Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

The fate of diplomatic gifts after their presentation can reveal patterns of instability and shifting narratives on the items themselves and how they were perceived and received at the time. Often, these important pieces of material evidence disappear or are decontextualised from their exchange. This has been the case with the Persian embassy to Louis XIV's court at Versailles in 1715, where the gifts that were presented to the Sun King were thought to have been lost. This paper traces the afterlives of two of the gifted items: a string of pearls and two gold boxes of mumia. Each of these gifts were retained by the French administration and can be tracked through the eighteenth century. Their journeys reveal much about their evolving significances and the re-evaluations that occurred once they entered the French collections.

This article analyses the Ottoman and Russian proclamations during the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768–1774 to understand their similarities and differences in discourse and their intended audiences, with a special focus on the elites of the Ottoman Empire. The article shows that Ottoman diplomacy practiced Enlightenment diplomacy in the same way as its rivals, using the language of enlightened absolutism to win the hearts and minds of the Polish nobility. However, the war made diplomacy and its accompanying discourses an internal affair, and the imperial elite rejected the idea of fighting for Polish liberties. This had a lasting impact on how Ottoman power was framed and understood by both the imperial elite and its subjects. This was the main difference between the Ottoman and Russian empires; the former had already created an elite consensus based on shared European cultural signifiers that depended on the European Enlightenment, while the latter never did.

This article explores Spain's positioning in the shifting currents of the later Enlightenment through the polemic works of lawyer and satirist Juan Pablo Forner. Forner's attempts to prove the existence of an autochthonous tradition of Spanish pragmatism and empiricism form an index of the penetration of intra-Enlightenment debates into Spanish thought in the late eighteenth century. Forner, profoundly aware of tensions between Cartesian rationalism and Lockean sentimental empiricism across Europe, intervenes on the side of empiricism, insisting that Cartesianism is nothing but a guise of Scholastic hyperrationalism. The article disputes scholarly perceptions of Forner as a Christian reactionary.

This article examines a group of Georgian needlework pictures based on late eighteenth-century cabinet prints of literary works. Focusing on how these needlework productions were realized, including which decisions regarding the colour of silk thread and chromatic patterns, as well as visual revision, were made by the female silkworker, the article seeks to introduce these pictures as meaningful remediations of printed visual literary culture. The silkworks will be shown to advance interpretations of and to provide framing for six literary characters and the ways in which their stories were iconically rendered by the silkworkers.

The eighteenth century saw antiquaries taking an increased interest in evidence arising from the Roman occupation of Britain. Sir Richard Colt Hoare explored Wales. From 1793 to 1804, his tours follow in the footsteps of Giraldus de Barri. His journals describing the Welsh tours are known, except for the year 1804. These have recently been uncovered at Stourhead. The 1804 tour was taken ‘[…] with a view to […] exploring the Roman Roads and Stations through the Principality’. Colt Hoare's translation of the The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin Through Wales, a.d. MCLXXXVIII/by Giraldus de Barri; …, followed in 1806. Comparison of Colt Hoare's journals with his translation of Giraldus' Latin text, which is mostly silent on the Romans, shows how he uses the translation to privilege his observations on Roman Wales.

The modern definition and associations of the word ‘mentor’ — a guide or adviser to a less experienced person — can be traced back to François Fénelon's didactic novel, Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (1699). The novel was one of the most widely read works of the eighteenth century, but its influence on British didactic literature has received little critical attention. This article explores the development of the mentor book, a subgenre within the guide tradition, which invoked deeply interpersonal and mutually affectionate nature of the mentoring relationship in their titles and personified the text as an adviser of the reader. Fénelon's characterization of the mentor figure was imitated in the mode of instruction and pedagogical strategy of these mentor books, which reflected changing perceptions of the didactic role of print on eighteenth-century society and culture.