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Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a framework for political debates today.
The pervasiveness of Protestant natural law in the early modern period and its significance in the Scottish Enlightenment have long been recognized. This book reveals that Thomas Reid (1710–1796)—the great contemporary of David Hume and Adam Smith—also worked in this tradition. When Reid succeeded Adam Smith as professor of ......
William Bartram's love of nature led him to explore the environs of the American Southeast between 1773 and 1777. Here he collected plants and seeds, kept a journal of his observations of nature, and made drawings of the plants and animals he encountered. The completed drawings were sent to his patron in London, and these make up the bulk of ......
Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880
Benjamin Coates was one of the best-known white supporters of African colonization in nineteenth-century America. A Quaker businessman from Philadelphia and a sometime officer of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, he was committed to helping black Americans relocate to West Africa. This put him at the center of a discourse with abolitionists ......
Unique among early modern artists, the Baroque painter, sculptor, and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini was the subject of two monographic biographies published shortly after his death in 1680: one by the Florentine connoisseur and writer Filippo Baldinucci (1682), and the second by Bernini’s son, Domenico (1713).
David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France
One of Jacques-Louis David’s most ambitious and darkly enigmatic paintings, Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae, hangs today in the Louvre, largely ignored. Focusing on this painting, Chains embarks on a discourse about the perception of the body, sexuality, and subjectivity in early nineteenth-century European ......
Brazilian Spiritism (espiritismo, kardecismo) is an important middle-class religious movement whose followers believe in communication with the dead via spirit mediums and in healing illnesses by means of spiritual therapies. Unlike Anglo-Saxon Spiritualists, Brazilian Spiritists count among their number a well-developed and ......
Ziolkowski explores the religious implications of the figure of Don Quixote in Western literature from Cervantes to the present.While scholars and critics in the past have often called attention to the secularizing tendency of modern literature, to the numerous fictional adaptations of the Christ figure on the one hand, and the innumerable ......
The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes
As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of ......
