DOCSLIB.ORG

J O H N S O N I a N N E W S L E T T E R Volume LXVII, No. 1, March 2016 Robert Demaria, Jr. James L. Clifford John H. Middendorf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
J O H N S O N I a N N E W S L E T T E R Volume LXVII, No. 1, March 2016 Robert Demaria, Jr. James L. Clifford John H. Middendorf Johnsonian News Letter Volume LXVII, No. 1, March 2016 EDITOR FOUNDING EDITORS Robert DeMaria, Jr. James L. Clifford John H. Middendorf ASSOCIATE EDITORS Nancy E. Johnson PUBLISHER Joanne Long Peter Kanter Published with the support of Vassar College VICE PRESIDENT PROOFREADER DESIGN & PRODUCTION Dru Rigney Grant Sue Mangan SENIOR TYPESETTER TYPESETTING DIRECTOR Suzanne Lemke Jayne Keiser PRODUCTION MANAGER Jennifer Cone The Johnsonian News Letter is published twice a year, in March and September. Sub­ scription rates are $12 per year. For subscriptions outside of the U.S. add $7 (U.S.) per year for postage. Send editorial submissions or inquiries to Robert DeMaria, Jr., Editor, Johnson­ ian News Letter, Department of English, Box 140, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, or e-mail the editor at [email protected]. We ask that submissions conform to the style of this journal and that, when possible, digital files (preferably in Microsoft Word, or RTF format) accompany printed articles. Send subscription orders or customer service inquiries to Cus­ tomer Service, Johnsonian News Letter, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855, or e-mail [email protected]. The material in this newsletter is Copyright © 2016 by the Johnsonian News Letter and its contributors, all rights reserved. Cover art: William Powell Frith, Before Dinner at Boswell's Lodging in Bond Street 1769 (1868), Ashmolean Museum, detail. See p. 12 below. Printed in the U.S.A. Table of Contents From the Editor 4 Articles and Talks Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting Stephen Clarke 5 Johnsoniana Nel Gusto del Doctor Johnson Submitted by Brian Grimes 22 Dull as a Torpedo Submitted by Matt Davis 23 Message with a Flyer for a Play by James Runcie Submitted by Gordon Turnbull 24 Reports Johnson and Shakespeare at Pembroke College Corinna Readioff 25 The Johnsonians Dinner (USA), 2015 Peter Kanter 27 Yale Boswell Editions Notes Gordon Turnbull 29 Notes and Queries Who Annotated My Copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson? Tim Savage 36 Johnson and Procopius Thomas Kaminski 48 2 Puzzle The Samuel Johnson Dictionary Puzzle, No. 7 Gordon Turnbull 50 Book Review Jonathan Israel: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750; Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752; Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 Carey Mcintosh 53 Remembrance In Memory of John L. Mahoney Stephen Fix 63 O^CO/TCI A Call For Contributions The editors of the JNL invite contributions of notes, queries, Johnsoniana, and short articles on any and all matters regard­ ing Johnson and his circle (social, political, and intellectual). Contributions to the March issue are due 1 December; those for the September issue are due 1 June. From the Editor t the kind invitation of Professor Giovanni Iamartino, a fellow Johnsonian, I spent three weeks at the Uni­ versity of Milan this autumn lecturing to undergradu­ ates on Johnson and Boswell, talking to some graduate students there, as well as in Pavia and Bergamo, and finally participating in a conference in Milan called "Writing the Body in Eighteenth- century Britain." It was a pleasure to interact with learned, culti­ vated professors and graduate students in that civilized part of the world, but the real challenge was in addressing the undergraduates and trying to interest them in Johnson. It is an ongoing challenge for me to interest American undergraduates in Johnson, but the challenge in Italy was different, as different as the two education­ al systems and the two cultures. I would say, however, that despite their great differences cultur­ ally, both groups are about equally apt to appreciate Johnson. I perhaps got the greatest response from Italians when I was talking about the pyramids in Rasselas, those monuments to human vanity, and comparing them to the purposeless, though gorgeous, towers built to display wealth and power in Pavia. Of one hundred or more such monuments only a handful remain, many having fallen, in a satiric collapse, on the heads of the builder's progeny. My American students, too, respond most to Rasselas, but it's life in the Happy Valley and "the wants of him that wants nothing" that most engage them. It's not surprising when you stop to think about it. Meanwhile, I can report and our correspondent (see p. 25 below) confirms that in the rarefied air of Pembroke College, Oxford, love of Johnson is thriving. Lynda Mugglestone, with help from Jim McLaverty, Tiffany Stern, and others, celebrated the 250th anniver­ sary of Johnson's Shakespeare. Johnson's room over the gatehouse, refurbished through a generous gift from Judy McCartin Scheide, was officially opened, and the celebration proceeded, like Johnson himself, from Pembroke College to Johnson's House in Gough Square. But most impressive of all at Pembroke was the cadre of young scholars learning Johnson and seeing him afresh. Oxford is special ground for the cultivation of Johnsonian studies, of course, but it was nevertheless heart-warming to find the young scholars spreading their future labors o'er Bodley's dome. jtkxXikMt^j ta,. Articles and Talks Samuel Johnson in Victorian Narrative Painting ne of the achievements of Boswell's Life of Johnson was the way in which, through anecdote, incident and con­ versation, it realised the living presence of the corpo­ real, physical Johnson. It is no coincidence that the decades after the publication of the Life saw a proliferation of images of Johnson, prints of him and his friends, and of places associated with him. That in turn fed into the growing popularity in early Victorian England of narrative painting, paintings that told a story in scenes taken from contemporary life, from history, or from literature. The consequence of this was that in the fifty years from 1840, over twenty narrative paintings featuring Johnson were created. The roots of narrative painting lie with Hogarth's moral scenes of contemporary life and with the tradition of theatrical paintings, stage scenes that run from Hogarth through Zoffany to Samuel De Wilde and George Clint. Like theatrical stage scenes, narrative paintings usually involve a group of people engaged in some animated activity, and this may be in an indoor setting that occa­ sionally takes on something of the stage set. One of the most famous early examples of nineteenth-century narrative painting was David Wilkie's The Village Politicians, exhibited to great acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1806, soon after the artist's arrival in London. Wilkie never looked back, and went on to produce a substantial body of narrative and historical genre paint­ ings. The early- and mid-nineteenth-century taste for narrative paint­ ings has been linked to the rise of the middle-class art buyer, whether the rich northern industrialist who could buy what he wanted, or the modest suburban householder who might spend a few guineas on a painting to go over the drawing room fireplace. Rather than the Old Masters, they preferred "works painted for a bourgeois society like their own, still lifes, landscapes, and... senti­ mental, anecdotal, narrative genre subjects in which art came Johnsonian News Letter closest to reflecting their own experience and the everyday world they lived in."1 A glance at the list of exhibits at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, or the Society of British Artists, particularly from the 1840s, reveals many works of this kind. As for the artists who supplied this market, they were not necessarily the most eminent of nineteenth-century painters; not Turner, or Leighton, or Burne-Jones—though there is a curious, claustrophobic Rossetti drawing of Dr. Johnson at the Mitre in which one of the pair of young women with Johnson bears more than a passing resem­ blance to Janie Morris. After Wilkie, the most prolific Victorian nar­ rative artists were C. R. Leslie, Daniel Maclise, E. M. Ward, and W. P. Frith, with behind them a horde of lesser-known names. The works of these artists were circulated by engravings, and successful artists such as Frith could make as much money from the sale of the engraving rights as from the sale of the painting. Firms such as Thomas Boys of Golden Square and F. G. Moon of Threadneedle Street, Printsellers to Her Majesty, attracted orders for the promised mezzotint or lithograph with small printed descriptive pamphlets with a folding outline etching of the print; Moon's catalogue of c. 1840 offered prints after Wilkie, Landseer, Lawrence, William Collins, and others, with titles such as Cottage Piety, Guilt and Innocence, and Hide and Seek. Blackwood's Magazine noted in 1850 that "probably no subjects are more generally popular than those that may be styled the homely-historical; scenes in the private apartments of royalty; the personal adventures and perils of princes..." and it was a short step from imagined historical scenes to imagined scenes re-created from literature.2 Burns and Scott provided much material for narrative artists, but so did eighteenth-century authors, especially Gold­ smith, Thomson, and Sterne. Some fifty or so paintings from The Spectator alone were exhibited in the 1840s and 1850s, and there were countless tearful images of Sterne's Maria. But it was Gold­ smith, above all in The Vicar of Wakefield, who carried away the prize, with over one hundred paintings from the novel exhibited, of which no less than thirty were shown in the 1840s. In 1845 Punch suggested that in future a large room at Royal Academy exhibitions should be set aside for paintings based on The Vicar of Wakefield.3 Along with paintings from novels, the Victorian taste for genre and anecdote encouraged paintings of incident from authors' lives. 1 Richard D.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Wesleyan Enlightenment
    The Wesleyan Enlightenment: Closing the gap between heart religion and reason in Eighteenth Century England by Timothy Wayne Holgerson B.M.E., Oral Roberts University, 1984 M.M.E., Wichita State University, 1986 M.A., Asbury Theological Seminary, 1999 M.A., Kansas State University, 2011 AN ABSTRACT OF A DISSERTATION submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of History College of Arts and Sciences KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas 2017 Abstract John Wesley (1703-1791) was an Anglican priest who became the leader of Wesleyan Methodism, a renewal movement within the Church of England that began in the late 1730s. Although Wesley was not isolated from his enlightened age, historians of the Enlightenment and theologians of John Wesley have only recently begun to consider Wesley in the historical context of the Enlightenment. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the complex relationship between a man, John Wesley, and an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment. As a comparative history, this study will analyze the juxtaposition of two historiographies, Wesley studies and Enlightenment studies. Surprisingly, Wesley scholars did not study John Wesley as an important theologian until the mid-1960s. Moreover, because social historians in the 1970s began to explore the unique ways people experienced the Enlightenment in different local, regional and national contexts, the plausibility of an English Enlightenment emerged for the first time in the early 1980s. As a result, in the late 1980s, scholars began to integrate the study of John Wesley and the Enlightenment. In other words, historians and theologians began to consider Wesley as a serious thinker in the context of an English Enlightenment that was not hostile to Christianity.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae (Updated August 1, 2021)
    DAVID A. BELL SIDNEY AND RUTH LAPIDUS PROFESSOR IN THE ERA OF NORTH ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS PRINCETON UNIVERSITY Curriculum Vitae (updated August 1, 2021) Department of History Phone: (609) 258-4159 129 Dickinson Hall [email protected] Princeton University www.davidavrombell.com Princeton, NJ 08544-1017 @DavidAvromBell EMPLOYMENT Princeton University, Director, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (2020-24). Princeton University, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, Department of History (2010- ). Associated appointment in the Department of French and Italian. Johns Hopkins University, Dean of Faculty, School of Arts & Sciences (2007-10). Responsibilities included: Oversight of faculty hiring, promotion, and other employment matters; initiatives related to faculty development, and to teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences; chairing a university-wide working group for the Johns Hopkins 2008 Strategic Plan. Johns Hopkins University, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities (2005-10). Principal appointment in Department of History, with joint appointment in German and Romance Languages and Literatures. Johns Hopkins University. Professor of History (2000-5). Johns Hopkins University. Associate Professor of History (1996-2000). Yale University. Assistant Professor of History (1991-96). Yale University. Lecturer in History (1990-91). The New Republic (Washington, DC). Magazine reporter (1984-85). VISITING POSITIONS École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Visiting Professor (June, 2018) Tokyo University, Visiting Fellow (June, 2017). École Normale Supérieure (Paris), Visiting Professor (March, 2005). David A. Bell, page 1 EDUCATION Princeton University. Ph.D. in History, 1991. Thesis advisor: Prof. Robert Darnton. Thesis title: "Lawyers and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1700-1790)." Princeton University.
    [Show full text]
  • History 2014
    History 2014 press.princeton.edu CONTENTS 1 general interest 16 politics & society in 24 economic history 5 world history twentieth-century america 26 ancient history 8 jewish history 18 u.s. history 28 medieval & early 10 jews, christians & muslims 20 america in the world modern history from the ancient to the 21 human rights & crimes 30 princeton classics modern world against humanity 30 history of science 11 middle eastern history 22 the public square 31 isaiah berlin 12 european history 23 asian | east asian history 32 index | order form LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Princeton’s History list o ers many treasures in 2014. Clearly, one of the year’s most important books is the highly anticipated English edition of Jürgen Osterhammel’s magni cent The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. The Times Literary Supplement, which reviewed the German edition, hailed it as “a work of tremendous conceptual precision, breadth and insight, a masterpiece that sets a new benchmark for debates on the history of world society.” For scholars interested in East European history, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe o ers a surprising new take on the Jewish market towns that were home to two-thirds of East Europe’s Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jacqueline Bhabha’s new book, Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, is the rst to integrate all aspects of child migration in a global perspective; it is at the same time an activist’s book, arguing for a compelling new international ethics of children’s human rights.
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring Requirements for Effective Deterrence of Interstate Aggression
    What Deters and Why Exploring Requirements for Effective Deterrence of Interstate Aggression Michael J. Mazarr, Arthur Chan, Alyssa Demus, Bryan Frederick, Alireza Nader, Stephanie Pezard, Julia A. Thompson, Elina Treyger C O R P O R A T I O N For more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/RR2451 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this publication. ISBN: 978-1-9774-0064-2 Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2018 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark. Cover: Three ROK soldiers watching the border at Panmunjeom in the DMZ between North and South Korea/Henrik Ishihara via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org Preface This report documents research and analysis conducted as part of a project enti- tled What Deters and Why: Lessons of Deterrence Theory and Practice for U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • Sowerby on Repealers
    This is an author-produced draft version of an article published in Past and Present, no. 215 (2012), pp. 85–123, which is accessible online at http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/215/1/85.short?rss=1 FORGETTING THE REPEALERS: RELIGIOUS TOLERATION AND HISTORICAL AMNESIA IN LATER STUART ENGLAND* by Scott Sowerby The erasure of the repealers from the historical record began with the failure to give the group a name. The men and women who rallied together for religious toleration in England in 1687 saw no need to name themselves. They presented themselves as a large group of concerned citizens. Their common cause was to enact a new ‘Magna Carta for liberty of conscience’ that would include the repeal of the laws that penalized both Protestant nonconformity and Roman Catholicism.1 They were visionaries. They claimed that their program had universal benefits and was not designed to aid a mere clique or party. They thought of themselves as those who were ‘zealous for Liberty of * I am grateful to Evan Haefeli, Mark Kishlansky, Owen Stanwood and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on this essay. Noah McCormack provided several helpful references and many useful suggestions. The essay has also benefited from the comments of those who heard an earlier version of it read at the Anglo-American Conference hosted by the Institute of Historical Research. 1 The quotation is from William Penn and the slogan appears to have been his invention, although others subsequently adopted it. See [William Penn], The Great and Popular Objection against the Repeal of the Penal Laws & Tests Briefly Stated and Consider’d (London, 1688, Wing P1298A), 6, 8, 10, 22; Scott Sowerby, ‘Of Different Complexions: Religious Diversity and National Identity in James II’s Toleration Campaign,’ English Historical Review, cxxiv (2009), 39–43, 48–9.
    [Show full text]
  • Literature of European History I Fall 2017 Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 Pm
    Literature of European History I Fall 2017 Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m. David G. Troyansky Office Hours (GC 5104): Wednesday, 1:00-2:00, and by appointment [email protected] This course provides an introduction to the literature of European history from the Late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. It explores different conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to the period and examines an assortment of classic and recent works on a variety of topics: religion and the state; science, technology, and medicine; economy and society; gender and sexuality; and ideas and mentalities. The course prepares students for the end-of-semester comprehensive examination and for further study of early modern Europe. Requirements: Class participation: 25% Five (2-page) response papers (one title each—not the common reading): 25% Two (8-10-page) historiographical papers on major themes of the course (4-6 titles for each): 50% Written work will be shared with the class. Recommended Reading: Textbooks and Reference Works: Eugene Rice and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559, 2nd edition (New York, 1994). Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975). William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660-1800, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1993). George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Bloomington, IN, 1998). T.A. Brady, H.O. Oberman and J.D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History 1400-1600, 2 volumes (Leiden, 1995). Jonathan Dewald, ed., Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, 6 volumes (Farmington Hills, 2004).
    [Show full text]
  • A Crucible in Which to Put the Soul”: Keeping Body and Soul Together in the Moderate Enlightenment, 1740-1830
    “A CRUCIBLE IN WHICH TO PUT THE SOUL”: KEEPING BODY AND SOUL TOGETHER IN THE MODERATE ENLIGHTENMENT, 1740-1830 DISSERTATION Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctor of philosophy degree in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University KARA ELIZABETH BARR, M.A. DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 2014 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE: Dale K. Van Kley, director Matthew D. Goldish, advisor Geoffrey Parker COPYRIGHT BY KARA ELIZABETH BARR 2014 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. Specifically, it explores how the Enlightenment produced the modern Western perception of the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body. While most traditional Enlightenment historiography argues that the movement was defined by radical, atheistic thinkers, like Diderot and Spinoza, who denied the existence of the traditional Christian immaterial and immortal soul, this project demonstrates that these extreme thinkers were actually a minority, confined largely to the intellectual fringes. By contrast, not only were many Enlightenment thinkers sincere Christians, but they were actually the most effective communicators of new ideas by showing how the Enlightenment supported, rather than attacked, traditional Christian beliefs. This moderate Enlightenment is responsible for developing Western ideas about how the mind and body are related, especially within the emerging fields of psychology and psychiatry in the mid-nineteenth century. This dissertation gains its focus through an examination of the work of two historiographically neglected enlightened thinkers—David Hartley in Britain, and the Abbé de Condillac in France. Both of them argued for the traditional Christian belief in an immortal soul, but used enlightened ideas to do so.
    [Show full text]
  • Jews and the Sources of Religious Freedom in Early Pennsylvania
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 4-3-2018 Jews and the Sources of Religious Freedom in Early Pennsylvania Jonathon Derek Awtrey Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Cultural History Commons, History of Religion Commons, Political History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Awtrey, Jonathon Derek, "Jews and the Sources of Religious Freedom in Early Pennsylvania" (2018). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4544. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4544 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. JEWS AND THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN EARLY PENNSYLVANIA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Jonathon Derek Awtrey B.S. University of West Georgia, 2007 M.A. University of West Georgia, 2009 May 2018 For Christina, Sandra, Cole, Val, Suzy, April, Les, Carolyn, John, Nita, Kevin, and families ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The years of research, writing, and revision that resulted in this dissertation derived from conversations with family members, friends, colleagues, trusted mentors, and other scholars, archivists, and editors. My entire family, but especially my mother and sisters, have sustained my intellectual curiosity from an early age.
    [Show full text]
  • Military Themes in British Painting 1815 - 1914
    / Military Themes in British Painting 1815 - 1914. Joan Winifred Martin Hichberger. Submission fcr PhD. University College, London. 1985 1 Abstract. Joan Winifred Martin Hichberger. Military Themes in British Painting 1815-1914. This thesis examines the treatment of the Bzitish Army and military themes, in painting, during the period 1815- 1914. All the works discussed were exhibited at the Royal Academy, which, although it underwent modifications in status, remained the nearest equivalent to a State Institution for Art in Britain. All the paintings shown there were painted with the knowledge that they were to be seen by the controllers of the Academy and the dominant classes of society. It will be inferred then, that the paintings shown there may be taken to have been acceptable to ruling class ideologies, and are therefore instructive of "official" attitudes to military art. Representations of the contemporary Army, in this period, fell into two main catagories - battle paintings and genre depictions of soldiers. Chapters one to three survey battle paintings; studying the relation of this genre to the Academy; the relative popularity of the genre and the career patterns of its practioners. The critical reception of battle pictures at the Academy and certain important public competitions will be noted and considered in the context of contemporary ideologies about art and about the Army and its men. Chapter four discusses the vital concept of "heroism" and its treatment in English military art. In particular, the reasons for the popularity of certain military figures above their peers, in academic art, will be explored. It will be argued that the process of "hero-making" in art was not determined by professional success alone, but was often the result of the intervention of patrons, publicists and pressure groups.
    [Show full text]
  • Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
    a Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Alexandra Walsham University of Cambridge Cambridge, United Kingdom How do we conceptualize and explain religious change in medieval and early modern Europe without perpetuating distorting paradigms inherited from the very era of the past that is the subject of our study? How can we do justice to historical development over time without resorting to linear grand narratives that have their intellectual origins in the very movements that we seek to comprehend? In one way or another, this challenging question has inspired all my published work to date, which has focused on the ways in which early mod- ern society adapted to the religious revolutions that unfolded before it. My work has explored the ambiguities, anomalies, and ironies that accompany dramatic moments of ideological and cultural rupture. It has sought to bal- ance recognition of the decisive transformations wrought by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations with awareness of the complexities and contra- dictions that characterized their evolution and entrenchment in practice. It has been marked by a consuming interest in the currents of continuity that tempered, mediated, and even facilitated the upheavals of the early mod- ern era. One consequence of this preoccupation with analyzing how and why cultures are held in tension and suspension during critical phases of transition is that I have been very much less effective in acknowledging and accounting for religious change itself. This is my Achilles’ heel as a historian, and one that I share with a number of other historians of my generation.
    [Show full text]
  • EHR Article on Chester Speech#15
    Of Different Complexions: Religious Diversity and National Identity in James II’s Toleration Campaign* by Scott Sowerby One of the most remarkable speeches ever given by an English monarch was delivered by James II in the city of Chester on 27 August 1687. This speech, which deserves the attention of historians, has never been published and survives only in a first-hand account written down by a Cheshire gentleman in his diary. It has not been cited in any of the standard works on James II and his reign. The existence of the speech was first mentioned in an unpublished dissertation in 1982, but it was not discussed at length in that work and has not received wide attention since then. The diary in which the speech was recorded has been held for the past eighty years in the municipal archives of Liverpool.1 Like many similar diaries, it consists primarily of an unembellished record of the diarist’s daily appointments as he called on his neighbors. The unusually long entry for 27 August 1687 was uncovered by the present author, buried among the briefer accounts of the diarist’s social engagements. The royal remarks recorded in that entry deserve more extensive examination than they have heretofore received, as they provide * This article grew out of research I did while holding the Clive and Packard fellowships at Harvard University and a dissertation fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I owe thanks to these institutions and to several individuals. Ann Blair, Evan Haefeli, Mark Kishlansky, Noah McCormack, Monica Piotter, Jonathan Scott and Owen Stanwood contributed valuable comments on earlier drafts.
    [Show full text]
  • Read Keith Thomas' the Wolfson History Prize 1972-2012
    THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 1972-2012 An Informal History Keith Thomas THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 1972-2012 An Informal History Keith Thomas The Wolfson Foundation, 2012 Published by The Wolfson Foundation 8 Queen Anne Street London W1G 9LD www.wolfson.org.uk Copyright © The Wolfson Foundation, 2012 All rights reserved The Wolfson Foundation is grateful to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing the use of the images from their collection Excerpts from letters of Sir Isaiah Berlin are quoted with the permission of the trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, who own the copyright Printed in Great Britain by The Bartham Group ISBN 978-0-9572348-0-2 This account draws upon the History Prize archives of the Wolfson Foundation, to which I have been given unrestricted access. I have also made use of my own papers and recollections. I am grateful to Paul Ramsbottom and Sarah Newsom for much assistance. The Foundation bears no responsibility for the opinions expressed, which are mine alone. K.T. Lord Wolfson of Marylebone Trustee of the Wolfson Foundation from 1955 and Chairman 1972-2010 © The Wolfson Foundation FOREWORD The year 1972 was a pivotal one for the Wolfson Foundation: my father, Lord Wolfson of Marylebone, became Chairman and the Wolfson History Prize was established. No coincidence there. History was my father’s passion and primary source of intellectual stimulation. History books were his daily companions. Of all the Foundation’s many activities, none gave him greater pleasure than the History Prize. It is an immense sadness that he is not with us to celebrate the fortieth anniversary.
    [Show full text]