Results by title
805 books match the query '18th Century' and 36 start with p
POLICING THE CITY
CRIME & LEGAL AUTHORITY IN LONDON, 1780-1840ANDREW T. HARRIS
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
Paper, Ink, and Achievement
Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century ScholarshipKevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Pasadena Before the Roses
Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890Yvette J. Saavedra
University of Arizona Press, 2018
But what existed before the roses? Before it was Pasadena, this land was Hahamog’na, the ancestral lands of the Tongva people. Later, it comprised the heart of the San Gabriel Mission lands, and in the Mexican period, it became Rancho San Pascual. The 1771 Spanish conquest of this land set in motion several colonial processes that would continue into the twentieth century and beyond.
In Pasadena Before the Roses, historian Yvette J. Saavedra examines a period of 120 years to illustrate the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments. By centering the San Gabriel Mission lands as the region’s economic, social, and cultural foundation, she shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. These visions have resulted in competing colonialisms that framed the racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies of their respective societies.
Paths to a Middle Ground
The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-1795Charles A. Weeks
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Weeks shows how diplomatic relations were established and maintained in the Gulf South between Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee chiefs and their Spanish counterparts aided by traders who had become integrated into Indian societies. He explains that despite the absence of a European state system, Indian groups had diplomatic skills that Europeans could understand: full-scale councils or congresses accompanied by elaborate protocol, interpreters, and eloquent metaphorical language.
Paths to a Middle Ground is both a narrative and primary documents. Key documents from Spanish archival sources serve as a basis for the examination of the political culture and imperial rivalry playing out in North America in the waning years of the 18th century.
Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724-1729
A Documentary History of His Frontier Inspection and the Reglamento de 1729Thomas H. Naylor
University of Arizona Press, 1989
People of Faith
Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de JaneiroMariza de Carvalho Soares
Duke University Press, 2011
People of Prowess
Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-AmericaNancy L. Struna
University of Illinois Press, 1996
Performative Polemic
Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century FranceKathrina Ann LaPorta
University of Delaware Press, 2021
Perverse Attachments
Reading Fiction Around 1800Anastasia Eccles
University of Chicago Press, 2026
This new theory of reader response describes “perverse attachment,” or the powerful desire to intervene in a story, even when it is impossible to do so.
Fiction has long inspired resistance in its readers: making them, for example, wish for a different plot, cringe at a moment of social discomfort, or itch to warn a character about an approaching calamity. These are symptoms of a condition that Anastasia Eccles calls “perverse attachment,” in which a person feels an urge to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive part of the experience of reading fiction, especially under the influence of literary sentimentalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also, significantly, a defining aspect of the mass politics that emerged in the same period, which rested on the demands of new political subjects to participate in a process that excluded them.
Perverse Attachments recovers a repertoire of aesthetic responses keyed to the psychodynamics of modern political life: complicity, suspense, historical regret, and cringing. Combining identification and disidentification, immersion and detachment, these experiences challenge deep-seated binaries in our theories of reading and point toward a new account of the political stakes of literary form.
Through readings of works by Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and others Eccles shows how this distinctive aesthetic and political relation shaped the major genres of Romantic fiction and gave rise to some of the novel’s characteristic forms, like the character type of the witness-protagonist and the techniques of free indirect discourse. The result is a major work in the theory of the novel and the history of readerly experience.
Philosophy in the Boudoir
or The Immoral InstructorsMarquis de Sade
University of Chicago Press, 2027
A freshly translated critical edition of the infamous eighteenth-century sadist’s sprawling work of eroticism that endures today as a serious philosophical argument.
The infamous libertine Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), from whose name we derive the word sadism, wove into his pornographic writings many strands of philosophical brilliance whose insights, interspersed between appalling descriptions of sexual deviance, have perplexed readers for centuries. First published in 1795, Philosophy in the Boudoir remains one of the most influential of these works, containing a powerful essay that distills Sade’s most illicit ideas into a compelling argument for personal freedom. In it, Sade experiments with forms drawn from sentimental fiction, pornography, philosophical dialogue, and drama to both satirize his contemporaries and champion the virtues of the heroic libertine—an important intellectual precursor to ideas further developed by Nietzsche, Freud, and others.
This new critical edition is freshly translated into contemporary English and includes a scholarly introduction and extensive notes that illuminate Sade’s myriad allusions and cultural connections, particularly to the larger world of Enlightenment Europe.
Pictured Politics
Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait CollectionsBy Emily Engel
University of Texas Press, 2020
The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.
Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.
Picturing Imperial Power
Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British PaintingBeth Fowkes Tobin
Duke University Press, 1999
Informed by the varied perspectives of postcolonial theory, Tobin explores through close readings of colonial artwork the dynamic middle ground in which cultures meet. Linking specific colonial sites with larger patterns of imperial practice and policy, she examines paintings by William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Arthur William Devis, and Agostino Brunias, among others. These works include portraits of colonial officials, conversation pieces of British families and their servants, portraits of Native Americans and Anglo-Indians, and botanical illustrations produced by Calcutta artists for officials of the British Botanic Gardens. In addition to examining the strategies that colonizers employed to dominate and define their subjects, Tobin uncovers the tactics of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance that make up the colonized’s response to imperial authority. By focusing on the paintings’ cultural and political engagement with imperialism, she accounts for their ideological power and visual effect while arguing for their significance as agents in the colonial project.
Pointing to the complexity, variety, and contradiction within colonial art, Picturing Imperial Power contributes to an understanding of colonialism as a collection of social, economic, political, and epistemological practices that were not monolithic and inevitable, but contradictory and contingent on various historical forces. It will interest students and scholars of colonialism, imperial history, postcolonial history, art history and theory, and cultural studies.
Placing the Enlightenment
Thinking Geographically about the Age of ReasonCharles W. J. Withers
University of Chicago Press, 2007
The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns.
Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition.
Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.
Play in the Age of Goethe
Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800Edgar Landgraf
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Plays by Early American Women, 1775-1850
Amelia Howe Kritzer, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Poetry as a Way of Life
Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth CenturyGabriel Trop
Northwestern University Press, 2014
What would it mean to make a work of art the focal point of one’s life practice? Poetry as a Way of Life goes back to the origins of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the early eighteenth century in order to uncover an understanding of the work of art as an exercise of the self. Engaging in close readings of works by both canonical and less well-known eighteenth-century German poets such as Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis, Friedrich von Hagedorn, and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Gabriel Trop illustrates the ways in which these authors tap into the potential of poetic form to redefine the limits of human perception and generate alternative ways of being in the world.
Poets Laureate in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1668-1813
Leo Shipp
University of London Press, 2022
The office of the poet laureate of Britain was a highly prominent, relevant, and respectable institution throughout the long eighteenth century. First instituted for John Dryden in 1668, the laureateship developed from an honorific into a functionary office with a settled position in court, and in 1813 was bestowed upon Robert Southey, whose tenure transformed the office. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the office’s institutional changes and public reception, the mechanics of each laureate’s appointment, and the works produced by the laureates before and after their appointments. It argues that the laureateship played a key part in some of the most vital trends in eighteenth-century culture.
At the core of the book is a new research paradigm that Leo Shipp calls the conceptual geography of culture. It shows that Britons routinely used spatial concepts to understand culture throughout the period, which became increasingly abstract over time. As part of this, Shipp shows, the court evolved from a concrete space in London to an abstract space capable of hosting the entire British public. The laureateship was a dynamic office positioned at the interface of court and public, evolving in line with its audiences. An important intervention in eighteenth-century historiography, this book presents a nuanced understanding of eighteenth-century culture and society, in which the laureateship exemplified the enduring centrality of the court to the British conceptual geography of culture.
Policemen of the Tsar
Local Police in an Age of UpheavalRobert J. Abbott
Central European University Press, 2022
Founded by Peter the Great in 1718, Russia’s police were key instruments of tsarist power. In the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881), local police forces took on new importance. The liberation of 23 million serfs from landlord control, growing fear of crime, and the terrorist violence of the closing years challenged law enforcement with new tasks that made worse what was already a staggering burden. (“I am obliged to inform Your Imperial Highness that the police often fail to carry out their assignments and, when they do execute them, they do so poorly because of their moral corruption…”) This book describes the regime’s decades-long struggle to reform and strengthen the police. The author reviews the local police’s role and performance in the mid-nineteenth century and the implications of the largely unsuccessful effort to transform them. From a longer-term perspective, the study considers how the police’s systemic weaknesses undermined tsarist rule, impeded a range of liberalizing reforms, perpetuated reliance on the military to maintain law and order, and gave rise to vigilante justice.
While its primary focus is on European Russia, the analysis also covers much of the imperial periphery, discussing the police systems in the Baltic Provinces, Congress Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.
Political Affairs of the Heart
Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800Linda Van Netten Blimke
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950
Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
The contributors foreground the struggles over democracy and citizens’ rights as well as notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class that have been at the forefront of political debates and social movements in the Andes since the waning days of the colonial regime some two hundred years ago. Among the many topics they consider are the significance of the Bourbon reform era to subsequent state-formation projects, the role of race and nation in the work of early-twentieth-century Bolivian intellectuals, the fiscal decentralization campaign in Peru following the devastating War of the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, and the negotiation of the rights of “free men of all colors” in Colombia’s Atlantic coast region during the late colonial period. Political Cultures in the Andes includes an essay by the noted Mexicanist Alan Knight in which he considers the value and limits of the concept of political culture and a response to Knight’s essay by the volume’s editors, Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada. This important collection exemplifies the rich potential of a pragmatic political culture approach to deciphering the processes involved in the formation of historical polities.
Contributors. Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, Carlos Contreras, Margarita Garrido, Laura Gotkowitz, Aline Helg, Nils Jacobsen, Alan Knight, Brooke Larson, Mary Roldan, Sergio Serulnikov, Charles F. Walker, Derek Williams
Popular Print and Popular Medicine
Almanacs and Health Advice in Early AmericaThomas A. Horrocks
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In this innovative study of the relationship between popular print and popular attitudes toward the body, health, and disease in antebellum America, Thomas A. Horrocks focuses our attention on a publication long neglected by scholars—the almanac.
Approaching his subject as both a historian of the book and a historian of medicine, Horrocks contends that the almanac, the most popular secular publication in America from the late eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth, both shaped and was shaped by early Americans' beliefs and practices pertaining to health and medicine. Analyzing the astrological, therapeutic, and regimen advice offered in American almanacs over two centuries, and comparing it with similar advice offered in other genres of popular print of the period, Horrocks effectively demonstrates that the almanac was a leading source of health information in America prior to the Civil War. He contends that the almanac was an integral component of a complicated, fragmented, semi-vernacular health literature of the period, and that the genre played a leading role in disseminating astrological health advice as well as shaping contemporary and future perceptions of astrology.
In terms of therapeutic and regimen advice, Horrocks asserts that the almanac performed a complementary role, confirming and reinforcing traditional beliefs and practices. By analyzing the almanac as a cultural artifact that represents a time, a place, and a certain set of assumptions and beliefs, he demonstrates that the genre can provide a lens through which scholars may examine early American attitudes and practices concerning their health in particular and American popular culture in general.
Post-Personal Romanticism
Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical LifeBo Earle
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Tracing this insight to Hegel’s suggestion that modern subjectivity is in some sense post-individual or even posthumous, Earle argues that signature Romantic lyrics offer a way forward that avoids postmodernism’s wholesale rejection of autonomous selfhood. With chapters on Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Earle traces how Romantic lyrics mine this interminability to recover figurative emblems or masks of selfhood from experiences of its inevitable normative failure. This model is of particularly urgent value today when the costs of modern narcissism, economic exploitation, and political imperialism have come to include the normalization of torture, signature drone strikes, and climate change.
Presumption
An Entertainment: A Sequel to Pride and PrejudiceJulia Barrett
University of Chicago Press, 1995
"An elegant emulation and continuation of Pride and Prejudice. . . . Jointly composed by two admirers of Jane Austen, the book often achieves crisp replication of her style. . . . Presumption shows how sequel-writing can, like parody, be a sharp exercise in literary appreciation."—Peter Kemp, Times Literary Supplement
Julia Barrett is a pseudonym for Julia Braun Kessler and Gabrielle Donnelly.
Pretexts for Writing
German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and PhilosophyWilliams, Seán M
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Privacy
Concealing the Eighteenth-Century SelfPatricia Meyer Spacks
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
Private Women, Public Lives
Gender and the Missions of the CaliforniasBy Bárbara O. Reyes
University of Texas Press, 2009
Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces.
Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women's voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?
Prolific Ground
Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690–1790Nicolle Jordan
Bucknell University Press, 2025
Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater
Gender and Comedy, Performance and PrintDiana Solomon
University of Delaware Press, 2013
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Promise to Pay
The Politics and Power of Money in Early AmericaKatie A. Moore
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Promise to Pay follows America’s first paper money—the “bills of credit” of British North America—from its seventeenth-century origins as a means of war finance to its pivotal role in catalyzing the American Revolution. Katie A. Moore combs through treasury records, account books, and the bills themselves to tell a new story of money’s origins that challenges economic orthodoxy and mainstream histories. Promise to Pay shows how colonial governments imposed paper bills on settler communities through existing labor and kinship relations, their value secured by thousands of individual claims on the public purse—debts—and the state’s promise to take them back as payment for taxes owed. Born into a world of hierarchy and deference, early American money eroded old social ties and created new asymmetries of power, functioning simultaneously as a ticket to the world of goods, a lifeline for those on the margins, and a tool of imperial domination.
Grounded in sustained engagement with scholarship from multiple disciplines, Promise to Pay breathes new life into old debates and offers an incisive account of the centrality of money in the politics and conflicts of empire, community, and everyday life.
Properties of Modernity
Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of EmpireMichael Iarocci
Vanderbilt University Press, 2006
Through a close study of Cadalso, Saavedra, and Larra, Iarocci argues that Spanish writers were intensely concerned with the same issues taken up by more famous Romantics and that the ways in which they address these issues provides us with a richer notion, not only of Spain, but of all of Europe.
Protecting the Empire’s Frontier
Officers of the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot during Its North American Service, 1767–1776Steven M. Baule
Ohio University Press, 2013
Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues.
Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective.
An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.
Protocols of Liberty
Communication Innovation and the American RevolutionWilliam B. Warner
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Providing for the Poor
The Old Poor Law, 1750-1834Edited by Peter Collinge and Louise Falcini
University of London Press, 2022
The Old Poor Law, which was established in 1601 in England and Wales and was in force until 1834, was administered by the local parish and dispensed goods and services to paupers, providing a uniquely comprehensive, premodern system of support for the poor. Providing for the Poor brings together academics and practitioners from across disciplines to reexamine the micropolitics of poverty in the long eighteenth century through the eyes of the poor, their providers, and enablers. Covering such topics as the providence of the parochial sixpence, which was given in order to get a beggar to move along to another parish, to coercive marriages, plebeian clothing, and the much broader implications of vagrancy toward the end of the long eighteenth century, this volume aims to bridge the gaps in our understanding of the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. It brings together some of the wider arguments concerning the nature of welfare during economically difficult times and documents the rising bureaucracy inherent in the system to produce a radical new history of the Old Poor Law in astonishing detail.
Public and Private
Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878)Patricia McKee
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Public and Private was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This groundbreaking work examines the emergent and fluctuating relationship between the public and private social spheres of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By assessing novels such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Emma through the lens of the social theories of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Patricia McKee presents a fresh and highly original contribution to literary studies.
McKee explores the themes of production and consumption as they relate to gender and class throughout the works of many of the most influential novels of the age including Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Emma, Frankenstein, Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and The Old Curiosity Shop, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native.
McKee analyzes portrayals of a society in which abstract idealism belonged to knowledgeable, productive men and the realm of ignorance was left to emotional, consuming women and the uneducated. She traces the various ways British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked to reform this social experience. Topics include Dickens's attack on the bureaucratic use of knowledge to maintain the status quo; the function of antiprogressive depictions of knowledge in Trollope, Shelley, and Hardy; and Austen's characterization of the protagonist Emma as an exception in a society that denied women's productive use of knowledge.
Offering a sharp challenge to theorists who have charted a linear division of public and private experience, McKee highlights the unexpected configurations of the emergence of the public and private spheres and the effect of knowledge distribution across class and gender lines.
Patricia McKee is professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James (1986).
Publishing The Prince
History, Reading, and the Birth of Political CriticismJacob Soll
University of Michigan Press, 2010
As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.
Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.
Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.
Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski
"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation."
---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead
"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power."
---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment
"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history."
---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley
"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice."
---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review
Pushkin on Literature
Tatiana Wolff
Northwestern University Press, 1998