Download or read book Empiricist Devotions written by Courtney Weiss Smith and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and cooperated. This brand of empiricism was committed to particularized scrutiny and epistemological modesty. It was Protestant in its enabling premises and meditative practices. It earnestly affirmed that figurative language provided crucial tools for interpreting the divinely written world. Smith recovers this empiricism in Robert Boyle’s analogies, Isaac Newton’s metaphors, John Locke’s narratives, Joseph Addison’s personifications, Daniel Defoe’s diction, John Gay’s periphrases, and Alexander Pope’s descriptive particulars. She thereby demonstrates that "literary" language played a key role in shaping and giving voice to the concerns of eighteenth-century science and religion alike. Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period’s science have not fully appreciated figurative language’s central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies

Download or read book The Museum of the Bible written by Jill Hicks-Keeton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together nationally and internationally-known scholars, The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction analyzes the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary positions, including biblical studies, history, archaeology, Judaic studies, and religion and public life. The Museum of the Bible is poised to wield unparalleled influence on the national popular imagination of the Bible’s contents, history, and uses through time. This volume provides critical tools by which a broad public of scholars and students alike can assess the Museum of the Bible’s presentation of its vast collection and wrestle with the thorny interpretive issues and complex histories that are at risk of being obscured when private funds put a major museum near the National Mall.

Download or read book Reading Popular Newtonianism written by Laura Miller and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Isaac Newton’s publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into both scientific and cultural discourse. Understanding the trajectory of Newton’s diverse critical and popular reception in print demands consideration of how his ideas were disseminated in a marketplace comprised of readers with varying levels of interest and expertise. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Informed by sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to his reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, Miller analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well as readers traced through the New York Society Library's borrowing records. Many of the works considered—including encyclopedias, poems, and a work written "for the ladies"—are not scientifically innovative but are essential to eighteenth-century readers’ engagement with Newtonian ideas. Revising the timeline in which Newton’s scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture, Reading Popular Newtonianism is the first book to interrogate at length the importance of print to his consequential career.

Download or read book Some New World written by Peter Harrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sensitive Witnesses written by Kristin M. Girten and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments. This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the author-philosophers that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter—boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted "modest" conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy. Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses' visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world.

Download or read book A History of English Georgic Writing written by Paddy Bullard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day, offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English with one of their most complex and enduring themes.

Download or read book Church in the Wild written by Brett Malcolm Grainger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerson and the Transcendentalists get credit for revolutionizing religious life in America by introducing a new appreciation of nature. But in this reconsideration of faith in the antebellum period, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was Evangelical revivalists who transformed everyday religious life and spiritualized the natural environment.

Download or read book The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England written by Subha Mukherji and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reading Contagion written by Annika Mann and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages. In Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread. This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.

Download or read book Futures of Enlightenment Poetry written by Dustin D. Stewart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse—exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth—is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse—driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young—is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.

Download or read book The Usufructuary Ethos written by Erin Drew and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways? Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings had only the "usufruct" of the earth—the "right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the "usufructuary ethos," had profound ethical implications for the ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use. Drew’s book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.

Download or read book Infinite Variety written by Wolfram Schmidgen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of a seventeenth-century aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite, and embraced by English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe.

Download or read book Pathologies of Motion written by Kevis Goodman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art's shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period's exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.

Download or read book Realist Social Theory written by Margaret Scotford Archer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-10-19 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and agency, Margaret Archer develops here her morphogenetic approach, applying it to the problem of structure and agency. Since structure and agency constitute different levels of stratified social reality, each possesses distinctive emergent properties which are real and causally efficacious but irreducible to one another. The problem, therefore, is shown to be how to link the two rather than conflate them, as has been common practice - whether in upwards conflation (by the aggregation of individual acts) downwards conflation (through the structural orchestration of agents), or, more recently, in central conflation which holds the two to be mutually constitutive and thus precludes any examination of their interplay by eliding them. Realist social theory: the morphogenetic approach thus not only rejects methodological individualism and collectivism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one between elisionary theorizing (such as Giddens' structuration theory) and the emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world. The morphogenetic approach is the sociological complement of transcendental realism, and together they provide a basis for non-conflationary theorizing which is also of direct utility to the practising social analyst.

Download or read book Artifacts written by Crystal B. Lake and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary history of the old, broken, rusty, dusty, and moldy stuff that people dug up in England during the long eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, antiquaries—wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians—used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently unidentifiable things, whose origins were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not self-evident, tell people about the past? In Artifacts, Crystal B. Lake unearths the four kinds of old objects that were most frequently found and cataloged in Enlightenment-era England: coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. Following these prized objects as they made their way into popular culture, Lake develops new interpretations of works by Joseph Addison, John Dryden, Horace Walpole, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. Rereading these authors with the artifact in mind uncovers previously unrecognized allusions that unravel works we thought we knew well. In this new history of antiquarianism and, by extension, historiography, Lake reveals that artifacts rarely acted as agents of fact, as those who studied them would have claimed. Instead, she explains, artifacts are objects unlike any other. Fragmented and from another time or place, artifacts invite us to fill in their shapes and complete their histories with our imaginations. Composed of body as well as spirit and located in the present as well as the past, artifacts inspire speculative reconstructions that frequently contradict one another. Lake's history and theory of the artifact will be of particular importance to scholars of material culture and forms. This fascinating book provides curious readers with new ways of evaluating the relationships that exist between texts and objects.

Download or read book Botanical Entanglements written by Anna K. Sagal and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly. Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic "entanglement" facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.

Download or read book Nature and Value written by Akeel Bilgrami and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, as we confront an unprecedented environmental crisis of our own making, it is more urgent than ever to consider the notion of nature and our place within it. This book brings together essays that individually and as a whole present a detailed and rigorous multidisciplinary exploration of the concept of nature and its wider ethical and political implications. A distinguished list of scholars take up a broad range of questions regarding the relations between the human subject and its natural environment: when and how the concept of nature gave way to the concept of natural resources; the genealogy of the concept of nature through political economy, theology, and modern science; the idea of the Anthropocene; the prospects for green growth; and the deep alienation of human beings in the modern period from both nature and each other. By engaging with a wide range of scholarship, they ultimately converge on a common outlook that is both capacious and original. The essays together present a revaluation of the natural world that seeks to reshape political and ethical ideals and practice with a view to addressing some of the fundamental concerns of our time. Nature and Value features widely known scholars in a broad swath of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, politics, and political economy to geology, law, literature, and psychology. They include Jonathan Schell, David Bromwich, James Tully, Jedediah Purdy, Robert Pollin, Jan Zalasiewicz, Carol Rovane, Sanjay Reddy, Joanna Picciotto, Anthony Laden, Nikolas Kompridis, Bina Gogineni, Kyle Nichols, and the editor, Akeel Bilgrami.