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Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Sacred Or Profane Pleasures? Erotic Ceremonies In Eighteenth-Century French Libertine Fiction, Marine Ganofsky
Sacred Or Profane Pleasures? Erotic Ceremonies In Eighteenth-Century French Libertine Fiction, Marine Ganofsky
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In France, the Age of Enlightenment was also an age of literary levity that saw a proliferation of erotic and pornographic narratives in which philosophy often fused with sexual gratification. The famous Choderlos de Lados with his Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and the infamous Marquis de Sade, along with authors such as Crebillon and Vivant Denon, epitomize this moment in French literary history, when erotic freedom paired with intellectual liberty. This "libertine" literature, as it is known, is characterized by its focus on fleshly desires and pleasures. The subject matter of libertine novels, short stories, poems, and paintings is the rendezvous …
Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
As the editor of an academic annual, I have the pleasure of interacting with scholars from across the United States and the world. While most of these interactions take place via e-mail, I feel as if I get to know RAE's contributors, in addition to their work, as I take a manuscript from submission to publication. Of course, some interactions are more personal than others. This was particularly true of my email exchanges with Adrianne Wadewitz, who died in a rock-climbing accident during the production of this volume. I am pleased to include her excellent essay on the ways eighteenth-century …
"To Put The Soul In Motion": Connoisseurship As A Religious Discourse In The Writings Of Jonathan Richardson, Clare Haynes
"To Put The Soul In Motion": Connoisseurship As A Religious Discourse In The Writings Of Jonathan Richardson, Clare Haynes
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
It is only relatively recently that the significance of Jonathan Richardson's writings has been properly recognized. Carol Gibson-Wood, in a number of articles and a book, identified two main keys to Richardson's importance: first, Richardson adapted European art theory and "Englished" it for a British audience using a methodology heavily dependent on Locke. In doing so, he developed an approach to art that was distinctive in the European tradition. Second, Richardson, as both a writer and connoisseur, was more influential at home and abroad than was previously recognized. Indeed, Richardson was rightly acclaimed by Gibson-Wood as the "art theorist of …
Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske
Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Astronomers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found themselves for a while at the center of an alignment of scientific, cultural, and religious curiosity. Theirs was an endeavor embraced by significant segments of the established churches of England and Ireland who supported the founding of scientific societies in both countries and who drew on their network of contacts with continental Protestants to keep abreast of current developments abroad. In England, for example, works such as the Reverend William Derham's Astro-theology drew on mounting evidence that the universe might well be far larger than could be imagined to raise …
Providential Empiricism: Suffering And Shaping The Self In Eighteenth~Century British Children's Literature, Adrianne Wadewitz
Providential Empiricism: Suffering And Shaping The Self In Eighteenth~Century British Children's Literature, Adrianne Wadewitz
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In "Praise for Creation and Providence" eighteenth-century Dissenting cleric Isaac Watts conveys God's encompassing presence-not only is he in heaven and hell, but he also inhabits (and owns) Earth and everything in it. This poem was reprinted for more than 150 years in Watts's Divine Songs: Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1775). A child reciting this poem is made keenly aware of how much he or she owes to God-soul, planet, and life. Watts emphasizes how one senses God's physical presence ("Beams of love:' "His Hand;' and "his Eye") with the body ("I stand or move" …
Recovering The Rhetorical Tradition: George Campbell's Sympathy And Its Augustinian Roots, Brian Fehler
Recovering The Rhetorical Tradition: George Campbell's Sympathy And Its Augustinian Roots, Brian Fehler
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The year 1776 saw the production of two important documents of the Enlightenment: the US Constitution and George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Both documents were products of Enlightenment thought, and both demonstrate the conflicting attitudes in the era toward the rhetorical use of emotional appeals. Recent scholarship by John Witte examines the religious roots of the anti-emotionalist rhetoric expressed by Federalist politicians in the Constitutional era and in particular the influence of the Calvinist clergy of New England, with their "Puritan covenantal theory of ordered liberty and orderly pluralism:'1 Like the Federalists who were in charge of the …
Equal Portions Of Heavenly Fire: Mary Wollstonecraft And The Sexless Soul, Rachael Givens Johnson
Equal Portions Of Heavenly Fire: Mary Wollstonecraft And The Sexless Soul, Rachael Givens Johnson
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
"This female philosopher indignantly rejects the idea of a sex in the soul, pronouncing the sensibility, timidity and tenderness of women, to be merely artificial refinements of character, introduced and fostered by men;' writes the appalled (and fictional) Hindu philosopher Shahcoolen in Benjamin Silliman's series The Letters of Shahcoolen (1802). Published not long after Mary Wollstonecraft's manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ( 1796), Silliman's series dedicates four epistles to detailing the nature and influence of the "regenerating system of this female lunatic." Another detractor brands Wollstonecraft "an unsex'd female" in a poetic satire on the author's manifesto …
The Potential Convergence Of Religious And Secular Interests In Voltaire's Traite Sur La Tolerance, John C. O'Neal
The Potential Convergence Of Religious And Secular Interests In Voltaire's Traite Sur La Tolerance, John C. O'Neal
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
When the Toulouse parliament condemned Jean Calas to death on March 9, 1762, and had him executed on the following day, Voltaire took up his pen to denounce what he saw as a brutal act of intolerance against a Protestant. Although Henry IV had signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing freedom of conscience for all religions, Louis XIV revoked this edict in 1685 and claimed Catholicism as the one official religion of France. Already well known for his anticlericalism, Voltaire questioned a number of religious practices. But in his Traite sur la tolerance he does not reject religion …
Sacred Alliance? The Critical Assessment Of Revelation In Fichte And Kant, Tom Spencer
Sacred Alliance? The Critical Assessment Of Revelation In Fichte And Kant, Tom Spencer
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Religion encountered a host of problems in the eighteenth century: the decline of Biblical authority, the rise of scientific skepticism, and an emerging spirit of human autonomy. Each of these developments diminished the function of religious institutions in public life, but this is not to say that religion lost its importance. Western modernity has not been able to ignore or replace Christianity- even if modernity generally cannot incorporate it. As Jonathan Sheehan observes, "secularization always is and always must be incomplete. Even as religion seems to vanish from politics and public culture, it never ceases to define the project of …
American Unitarians And The George B. English Controversy, Bradley Kime
American Unitarians And The George B. English Controversy, Bradley Kime
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In late September 1813, a Harvard graduate named George Bethune English published an attack on the historical evidences of Christianity titled The Grounds of Christianity Examined, by Comparing the New Testament with the Old. English denied the relevance of miracles and argued that Jesus's claims to divine authority hinged solely on his fulfillment of Messianic prophecies. Only by twisting such prophecies beyond their obvious meanings, English argued, could Christians conceivably claim that Jesus fulfilled them. In their own day, the apostles and Evangelists did just that-misapplying the prophecies to Jesus either out of ignorance or dishonesty. In either case, …
Pentecost 1794: Robespierre's Religious Vision And The Fulfillment Of Time, Muriel Schmid
Pentecost 1794: Robespierre's Religious Vision And The Fulfillment Of Time, Muriel Schmid
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Publications on the religious history of the French Revolution were in vogue during the second half of the nineteenth century. Several important essays published then are still regarded as landmarks for this topic, including those by Edgar Quinet (Le christianisme et la Revolution franraise, 1845), Francois-Alphonse Aulard (Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l'Btre Supreme, 1892), and Albert Mathiez (Les origines des cultes revolutionnaires, 1904). After this initial wave of interest, the religious paradigm of the French Revolution disappeared from scholarly discussions for more than half a century. Not until the …
The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism In England And Wales, 1735-1811: Book Review, Isabel Rivers
The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism In England And Wales, 1735-1811: Book Review, Isabel Rivers
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The Calvinistic Methodists have received far less attention from historians than the Wesleyan or Arminian Methodists, and this book sets out to remedy that neglect. The imbalance is not surprising-Methodism of the Wesleyan kind became and remains a multimillion, worldwide movement, with many variants that retain the Wesleyan emphasis on holiness and salvation open to all, whereas eighteenth-century English Calvinistic Methodism is now represented only by the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, active on a small scale in England and Sierra Leone, while its Welsh co-movement became the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, now known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales. The …
David Hume: The Philosopher As Historian: Book Review, Richard Kleer
David Hume: The Philosopher As Historian: Book Review, Richard Kleer
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Judging a book by its cover would give especially misleading results in this case. From its title, readers might expect a general introduction to Hume's scholarly work. Instead, they will get an account mainly of Hume the historian. The volume was originally commissioned as part of "a series of short books by historians writing about their favourite historians" (5). First published by Avon (in Britain) and St. Martin's (in the United States), it is now reprinted by Penguin and Yale. The rerelease may have a lot to do with the apparent popularity (judging by the many reviews, at least) of …
Imagining Methodism In Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, And The Borders Of The Self: Book Review, Robin Runia
Imagining Methodism In Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, And The Borders Of The Self: Book Review, Robin Runia
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
I n her sensitive and thoughtful afterword, Misty Anderson rehearses the investment of literary criticism in "restaging the opposition between a religious past and a secular modernity" (236). She makes clear how the discipline of literary studies has largely refused to acknowledge its own ideology of secularization. Quoting Michael Kauffman, Anderson offers her audience the following call to action: "Anyone constructing a narrative of secularization (even if finally to refute it) needs to evaluate certain ideas, truth claims, or values that may seem more or less spiritual, more or less 'religious"' (236). Following her own thorough consideration of the relationship …
Songs Without Music: The Hymnes Of Le Franc De Pompignan, Theodore E. D. Braun
Songs Without Music: The Hymnes Of Le Franc De Pompignan, Theodore E. D. Braun
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In the first edition of his Poesies sacrees (1751), Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignan (1709-1784) published 40 poems in four books, each containing ten poems.1 These Poesies sacrees, or Sacred Poems, were to be printed three times in his Oeuvres choisies or Selected Works of 1753, 1754, and 1754-55. This modest collection was to be enlarged to 85 poems divided into five books of unequal length in its definitive form in the de luxe quarto edition of 1763 and finally as the first volume of his Oeuvres in 1784, which is the text I am using in this …
Re-Envisioning Blake: Book Review, Joshua Davis
Re-Envisioning Blake: Book Review, Joshua Davis
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Born out of a conference commemorating its subject's 250th birthday, Re-Envisioning Blake surveys the state of contemporary Blake scholarship and invites new and challenging readings of one of British literary history's most renowned iconoclasts. The book's introduction reviews three principal strains in Blake studies-the bibliographic, the hermeneutical, and the historicist-and seeks to locate points of convergence, sites of overlap, in order to imagine not just the future of Blake studies but the future of literary studies as well.
The Truth Of The Christian Religion, With Jean Le Clerc's Notes And Additions: Book Review, Robert G. Walker
The Truth Of The Christian Religion, With Jean Le Clerc's Notes And Additions: Book Review, Robert G. Walker
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
P aul L. Maier, in his introduction to a recent translation of The Church History of Eusebius, has some refreshing advice: regarding Eusebius's long lists of bishops' names and dates, "the ~eader is urged to scan or to skip this material, since it can all be found in Appendix 2" (20). I can enthusiastically recommend the book under review, a new edition of what is generally known as the first work of Protestant apologetics, with no expectation that many people on the planet will read every word. To become familiar with this book, however, is to go far toward an …
Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, And The American Episcopate: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske
Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, And The American Episcopate: Book Review, Christopher J. Fauske
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Perhaps the most charming aspect of Kenneth Elliott's Anglican Church Policy, Eighteenth Century Conflict, and the American Episcopate is its author's propensity to take at face value the statements made in the voluminous correspondence, the many pam - phlets, and the occasional published sermons on the subject of whether a resident bishop would help secure the Church of England in the North American colonies and whether such an outcome was in any case desirable.
Philosophy And Religion In Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies: Book Review, Bob Tennant
Philosophy And Religion In Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies: Book Review, Bob Tennant
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
This collection of twelve individually strong pieces was published in tribute to M. A. Stewart, the former Gifford Lecturer and, until lately, professor of philosophy at Lancaster University. The editor, Ruth Savage, succeeded in putting together an outstanding list of contributors from across Britain, Europe, and North America. This in itself is a tribute to Stewart's eminence in research and evident excellence as a teacher.
Religious Dissent And The Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860: Book Review, Nigel Aston
Religious Dissent And The Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860: Book Review, Nigel Aston
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
There has been a remarkable rise of interest during the last decade in Anna Letitia Barbauld's (nee Aikin) significance in the formation of Romantic literature, and Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860 places her appropriately within the thriving nexus of her intellectually creative Dissenting family. This volume of nine essays has its origins in a conference at Dr. Williams's library, currently the engine room of many initiatives into British dissenting history. The Aikins were a talented, hardworking, group of men and women down several generations, sparking off each other, inspired by their non -trinitarian Christian faith, and making complex …