History Commons^™

A 'Foundation In Nature': New Economic Criticism And The Problem Of Money In 1690s England, Courtney Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

This essay reconsiders new economic criticism’s assumptions about the role of nature in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economic thought. I take the debates surrounding the English recoinage crisis as a test case. As I read economic tracts by John Locke, William Lowndes, Nicholas Barbon, and James Hodges alongside an array of anonymous polemical policy pamphlets, I demonstrate that many writers addressed the recoinage problem by turning with urgency to the created natural world. They believed that close attention to the material properties of silver bullion, for example, could access encoded clues about God’s will for human economic institutions. I …

Political Individuals And Providential Nature In Locke And Pope, Courtney Weiss Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man. Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the …

Mars And Venus: Symbols Of The Chaotic And Conflicted Human Passions And The Reestablishment Of Order In “The Knight’S Tale.”, Olivia Blessing

Olivia L Blessing

During the Middle Ages, Europe experienced a period when philosophers attempted to separate and analyze the passionate and rational elements of the soul. Some supported strict reason as the sole moral basis for living, while others looked to the tempestuous passionate emotions. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” portrays this conflict between reason and the passions through the depicted relationship between Mars and Venus and the uncontrolled passions of Arcite and Palamon.

Determining that a world controlled by passions results in chaos, Chaucer offers three different solutions—negating the passions, subjugating the passions to reason, and a balance between passion and reason. …