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The Enlightenment Archive
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Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe word 'mistress' has a multi-layered history. Today, it generally refers either to a woman an illicit sexual relationship, or, more rarely, to someone who is in perfect control of her art. Both the sexual connotation and the inference of complete competencei date back to at least the later middle ages. -
Leather guns and other light artillery in mid-17th-century Scotland
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsIt was the Scottish officers who had served under Gustavus Adolphus who brought knowledge of leather guns to Britain. -
‘Selling Consumption’: An Examination of Eighteenth-Century English Trade Cards
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsAdditionally, the cards’ aesthetic enticed consumers by using themes, images and a language that would have been associated with innovation, originality and luxury. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Did the Glorious Revolution Contribute to the Transport Revolution?
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsMost studies on political change and economic development in Britain focus on government or private borrowing, taxation, and the stock market. Infrastructure investment has received little discussion by comparison. -
‘Man is a dining animal’: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750-1900
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis covers the material culture of food and dining c.1750-1900. At first view this is a long period to attempt to cover within the remit of a doctoral thesis, which might reasonably be expected to concentrate on one specific aspect of the dining experience or a single case study within the period, or to consider a few decades only. The length of the period to be considered has been dictated by the wish to study and explain large-scale changes in dining in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. -
“The Nightmare in Early Modern England.”
Posted on December 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was held at Victoria College by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and dealt with the idea of the nightmare and its evolution from demonic possession to medical malady. -
English Xenophobia in the 18th Century: the Case of Lord Bute
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe covert manipulator, in other words, of the political strings chiefly responsible for the difficulties which marked the opening years of George III’s reign. -
For Something More Than King and Country: The Persistence of the Mercenary Tradition in Seventeenth Century Scottish Military History
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsWhy was it that the Highlanders came into the military service of a regime that had previously treated their society as a pariah? -
The Glasgow Royal Infirmary: Aspects of Illness and Health Care in the Victorian City
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsSince the opening of the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow’s growth had been dramatic. In 1791 the population of the city and its suburbs numbered 66,000; a century later it had swollen to three quarters of a million. During this time the Royal endeavoured to treat diseases and mend bodies of a mushrooming populace: in-house medical and surgical wards were extended; vaccination services commenced in 1857. -
Becoming British? Navigating the Union of 1707
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will take one extended family, the Humes of the Merse (Berwickshire) and use it as a lens through which to view the process of “Brittification;” the four main areas addressed will be the legal, religious and educational ramifications of union for ambitious Scots and the issue of self-identification. -
Dissecting the Living: Vivisection in Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe term ‘vivisection’, which refers to the act of dissecting a live animal or human being, was coined in 1709. Yet, it celebrated a long tradition reaching back thousands of years. One of the earliest recorded accounts dates from 500 B.C., when Alcmaeon of Croton severed the optic nerves of live animals in order to understand how it affected their vision. -
Did Slavery make Scotia great?
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsIn the last few years, however, the research agenda has changed dramatically. Studies have now started to be published on the Scottish connection with the West India sugar colonies and the extent of Scottish involvement in slave trading itself or, by proxy, in Bristol, Liverpool and London. A new interest has also developed in the impact of the slave-based economies on Scotland which connects with older work on the relationship between the imperial trades and Scottish economic development -
The 1738–41 Harvest Crisis in Scotland
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsTo demonstrate this, the harvest and mortality crisis or macroeconomic depression of 1738–41, a hitherto largely unexplored event in Scotland’s eighteenth-century economic history, has been chosen. -
Oliver Cromwell : Man of Force
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsThere is no denying the fact that in many instances, Oliver Cromwell was in the right place at the most opportune time and that events often seemed to work in his favor through sheer luck, assuming that he had no hand in them. -
Promises broken: Breach of promise of marriage in England and Wales, 1753-1970
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary basis for this study was are 875 breach of promise cases between 1750 and 1970. -
‘A Suffering People’: English Quakers and Their Neighbours c.1650–c.1700
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsPopular hostility towards Quakers has attracted little attention from historians. Studies of crowds and riots in the Restoration period make little mention of violence against Quakers -
Victorian Culture and the Museum: Before and After the White Cube
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay broaches two separate but related questions: firstly, what was distinctive about Victorian museum culture, and secondly, how do museums represent the Victorians, and in particular Victorian art, to us today? -
Devotion and Piety of English Women, 1480-1620
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThese very personal invocations to God were self-reflective and pensive, capturing some early modem English women's desire and need to comprehend the intrinsic complexities of their intimate relationship with God. -
Anne Askew and Margaret Fell: Religious Women in Prison And Technologies of the Self
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBoth Anne Askew (1521-1546) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) were imprisoned and wrote significant writings in jail. In prison Askew wrote The First Examination (1546) and The Latter Examination (1547); Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666). The two Protestants’ imprisonment indicates not only their struggle for freedom of their Protestant belief but also the government’s arbitrary exercise of institutional power over non-conforming women. -
The justice of the peace and county government in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1782-1836
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Riding was dominated by its geology and geography. It was predominantly agricultural with few major settlements and very little industrial development. -
‘Wanton and torturing punishments’ : patterns of discipline and punishment in the Royal Navy, 1783-1815
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe British Navy of the time of the Napoleonic Wars acquired a fearsome reputation, not only for its success but also, in the eyes of many historians, for the cruelty with which it recruited and treated its men. It is not simply that the forms of punishment, including hanging, flogging and gagging were, to the modern eye, barbaric and unacceptable. -
The reform of punishment and the criminal justice system in England and Wales from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the late seventeenth-century and throughout the eighteenth-century crime provided one of the principal subjects for popular literature. -
Witchcraft, Politics and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsBodenham’s fate was shared by several hundred others in early modern England, all of whom became trapped at a deadly intersection of circumstance. It is still sometimes assumed that ‘villagers were constantly engaged in contending with, or discussing, witches’, and that popular suspicions and grievances translated simply into prosecutions. -
Melancholy and the Idle Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis considers Johnson‘s preoccupation with idleness as a symptom of his melancholy, a notion that has received little critical attention. Shenstone‘s experience is used to illustrate the depressing effect that a retired lifestyle could have on the individual. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
Robert Harley and the Myth of the Golden Thread: Family Piety,Journalism and the History of the Assassination Attempt of 8 March 1711
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsOn 8 March 1711, a possible French double agent, the marquis de Guiscard, on his own initiative bearing a grudge against both Robert Harley and Henry St John, attempted to assassinate Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer (later lord treasurer and earl of Oxford) and head of the new tory ministry established the previous year, by stabbing him with a penknife. -
Political Verse in Late Georgian Britain: Poems Referring to William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsThough Pitt was remarkable for the length of his tenure of office and for his youth when first appointed – he became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four and only Sir Robert Walpole held office for a longer period – it is not our intention to suggest that he was in any way a unique phenomenon in the history of political versifying. -
‘The art of dancing, demonstrated by characters and figures’: French and English sources for court and theatre dance, 1700-1750
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of James I and Charles I, England developed its own court entertainment in the masque - many of them devised by the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson in collaboration with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. -
England and the Machinery of Reason 1780 to 1830
Posted on July 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe increasingly sturdy optimism that nature could be understood and controlled both influenced and was equally strengthened by, the growing development of manufactures and attempts to understand labour productivity during this period. -
Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe present study may be regarded as treating upon those attitudes to the past and its relationship to the present generally discussed under the rubric of the conflict of the Ancients and the Moderns. -
From obligation to agreement: concepts of servitude in early modern England
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsUntil quite recently, servants played a central role in European family life...Early Modern England was no exception, for nearly every household participated in the institution of servitude. -
English hunger and industrial disorders : a study of social conflict during the first decade of George III’s reign
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation will argue that while the distress of the industrious poor, which followed sudden fluctuations in food prices and declining employment was the common denominator in the numerous riots of the 1760's, the disorders were merely the surface manifestation of underlying political, economic, social and intellectual ferment which affected all levels of society. -
“And With All That, Who Believes in Vampires?” Undead Legends and Enlightenment Culture
Posted on October 25, 2011 | No Comments“And With All That, Who Believes in Vampires?” Undead Legends and Enlightenment Culture Burns, Stu Paper given at 33rd Annual European Studies Conference (2007) Abstract In the winter of 1740,...