brown’s role in registering the
complexities of understanding and experiencing the American landscape, particularly outside of his works of
fiction. This paper will explore this topic, focusing particularly on Brown’s editing and writing in periodicals as
a relatively “objective,” public, and didactic forum in contrast to his fiction, since this period was rife with
what Karen Ann Peard Lawson has termed “selfdirected propaganda” with respect to images of the
American landscape. In developing a context for Brown’s work, this paper will address not only relevant
writing in other periodicals, but also contemporary writings on the Picturesque found and created in the
fledgling nation, and the work of American landscape artists.
42
Enlightenment European Architecture
Crucial to this trajectory is Schinkel’s engagement with theories of the Picturesque that had been
increasingly thrown into question by certain English aesthetic debates of the late eighteenth century. By
examining a series of projects he executed in Potsdam in the 1820s in collaboration with court landscape
designer Lenné, in particular his modification of a small Casino at Schloss Glienicke in 1824, the talk will
explore how he made use of established ‘tricks’ of the picturesque (such as framing, reflection, concealment
and surprise) in ways that allowed him to exact a tension between a classical formalism in architecture and
the free movement of the observer within and around it. Most importantly, Schinkel’s Glienicke Casino can
be seen as an early example of the potential of the picturesque to transcend the picture in ways that
prefigured Modern architecture.
Viktor Lőrincz (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris/Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem)
llumination and Enlightenment - the case of Isidore Canevale
In October 1749, en route from Paris to Vincennes, Rousseau found an advertisement in the Mercury of
France from the Academy of Dijon. The sudden flow of ideas which lead him to write his First Discourse
(1750) is now known as the “Illumination de Vincennes”. Rousseau visited his friend, Diderot imprisoned
then in the Château de Vincennes. The architectural ensemble which influenced Vanbrugh (also
incarcerated) too, served also as depot of the Bâtiments du Roi. Isidore Ganneval (Canevale), spent his youth
here. Son of an employee of The King's Buildings, brother of a worker of the Vincennes-Sèvres porcelain
manufactory, studied at the Royal Academy of Architecture. In this school, he became familiar with the ideas
of Marc Antoine Laughier. Laughier wrote on the direction of architectural history, after a sudden
illumination too. As a pupil of Servandoni, architect of the St Sulpice and stage designer (of the Royal
Fireworks of Handel) Ganneval travelled to Vienna, and became court architect. He built a cathedral, several
castles, the name-giving fountain of Schönbrunn, and iconic buildings of Josephinist Enlightenment: the
Narrenturm (psychiatry), the Josephinum (medical university) and the utopist city in of Neugebaude in
Budapest. One of Ganneval’s interior designs is now at the Metropolitan Museum. Using the biography of
Ganneval, a cross-road of art and science, on the basis of network theory and Eric R. Kandel’s psychology of
creativity, we wish to present the phenomenon of illumination, surprise and unpredicted rupture in the
Enlightenment, from Dezallier d'Argenville’s ha-ha to Kandel’s (2012) Aha!.
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Christina Gray (University of California, Los Angeles)
Dégagement, Making Risk Visible
When Claude Perrault introduced the word ‘dégagement’ in his description of the modern usage of columns
in his 1683 treatise on architecture, "Ordonnance des cinq espèces des colonnes selon la méthode des
anciens," he seemingly suggested a spatial concept in evoking more generous intervals between structural
elements. But the usage of the word dégagement had only recently been codified as a derivation from the
far more Germanic Old French. This preceding usage of the word suggested less a spatial conception and
more a transactional sense of risking a wager. It had developed out of a militaristic understanding of the
risks of battle which by Perrault’s time had coalesced around the more courtly practices of fencing in which
all real bodily danger of the battlefield had been transposed into highly stylized courtly manners. Close to a
century later Jacques-François Blondel notated on a plan drawing “garde robe ou dégagement” in reference
to the space in which valuable royal clothing would be secured to offset any risks to either property or
propriety. Between both instances, the question of courtly manners is implicated directly in architectural
choices designed to mitigate various forms of liability. Situated within the rise of the Enlightenment, this
paper traces between Perrault and Blondel the ways in which the notion of dégagement negotiated between
a spatialized and transactional understanding in order to subsume risk within a growing regime of
rationalism.
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Reading and the Body
1. Peter Wagner, ‘The Discourse on Sex- Or Sex as discourse: eighteenth-century medical and paramedical erotica’, in Sexual
Underworlds in the English Enlightenment, edited by Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill,
1988, p.46.
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James Reeves (University of California, Los Angeles)
Untimely Old Age and Deformity in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall
This paper focuses on one of the most striking figures in Sarah Scott's utopian Millenium Hall (1762): a "grey-
headed toothless old man of sixteen years of age" who apparently suffers from progeria. This man is
mentioned only briefly, yet his particular deformity—the incongruity between his "old" body and his
chronological age—is of considerable import in Scott's novel. In fact, the novel is filled with bodies that defy
standard eighteenth-century notions of the aging process. Millenium Hall is a place where untimeliness is
morally regenerative, as it alerts Scott's heroines to the particular temporality at work in her utopia. The Hall
operates on a completely different timeline from the world outside its borders, and it is the sick, disabled,
deformed body that makes this difference palpable and visible. In effect, the deformed body acts as a
memento mori of sorts, reminding Scott's heroines of the importance of living for eternity in the here and
now. Thus, Millenium Hall recalibrates time and revalues the human body by valorizing embodied, temporal
deformity. In her recent Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), Alison Kafer insists that "disabled people are
continually being written out of the future, rendered as the sign of the future no one wants … We must
begin to anticipate presents and to imagine futures that include all of us. We must explore disability in time"
(p. 46). To that end, this paper proposes that we take seriously the way that fictional deformed bodies in
Scott’s Millenium Hall challenge normative understandings of temporality.
46
Communities in Print
47
Paul Tankard (University of Otago)
Anonymous Celebrity: Newspapers and the Invention of the Public Figure
British newspapers and magazines of the eighteenth century represent a new public space, one in which it
became possible for private identity and public image to be separable and the latter subject to manipulation
and management. In the absence of professional journalists, the newspapers were in some ways a very
democratic medium, open to those who had the talent, insight, time and leisure to contribute, and in
practice open in particular to exploitation by those with an “interest”. Reading the “paragraphs” we see the
dynamics of celebrity played out in public, but with the shadow of anonymity both of writer and subject
constantly teasing the reader.
48
New perspectives on Jane Austen
In Persuasion, Austen offers examples of successful evolution, and also of the failure of some individuals to
survive in their environments. Sir Walter Elliot, Austen writes, ‘had not had principle or sense enough to
maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him’.2 The Romantics’ newly-formed
understanding of the process of extinction, led by a growth in the study of fossils, forms the background to
this novel in which Austen radically questions the desirability of the very existence of the British landowning
classes, concluding: ‘they were gone who deserved not to stay’.3 Austen’s ultimate ambivalence about the
survival of her culture’s values and even its members sets a powerful precedent for twenty-first-century
science fiction. The romanticised final exile of Persuasion takes on new significance when read in light of
novels which import Romantic tropes of exile in the face of ecological cataclysm.
1. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 165; Peter W. Graham,
Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists (Burlington, VT and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 9. Letter to Anna Austen, 9-
18 September 1814, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 4th edition, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 287.
2. Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 23.
3. Ibid., Chapter 13.
49
Annette Upfal (University of New South Wales)
A Taste for Cruel Humour: Jane Austen’s The History of England and James Gillray’s Bawdy
Caricature of Charles James Fox
One of the wittiest and most appealing items in Jane Austen’s juvenilia is The History of England, completed
in November 1791, shortly before her sixteenth birthday. This work was transcribed several months later
into the notebook Volume the Second, with her sister Cassandra, aged nineteen, adding portraits of the
various monarchs. Whilst some images can be identified as Austen family members, the portrait of Henry VIII
reveals a surprising link between the Austen sisters and the famous caricature artist James Gillray. It is
evident that Cassandra Austen has closely modelled her portrait of Henry VIII on a particularly crude and
scurrilous political caricature of the Whig parliamentary leader Charles James Fox by Gillray.
The fact that Cassandra chose Gillray’s image of Fox as the model for Jane Austen’s villainous monarch
requires any interpretation of The History of England to take into careful consideration the response of the
Austen family at Steventon Rectory to two of the major political scandals of the day – the trial of Warren
Hastings, and the secret and invalid marriage of the Prince of Wales. It incidentally provides evidence of the
Austen sisters’ forthright appreciation of extremely coarse, even ribald humour, and their deep engagement
and partisan approach to major political issues. More importantly, this image of Fox as Henry VIII, and the
interpretation it authorizes, reflects Jane Austen’s response to these events and reveals her early mastery of
a distinctive style of overtly mocking humour combined with more subtle, allusive satire. It also highlights a
similar early and outraged commitment to proto-feminist issues, and offers new insights on Austen’s
championship in her History of famously oppressed, beautiful and innocent Royal women.
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Responses to Garden Spaces and Nature
Three gardens outside Paris are examined in detail: Marie Antoinette’s garden at the Petit Trianon at
Versailles; Mon. De Monville’s Desert du Retz; and the Desert d’Ermenonville, the garden of the Marquise de
Girardin. A “close reading” of the follies and features of each garden reveals that each plays on the standard
repertoire to turn the garden into public self-portrait of its creator as he or she wished to be seen.
The new innate self of the second half of the eighteenth century was to be “cultivated by a spontaneous
relation to nature” (John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self, 198). It is perhaps not surprising then to find the
spectacle of nature as expressed in the garden being in turn made into the means of projecting the self to
others. It might even be argued that the popularity of the jardin anglais among patrons before the
Revolution was in part due to the opportunities it offered for creating a public image of the self.
51
Jessica Priebe (University of Sydney)
Inventing Artifice and the Game of Nature: François Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre
More than any other artist of his generation, François Boucher (1703-1770) is associated with the visual and
material culture of luxury in mid eighteenth-century France. His works are filled with desirable items that
informed the tastes of modern collectors. What is less known is that Boucher was himself an enthusiastic
collector, acquiring more than 13,000 different objects of art and nature over the course of his lifetime.
Ranging from highly prized works of fine and decorative art to natural objects and other material items
selected from the street, Boucher’s collection was celebrated by his peers for both the choice of objects and
for its unique arrangement. According to the dealer Pierre Rémy (1715-1797), it was generally agreed by
‘everyone’ that the artist’s collection was ‘one of the richest and most pleasant ever seen in Paris’ (1771).
This paper examines the display of Boucher collection in his studio at the Louvre, where the artist lived and
worked for close to two decades. Using architectural drawings and other supporting archival material, I show
how Boucher redeveloped the studio to accommodate both a working atelier and a cabinet of curiosity. This
paper also reveals the extent to which Boucher enhanced his collection through artifice, in particular the
natural objects for which he especially well known. In reconstructing aspects of this display, I show how
Boucher encouraged visitors to the studio to think aesthetically about nature and to explore the creativity of
artistic invention. The enhancement of his collection through ornamentation and innovative arrangements
promises to offer new insight into areas of Boucher’s artistic practice, especially those works that highlight
the role of imagination in his creative processes.
52
Borders, State, Sovereignty
53
being”) derives from Kant’s anthropology in which a certain kind of subject, constituted by the empirical /
transcendental duality, is the protagonist. The implication for interpreting Kantian cosmopolitanism is that,
charged with the cultivation of world citizenship, it is primarily concerned with subject formation. Attention
to this agenda, I contend, needs to be restored in our reading of Kantian cosmopolitanism in order to avoid
celebrating Kant’s cosmopolitanism as anti-imperial, non-racist or anachronistically promoting human rights.
54
Scurvy and the Irish
The fact that the early colony of Australia suffered seriously both from periodic shortages of food and from a
lack of fresh meat and vegetables, even when salt meat and flour were plentiful, are facts well known; but
the scorbutic effects of such a situation have (while being noted) not fully entered into the account of the
tribulations of the inhabitants, especially the convicts. For some years, scurvy operated like a pump, being
imported with the transports, exacerbated by the famine in Port Jackson, and then exported among the
crews of the transports returning home. Owing to the harsh climate and the infertile soil it was difficult to
grow food in anything like the quantities necessary for general health, and even what was produced was
often stolen by people who, even if they were not technically famished, were in urgent and incontinent need
of fresh produce. This introduced another circle of misery in the settlement as the combination of actual
hunger and scorbutic cravings led to theft, and theft to further punishment in conditions that almost always
increased susceptibility to more scurvy. For at least four decades it was endemic in penal settlements such
as Port Arthur and Moreton Bay. In the 1837 Parliamentary Select Committee Report on transportation it
was the opinion of some of its members that the only viable future for the colony was as a pirate
commonwealth, along the lines of Tunis. In this paper I want to suggest that for all convicts, but particularly
the Irish, the problems stemming specifically from the intertwined miseries of excessive punishment and
scorbutic symptoms were so severe they shaped the culture and the aesthetics of the colony, not to mention
its politics, long after its nutritional problems were solved.
55
Killian Quigley (Vanderbilt University)
Scorbutic Constitutions: Irishness and Scurvy as Convergent Pathologies in the Transportation
Era
As the number of Irish convict transportees to the Australian colony ballooned, accounts of some link
between Irishness and illness proliferated. For the naval surgeon Andrew Henderson, the Irish convicts’
unique predilection for indolence and melancholy “predisposed” them to scurvy. Some connection between
scurvy and the Irish – if not Henderson’s interpretation of thereof – was confirmed in other contexts, such as
mid-nineteenth century Scotland, where Irish railroad workers presented scorbutic symptoms at an
alarmingly disproportionate rate. Likewise midcentury Dublin, where J.O. Curran observed an astonishing
uptick of scurvy amongst Ireland’s famine-stricken population, and most particularly in male patients.
Curran’s analysis, while not so critical or moralizing as some others, is nonetheless underwritten by a sense
that some predisposing factor, or “epidemic constitution,” was working, in tandem with “dietetic error,” in
order to incline the Irish to the malady.
Impressions of the Irish as diseased – and the diseased impressions of the Irish – have not been adequately
considered in studies of convict transportation. This presentation begins to unpack a complicated tradition
of observing and interpreting a link between Irishness and scurvy. It also draws upon a recent paper by Joris
Delanghe et al., published in Nutrients late last year, which suggests that we understand the
disproportionate impact of scurvy on the Irish in terms of a genetic predisposition among Irish males. I urge
us, first, to understand this fresh research as taking its place in a lengthy and often fraught history of
diagnosing scorbutic Irishness. But I argue, further, that by taking seriously the genetic uniqueness of Irish
convict transportees, we might complicate our understanding of the lives and experiences of the 45,000 Irish
persons sent against their will to the new colony.
56
Universalism, Classicism and Antiquiarianism
57
both Dubos and other theorists of aesthetics like Charles Batteux (1713-1780) sympathised with the Dutch
critics – his Réflexions critiques are full of references to the works of Gerard (15771649) and Isaac Vossius
(16181689) and Marcus Meibomius (16301711) among others. I will therefore argue that the sensualist
turn of eighteenth century aesthetic theory should therefore not just be considered against the background
of Locke’s philosophy but also within the context of contemporary developments in classical scholarship.
Regarding the broader context of the long eighteenth century, this paper will emphasize how far
Enlightenment thinkers connect with the seventeenth century pace Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay.
Meibomius’ work, for example, did not just inspire thinkers like Dubos and Batteux, but was also a major
source for Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique. The Enlightenment therefore needs to be placed back in the
Ancien Regime and not equated with modernity.
58
Enlightenment Images
In a close reading I would like to discuss how this painting can visualize the idea of the presence of spectral
colours according to Sir Isaac Newton and how it also enhances a representation of experiments in the
manner these took place in the households.
The painting, at first characterized as an “amusement frivole d’un jeune homme, faisant des bouteilles de
savon”, refers to the baroque tradition of vanitas. By contextualizing this motive in the time of its origin and
by interpreting it from a discourse analytical perspective, the soap bubble appears as a traditional
visualisation of the finiteness of the human life and turn out to be a scientific instrument as well. By
combining the traditional representation of homo bulla, the inset of colours (red and blue colour line next to
the soap liquid) and the scientific knowledge of the colours of light as a result of experiments with soap
bubbles, Chardin uses the visual language, created by the medium itself, to gain an artistic visualization of
the scientific discussions about Newton’s Opticks. Hence the symbol of vanitas becomes an instrument of
veritas as well.
59
paintings by the Bamboccianti can provide vital information on the everyday life of the socially marginal in
the long eighteenth century.
Usually during the 18th century portraits used to refer to scholar's theoretical achievements e.g. by showing
them in their studio with their treatises. But the work done by Parkinson, Hodges, Webber, Planes and later
by Arago and Choris can be observed as a new idealised and euphemistic protagonist approach. The
mediator role of scholars can also be detected in Wright of Derbys paintings “Philosopher Lecturing on the
Orrery” or “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” but in the expedition-illustrations they are often
depicted as peaceful observers communicating and interacting with indigenous. They did research and also
establish contacts or friendships with these 'exotic' and 'uncivilised' people.
Recent cross-disciplinary research is focused on this aspects of intercultural connections between indigenous
and European conquerors, like Smith demonstrates in her study “Intimate Strangers. Friendship, Exchange
and Pacific Encounters” (2010) or O'Malley investigates in “The Meeting Place. Māori and Pākehā
Encounters, 1642-1840” (2012). In this regard this paper will also question that how influential these
illustration were for the depiction of later travelling researchers or painters like Humboldt and Earle.
60
Mind/Body Metaphysics
Although historians are now well aware of the influence of medical knowledge on conceptions of the science
of man in this period, the debt they owe to earlier Enlightenment debates of the mind-body problem, of the
nature of the soul and more broadly of the material and spiritual expressions of living matter, remains
unclear. This paper will offer one way of illuminating this genealogy by exploring the meaning of this
reference to German anthropology.
Having visited the country in 1773-75, Cabanis was most likely alluding to works by Ernst Platner, Johann
Gottfried Herder and the pre-critical Immanuel Kant which discussed science, philosophy and the
anthropological study of man. Recasting his intellectual project as a response to these works will shed light
on relatively unexplored connections between French and German thinkers in the second half of the
eighteenth century. In this way this paper will contribute to ongoing efforts to understand the
Enlightenment, and its legacy, in the actual terms of its contemporaries.
The first three measures of the Pathetique establish the downward trajectory of the pitch E-flat. In
traditional counterpoint, chordal sevenths resolve downward, and in the first three measures, the sevenths
1. Wilfrid Mellers, Beethoven and the voice of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 4. See also Beethoven, Ludwig van,
Alfred Christlieb Kalischer, and J. S. Shedlock. Beethoven's letters; a critical edition with explanatory notes. Freeport, NY: Books for
Libraries Press, 1969.
2. Mellers, 4.
61
resolve properly.3
In the fourth measure, however, the E-flat transcends the D and continues higher, up to E-natural, and then
F. The significance of this transcendence cannot be understated because it serves as the basis for structural
imperatives throughout the entire piece. Therefore, my paper will show how “transcendent voice-leading” in
the Pathetique sonata represents a musical portrayal of Kantian ideals and intellectual liberation of the
Enlightenment.
Example 2: Large-scale significance of the “transcendent” E-flat to E motion in all movements of the
Pathetique sonata
3 Allen Cadwallader and David Gagne, Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian perspective, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), p. 53.
62
Bibliography
Beethoven, Ludwig van, Alfred Christlieb Kalischer, and J. S. Shedlock. Beethoven's letters; a critical edition
with explanatory notes. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
Cadwallader, Allen and Gagne, David. Analysis of Tonal Music: s Schenkerian perspective. 3rd ed. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Hatten, Robert. Musical meaning in Beethoven. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Mellers, Wilfrid. Beethoven and the voice of God. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Réti, Rudolph. Thematic Patterns in the Sonatas of Beethoven, ed. Deryck Cooke, Chapters 1-6, 17-59.
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1992.
Schmalfeldt, Janet. In the process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early
Nineteenth-Century Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Sisman, Elaine. “Pathos and the Pathétique: Rhetorical Stance in Beethoven’s C minor Sonata, Op. 13.”
Beethoven Forum (1994): 81-105.
63
Romanticism Reconsidered
64
understood to be corruptible. Not only that, but measuring the brightness of the stars was an important part
of establishing this stellar irregularity. In scientific papers published between 1775 and 1820, unusually
bright stars or stars that fluctuated in their brightness, were identified as comets, meteors, double stars and
variables – stellar objects that directly refuted the existence of a ‘pure’ universe, free from change.
This paper examines Romantic-era scientific treatises on variable or periodical stars and shows that by the
time Keats had composed his tribute to Fanny Brawne, the term ‘bright star’ had become strongly associated
with stellar objects that were remarkably changeable in appearance. It asks two questions: what does Keats
mean when he longs to be ‘as’ steadfast as the bright star? And how might the compelling disjuncture
between imagery and meaning in the octet and the sestet trouble the poem’s status as a ‘love’ poem’?
65
Rethinking Friendship
Dunton and Rowe revived the trope of platonic love, popularised in England earlier in the century, and
radically refigured it, extending its scope in a number of ways. In a subsequent account of his friendship with
Rowe, Dunton revealed the proprietorial and coercive elements of platonic love as he conceived it. “The
arms of friendship “, he declared, “are long enough to reach you from the one end of the world to the other,
and fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination”. In his account, the lascivious reach of
platonic love – a romance of spirits, he insists, not bodies – exceeds that of a corporeal union. This paper
investigates what happens when the tropes of platonic love are transposed to the public world of periodical
literature. Specifically, I read Rowe’s poetry and Dunton’s letters to demonstrate how platonic love was
transformed in the early eighteenth century to imagine new kinds of literary relationships.
66
upon, and variously thematized, as is the unreliability and untrustworthiness of all possible means of
dissemination, including the susceptibility of originals to (more or less accurate) reproduction. The pastoral
pseudonyms Philips bestowed, as a gift, on those she invited into her ‘Society of Friendship’ signal the
intrinsically literary pleasures of the coterie as well as the potential risks of association. The letters record
and enact the movement of texts, all the while offering an anxious commentary on the occasions for, and
contexts of, reading, writing and performance; on protocols of genre; and on the porousness of manuscript
and print. Poems are folded inside letters, take the form of verse epistles, and reply to other poems or
letters. Letters and other literary texts, in manuscript, print and performance, cross and refer to each other,
offering a finely grained sense of a discursively and generically complex network and the textual imbrication
of everyday life for Philips and her ‘Society of Friendship’.
67
Church Architecture and Funeral Monuments
My paper concentrates on two very important commissions, “Le mausolée de Maréchal de Saxe” of Jean-
Baptiste Pigalle and the “Dauphin-Monument” of Guillaume II Coustou in Sens. I will demonstrate how these
works deal with discussed ideas of gloire, immortalité, grands hommes and afterlife but are syntheses of a
great number of conditions at whose very end stand artistic solutions about the iconographical theme and
its narrative and formal realisations.
68
Secularisation and Biography
69
represented in Gainsborough’s pictures such as sensation, the man of feeling and sensibility, effeminacy, the
abolition of cruelty to animals and the welfare of the poor.
Coursera MOOCs (massive on-line open courses) are designed to give web-users access to tuition in over 80
universities including Stanford, Caltec, Yale, and the University of Melbourne. The units can be taken by
anyone and although there are assessment components and certificates awarded for completion, they are
not at the moment, for credit. This will change with the recent announcement by Barak Obama that
Coursera programs will in the future be available for credit towards qualifications relating to digital
education in the United States. I will show how paintings, and in this particular case, British portraits, are an
ideal subject for effective interactive and collaborative digital teaching on-line, a form of instruction set to
become central to Higher Education.
70
Cosmopolitanism Trade, Material Culture
What is perhaps less known, and certainly less incorporated into the historiographical literature, is the role
played by prominent merchants, military governors and senior bureaucrats in a trans-Atlantic advocacy of
this new form of commercial and military power. This paper will argue that ideas often associated with the
economic domain were first framed as moral statements within arguments over the nature of trans-Atlantic
networks, or occurred within contests over control of the administrative framework of the Atlantic colonies.
The attack on absolutism and its strategy of monopoly was thus first formulated in the Atlantic colonies, as a
particular fusion of forms of military and commercial power, exemplified in the plantation economies of the
71
Caribbean, and put to use as a weapon in the contest over the management of the slave trade. The stability
of the long eighteenth century, and the economic conception of free trade, had their origins in the turmoil
and violence of the Atlantic arena.
The underlying context of this exchange has not been fully explored in the framework of cultural history and
the study of early modern consumption. At most, the trade negotiations between the Ottoman Empire and
France are identified as a point of contention, but Soliman Aga’s visit was complicated by a number of
factors, including: his concealed diplomatic status; competing claims for diplomatic savoir-faire; and the
inability of Louis XIV’s Oriental experts to translate Turkish. The first official diplomatic audience granted to
Aga is given by the French Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Hugue de Lionne – dressed as a Turk, in the regalia
of the Grand Vizir of the Sublime Port. To signal the end of the reception, the Sultan’s representative is
served coffee, sherbet and incense, as would be customary in Turkey – in Paris.
Coffee was a known commodity when he arrived, but a widespread habit had not been established. Despite
the agency ascribed by historians to Soliman Aga, evidence of his influential contact with Parisians is scarce.
Here, I explore the literal and metaphoric impact of this diplomatic masquerade to question: the currency of
the historic myth; the role of ‘armchair Orientalists’ and aspiring merchants in developing related discourse;
and how exoticism was both embraced and rejected in the development of the Parisian coffee habit.
72
China and Europe
73
(paper making and printing methods) were more highly valued as they had a more physical or material
appeal. Even when writers did discuss these Chinese visual arts, they focused almost solely on the physical
and material aspects of things related to these art forms – such as ‘the four treasures’ (paper, brush, ink, and
ink stone) and writing manner. They also did not see the cultural importance of these physical and material
features or their relationship to artistic practice; thus, no European writers in the those investigated writings
were able to see beyond these physical characteristics and realize that these four objects were a big part of
the elite culture among Chinese literati, known as ‘the four treasures of the literati’s study room’ since the
5th century. Examined texts are representatives and examples that were important, influential, or typical in
the period. They include descriptions, interpretations, and analyses of these Chinese arts and material
culture in books on China, in travel writings about China, and in encyclopedia entries about China and/or
Chinese culture. This paper does not include unpublished letters or manuscripts, or writings in newspaper
and magazines.
74
Enlightenment Periodisation
The idea for this panel arose from a conference shortly to be convened at All Souls College, Oxford, on
questions of literary periodisation (‘Periodisation: Pleasures and Pitfalls’). The conference has raised a
number of questions that would be usefully discussed in an interdisciplinary manner, and in the context of
eighteenth-century studies. This panel seeks to address a few of them. Our papers will consider the
construction of long eighteenth-century periodicity in print culture, the modern heritage industry and
neoclassical poetic genre. We are especially interested in the impact of trends of privatisation or
specialisation on narratives of period-formation (for instance, the effect of the Tonsons’ publishing
monopoly on perceptions of Renaissance literature; the distance between non-specialist conceptions of
country house history and those of the academies; the encounter between traditional poetic genres and
Enlightenment categories of professional information). Our panel will point out some of the contemporary
and modern ideologies operative in narratives of Enlightenment periodisation, and suggest ways in which
the particular emphases and interests of Enlightenment intellectual activity often prove resistant to broad
periodising assumptions.
I will explore the challenges in making Georgian country houses intellectually accessible to visitors with little
knowledge of the eighteenth century through the case study of a collaborative project I am directing at
Stowe House and gardens. I will outline why certain kinds of interior and exterior styles flourished under
eighteenth-century historical and intellectual conditions, and suggest some ways in which these conceptual
frameworks and ideas can be made visible to modern audiences. What forms of Enlightenment narratives
prove to be problematic when engaging with non-specialist audiences?
This paper will use my experiences as the creator of the Thames Valley Country House Partnership
(www.tvchp.org) to argue that specialisation within higher education and lack of public knowledge has
conspired to limit informed access to the eighteenth-century country house. In the UK National Curriculum,
the Georgian Period is an awkward no man’s land between the English Civil War and the Industrial
Revolution, or Henry VIII and Hitler. In popular culture the Georgians fare little better, tailing in behind the
Nazis, Queen Victoria, Henry VIII and the Civil War.
75
why did others fail to survive? What forms of Enlightenment thinking proved to be problematic for the kind
of work that the established poetic genres performed?
I want to consider the case of the English georgic at mid-century, and in particular four georgics which focus
on domestic agriculture: Smart’s The Hop-Garden (1752), Dodsley’s Agriculture (1753), Dyer’s The Fleece
(1757) and Jago’s Edge-Hill (1767). These poems represent a serious attempt to adapt the tropes and images
of the Virgilian didactic tradition to the new information, techniques and objectives of British agricultural
improvement. They celebrate the efficiency and maximisation of yield that modernised forms of production
enable, and present a finely detailed macroeconomic overview of interlinking professional occupations. I
argue in this paper, though, that there are problems with using an inherited Virgilian framework to
communicate the kind of technical information that obtains in a period of rapid agricultural progress. The
mid-century georgic articulates a crisis of confidence about the role and purpose of didactic poetry, and
about the poet’s conflicted position as both disinterested observer of, and knowledgeable specialist in, the
agricultural work he describes. I suggest that this fraught engagement with the information of
Enlightenment political economy is one reason for the decline of the English georgic during the later
eighteenth century.
Viewed from this perspective, the apparently staid and insular world of Georgian intellectual culture belies
its own self-fashionings as a steady period of intellectual amelioration, and appears instead as a barrage of
repetitive waves of mass obsession and excess; of manias and urban spectacles which seemed wildly to
overflow the people, places and incidents which inspired them. This paper will examine a handful of
manifestations of the Pacific craze as a means of reconstructing this contemporary idea of the metropolis,
then in the process of being displaced onto the exotic outsider.
76
understanding the special status of these singers is through considering the ways in which they uniquely
embodied the constructions of identity and social, economic and political power which were played out for
aristocratic audiences in the production and reception of opera seria–constructions which the singers
simultaneously reinforced and subverted. Singers’ ambiguous public and private status, and the potent ritual
enactment which opera represented, meant that they occupied a liminal space which required them to
perform multiple and overlapping identities on and off stage. A reading of the ways in which they
constructed their own identities in relation to the social parameters which they embodied can also provide
insight into the meanings which they and other participants in this special mode of performance understood
it to instantiate.
77
Enlightened Transformations
These studies deliver a description of the Christianity of the laity and of non-cultic religious praxis. Dogmatic
methods and a history of salvation with metaphysical actors lose to a pragmatic method focusing on
“innerweltliche” factors and causality. And periodic division of ancient, medieval and modern history was
victorious, as well as the consequent use of historical-critical method.
The work of Church historians from the 18th century not only constitutes a milestone in Church
historiography. The new historical narrations of Christianity created a hyper individualised concept of Church
and a particular kind of secular chiliasm later to reappear in the social democratic movements of this region.
This paper investigates how ideas of enlightenment transformed historiography, Church and Christianity,
and how concepts of the past became an intellectual battleground of consequence for culture and society.
78
Rowland Weston (University of Waikato)
Chivalry, Commerce and the 'coarse clay' of humanity: William Godwin and the ‘end of history’
In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke famously pronounced the end of the age of
chivalry and its replacement with an era presided over by ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’. At the
time the most extensive and celebrated response to Burke’s defence of tradition, instinct, and the
aristocratic status quo was the English Dissenter William Godwin’s notorious Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice (1793). Godwin proposed an anarchist polity comprising radically independent, ratiocinative
individuals governed by calculations of public utility. Isaac Kramnick rightly draws attention to the
importance of Dissenters and Dissenting thought in Britain’s commercial successes of the long eighteenth
century. Central to the ‘bourgeois civilization’ and ‘ideology’ espoused and pursued by these thinkers were
classic liberal notions of low taxation, minimal state intervention, and equality of opportunity – though not
equality understood as social leveling. While Godwin can certainly be enlisted in this cause, there is enough
in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to suggest that his was an imperfect fit.
This paper explores Godwin’s critique of extant discourses associating the rise of modern civility with that of
commercial society. Thinkers Godwin engaged included William Robertson, David Hume and, especially,
Adam Smith. Along with Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin texts analysed in this paper include his
historical novel of the sixteenth century St Leon (1799) and his social and intellectual history of the late
middle ages Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803).
79
Women, Print, Public Sphere
80
Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University)
Saving Marie Antoinette: Mary Robinson and Helen Craik Resuscitate a Queen
It has often been noted that many women writers of the eighteenth century on both sides of the radical-
conservative divide felt a particular affinity for Marie Antoinette. Both the radical novelist Mary Robinson
and the anti-Jacobin Helen Craik wrote novels in which they attempt to effectively ‘save’ Marie Antoinette
through their representations of Marie Antoinette surrogates. In Robinson’s émigré novel, Hubert de Sevrac,
the trials and tribulations of the de Sevrac family reflect the struggles of the French royal family in
revolutionary France. In imagining a happy resolution for the de Sevrac family, Robinson transforms the
dead King and Queen into a family of ideal French republicans who will uphold the original ideals of the
French Revolution. Helen Craik’s Adelaide Narbonne gives us two Marie Antoinette surrogates in Victorine,
the fictional look-alike niece of Marie Antoinette, and the eponymous heroine of the novel, who, like the
French Queen, is despised by both royalist and revolutionary alike. At the end of the novel, Craik removes
Victorine and Adelaide to an apolitical utopia in England, suggesting that the only safe option for women
with any kind of public profile is removal from the political sphere. Both Craik and Robinson fictionalize the
French Revolution in order to “save” the French Queen, reflecting both the extraordinary hold Marie
Antoinette had over the imaginations of British woman from both sides of the political divide, and her ability
to function as a symbol for thinking through ideas about the role of women within the public sphere.
Charlotte Lennox’s 1758 novel, Henrietta, is one of a number of mid-century novels to both support and
question the emergent domestic ideology and to do so in part through the form of the narrative. Henrietta is
an unusual heroine – lively, enthusiastic, intelligent and bold, easily overcoming the obstacles set against
her, resisting marriage and domesticity in order to maintain her control over her life and her narrative. In the
final book of the novel, however, she loses control of both to her brother, to whom she voluntarily submits
herself and her story. She moves quickly from being the subject of her narrative to being the object of her
brother’s tale.
This paper will explore how Lennox uses both the content and the form of Henrietta to question and
challenge ideas of domesticity and female submission in eighteenth-century society, and thus how this novel
reveals the types of experimentation occurring at this point of the novel’s development.
81
Author Index
Gray, Christina, 44
A Green, Karen, 28
Alvarez, Kerby, 11 Greentree, Shane, 29
Greig, Elias, 64
B Griffiths, Huw, 66
Bárcena, Ramón, 78 H
Bending, Stephen, 6
Brennan, AnnMarie, 37 Hall, Shawn Cailey, 80
Bricker, Andrew, 7 Hamel-Akré, Jessica, 31
Brosnan, Kelsey, 9 Hamilton, William, 15
Bucknell, Clare, 75 Hankinson, Alexandra, 35
Burchell, David, 33 Harris, Jocelyn, 49
Harrison, Fiona, 56
Hasted, Meegan, 64
C Heath, Ekaterina, 35
Cahill, Samara, 73 Hill, Michaela, 21
Casey, Mary, 28 Hoorn, Jeanette, 69
Charles, Katie, 80 Hosseini, Anita, 59
Chen, Jen-yen, 73 Hultquist, Aleksondra, 34
Christie, Will, 74 Hunt, John Dixon, 2
Chua, Brandon, 23
Clifford, Katrina, 81 J
Collins, Jeffrey, 4
Cooper-Dobbin, Melanie, 69 Jones, Adrian, 26
Cooperman, Emily, 42 Jones, Emma, 43
Cordingley, Anthony, 37 Jones, Timothy Rees, 57
Cox, Oliver, 75 Jones-O'Neill, Jennifer, 36
Crouch, Sara, 45
K
D Kaplama, Erman, 58
D’Angelo, Fabio, 30 Karalis, Vrasidas, 53
Dale, Amelia, 45 Kwok, Yin Ning, 73
Del Balzo, Angelina, 19
Denney, Peter, 7 L
During, Simon, 23
Lalevée, Thomas, 61
Lamb, Jonathan, 55
F Larcombe, Christopher, 16
Ferng, Jennifer, 26 Law, Hedy, 19
Flannery, Kristie, 13 Ledbury, Mark, 64
Fripp, Jessica, 10 Lilley, Kate, 66
Lőrincz, Viktor, 43
G
M
Garrioch, David, 21
Gaston, Vivien, 17 Maddox, Alan, 76
Glanville, Luke, 53 Maifreda, Germano, 30
Gleadhill, Emma, 21 Mallari, Aaron, 12
Graf, Benjamin, 61 Martin, Matthew, 71
Grainger, Jacqui, 28 Maskil, David l, 17
82
McAuley, Louis Kirk, 14 Russell-Clarke, Jo, 38
McBain, Jean, 47 Russo, Stephanie, 81
McKeon, Michael, 1 Ryan, Lauren, 59
McMahon, Darrin, 7
Milam, Jennifer, 51 S
Min, Eun Kyung, 47
Moloney, Jack, 71 Saar, Doreen Alvarez, 41
Moore, Sarah, 41 Schmidt, Marthe, 60
Mukherjee, Nilanjana, 13 Scobie, Ruth, 76
Murphy, Olivia, 49 Scott, Alison, 24
Shepheard, Mark, 17
N Simons, Patricia, 9
Naginski, Erika, 3 T
Ngg, Genice, 69
Nursoo, Ida, 53 Tankard, Paul, 48
Thell, Anne, 63
O Touma, Josephine, 20
O’Connell, Lisa, 24 U
Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra, 31
Oslington, Paul, 39 Upfal, Annette, 50
Owen, Christine, 79
V
P Van Dyk, Garritt, 72
Parsons, Nicola, 66 Vassiliou, Constantine, 39
Phiddian, Robert, 15 Verhaart, Floris, 57
Poblador, Karl, 11
Priebe, Jessica, 52 W
Q Wellington, Robert, 25
Weretka, John, 68
Quigley, Killian, 56 Weston, Rowland, 79
White, Janet, 51
R Whiteman, Stephen, 25
Windorf, Wiebke, 68
Reddan, Bronwyn, 33
Reeh, Tine Ravnsted-Larsen, 78 Z
Reeves, James, 46
Rinaldi, Bianca Maria, 27 Zabel, Christine, 40
Rosenfeld, Sophia, 5
83
For more information go to the Sydney Intellectual History Network
(SIHN) website:
sydney.edu.au/intellectual-history/
SYDNEY
INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY NETWORK
Image: François Boucher, French, 1748, Oil on canvas, 116 x 133 in. 71.PA.37