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More, Pope, Swift: The Use Of English Satire Within The Intellectual Historical Narrative (1516 - 1726), Monica Barry

History | Senior Theses

This paper traces the use of satire as a literary form in England from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. By analyzing three major English satirical writings from the 16th through 18th centuries, this paper unites literature and intellectual history, illustrating how literary analysis provides deeper insight into the progressive relationship between these two major eras in intellectual history. The paper provides a literary criticism of the genre of satire; the use of irony, humor, and exaggeration to criticize one’s vices, often relating to politics. First, the paper explores major concepts and themes of satire during the Renaissance period. Thomas More’s …

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 …

"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 …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 …

Madonella's Other Convent: "Platonick" Ladies, Randy Rakes, And The "Mahometan" Paradise, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In eighteenth-century England both the Roman Catholic convent andthe Muslim harem were stereotyped as feminine spaces of religious alterity and sexual subversion. As a result, those who wished to defend women's learning often resorted to complex xenophobic representational strategies as a way of disassociating learned women from these spaces. I argue that the stereotypical "Platonick lady:' as a satirical figure that negotiated both these sites of supposed sexual hypocrisy and foreign dominion, ought to be considered a complex but key trope in the history of feminist orientalism. This is because, in her hypocritical obsession with the disembodied "soul;' the …

Global And Local Perspectives In Spanish And New World Performances Of Calderon's Four Parts Of The World, Beth K. Aracena

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The first published collection of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's autos sacramentales(sacred dramas) dates from 1677, during Calderon's lifetime (1600-1681), and includes an explanation of the works penned by this great Spanish dramaturge. In his preface, recognizing that readers may be annoyed at similarities in the printed repertoire of more than seventy autos, Calderon justifies the collection: "The autos were performed but once [sic] a year, and this volume contains works which were produced at intervals over a period of more than twenty years. They were not written to be printed together and read one after another:" Calderon also …

Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I f one were to undertake a genealogy of how Western Europe established a concept of otherness, the eighteenth century would be one of the most rewarding "information hubs" for such a study. Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, and other new knowledge fields exploring global populations and environs were founded in this century, analyzing and systematizing the waves of travel reports that had been flooding Europe since the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Stories and images of paradisiacal and terrorizing spaces, peculiar humans, and wondrous animals and plants had taken root in the Western imagination beginning in the sixteenth century. …

Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I t is a tragedy for the investigating intellect to have both its own resilience and the power to lift itself to something higher chained when it attempts to track the progress of human knowledge in the annals of the world, the shaping of the intellect, and the refinement of morals. The scholar is fettered in his desire to collect data, which contributed to the enlightenment of nations and which, so to speak, fermented the human mind so that it was able to lift itself up into higher regions and throw off prejudices. He is hindered in his work when …

An Introduction To Ignaz Edler Von Born And His Article "Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians", Hans-Wilhelm Kelling

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Although well known during his own lifetime as a scientist, author, and promoter of Enlightenment ideals, Ignaz Edler von Born also made a significant impact in his less public life as a Freemason. In 1784 he was both Meister vom Stuhl of the Masonic Lodge "Zur wahren Eintracht" and editor in chief of the Journal fur Freymaurer, published quarterly for just three years by Christian Friedrich Wappler in Vienna. In its very first issue, Born, under the initials I.v.B.M.v.St., Ignaz von Born, Meister vom Stuhl, contributed an article important to the Freemasons titled "Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier:" In …

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere. It further demonstrates the centrality of the India question in defining the contours of some …

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As I was breaking into the profession some years ago, religion was a mere blip on my radar of scholarly interests. Having come through graduate school in the 1990s, I naturally followed disciplinary trends in literary and eighteenth-century studies, focusing much of my research on issues of race, class, and gender and examining the relationships between Britain's imperial history and the literature and culture of the period. Religion factored into my queries at times, say, in considering the ways Crusoe's Protestantism informed his sense of self while taking possession of a West Indian island. But religion itself remained on the …

Romanticism, Janice Wilson

Honors Theses

Romanticism actually blossomed out in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term romantic was first used by Fridrich Schlegel to identify the new mental revolution that was taking place all over the world. This new movement was not concerned with just one phase of living such as politics, but everything from literature, music, and art, to science. The Romantics were not content with the existing sciences, but turned their avid minds to new, intriguing fields of knowledge. The Age of Enlightenment had set the stage for the idealistic Romantics.

It is the purpose of this paper to explore the …