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A microhistory of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances Provincializing Global History explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.
Experimental Life establishes the multiple ways in which Romantic authors appropriated the notion of experimentation from the natural sciences. Winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, BSLS Book Prize of the British Society for Literature and Science If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism specifically, with regard to Romanticism no study has investigated what it meant for artists to experiment and how those experiments re...
This text investigates the role of learned, mostly scientific societies in building civil society in imperial Russia. It challenges the idea that Russia did not have the building blocks of a democratic society.
Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.
The book demonstrates how the 'common law mind' was able to meet the various challenges posed by Enlightenment rationalism and civic and commercial discourse, revealing that the common law played a much wider role beyond the legal world in shaping Enlightenment concepts.
When nineteenth-century Londoners looked at each other, what did they see, and how did they want to be seen? Sharrona Pearl reveals the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves. Physiognomy was initially a practice used to get information about others, but soon became a way to self-consciously give information--on stage, in print, in images, in research, and especially on the street. Moving through a wide range of media, Pearl shows how physiognomical notions rested on instinct and honed a kind of shared subjectivity. She looks at the stakes for framing physiognomy--a practice with a long history--as a science in the nineteenth century. By showing how physiognomy gave people permission to judge others, Pearl holds up a mirror both to Victorian times and our own.
The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.
From these four cases she builds a picture of cooperation that departs significantly from the conventional portrayal and that has wide ramifications for our understanding of cooperation among states as well as among firms.
This book provides a reinterpretation of early modern clock and watch dials on the basis of use. Between 1550 and the emergence of a standard format in 1770, dials represented combinations of calendrical, lunar and astronomical information using multiple concentric rings, subsidiary dials and apertures. Change was gradual, but significant. Over the course of eight chapters and with reference to thirty-five exceptional images, this book unlocks the meaning embedded within these early combinations. The true significance of dial change can only be fully understood by comparing dials with printed paper sources such as almanacs, diagrams and craft pamphlets. Clock and watch makers drew on traditional communication methods, utilised different formats to generate trust in their work, and tried to be help users in different contexts. The calendar, lunar and astronomical functions were useful as a memory prompt for astrology up until the mid-late seventeenth century. After the decline of this practice, the three functions continued to be useful for other purposes, but eventually declined.