Research Theme: Institutions and Oppositions of Enlightenment

Events

 

IASH Homepage

IASH Research Themes

Theme: Institutions and Oppositions of Enlightenment

Future/Recent Events

 

 

 

Workshop Series: Spring 2008

Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square

29 January Dr. Bill Zachs (University of Edinburgh): "A Scottish Endarkenment: or Shadows in 18th-Century Scottish Studies"
This talk considers the term 'the Scottish Enlightenment' by examining both its origins in the early 19th century and its current uses, not only by scholars in the field but by politicians, journalists and others who have a stake in interpreting that period of Scottish history with which the term is associated. While by no means denying the idea of enlightenment in Scotland, I argue that if we are to more fully understand what it was like in 18th-century Scotland we need to use such terms with care and be aware of the reflective and refractive interplay between the present and the past.

12 February Dr. Timothy C. Baker (University of Edinburgh): "Individualism and Free Will in George MacDonald's English Novels"
The Scottish Victorian novelist George MacDonald is primarily remembered for his fantasy novels. The bulk of his corpus, however, consists of twenty-seven largely-forgotten realistic novels, equally divided between English and Scottish settings. These works, when considered at all, are largely placed within the literary context of 'kailyard' fiction, and are dismissed as overly sentimental and poorly written. It is in these novels, however, especially in two overtly theological trilogies - Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867), The Seaboard Parish (1868) and The Vicar's Daughter (1871); Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876), Paul Faber, Surgeon (1878) and There and Back (1891) - that MacDonald most clearly sets forth his philosophy of individual responsibility.

Since the publication of Robert Lee Wolff's The Golden Key (1961), criticism of both the fantastic and realistic novels has been dominated by Jungian terminology. MacDonald, however, explicitly sets forth his ideas in the context of German Idealist thought, most especially in relation to Novalis. A noted Germanist in his own day, MacDonald's work displays the influence not only of märchen authors such as Hoffman and Richter, but also of Idealist and Frühromantik thinkers such as Fichte and Hamann. These texts, often seen as emerging at the forefront of Romanticism, can also be seen - as, indeed, they were by their authors - as continuing a post-Kantian Enlightenment project. By detailing MacDonald's continued emphasis on the importance of these works, as well as the way in which he incorporates them in his own theological outlook, this paper will explore new avenues for the understanding of the reception of eighteenth-century German thought in post-Carlylean Scotland.

26 February Dr. Jane Rendall (University of York): "Medicine, politics, gender, and the reputation of William Cullen (1710-1790)"
When William Cullen resigned his Chair in the Practice of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh in December 1789, the University and the Town Council of Edinburgh united to pay homage to a man of such distinction. Internationally renowned since the 1770s, his teaching and inspiration had had a major influence on the development of the medical schools of North America. Yet, seventy years later, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh found no sign of even a headstone at the grave of this distinguished figure.

Recent work by medical historians has demonstrated how John Thomson and his sons, in their important biographical study, constructed their own William Cullen in the light of nineteenth-century medical concerns. As contemporaries noted, it was extraordinarily silent on their subject's personal life. This paper takes as its starting-point the novel published by William Cullen's daughter Margaret, Home (1802), as an illustration of the personal and political tensions within the Cullen family, tensions which had a considerable effect on William Cullen's posthumous reputation and explain the Thomsons' silence. They were primarily the result of Cullen's disastrous financial affairs. For in spite of his fame and substantial income, he died virtually bankrupt, leaving his daughters without financial support, in spite of a long legal battle. There were also fundamental political differences between Cullen's children. His daughters and son Archibald followed the politics of the Foxite Whigs, admired the American Republic, and read Mary Wollstonecraft; but the eldest son, Robert Cullen, though formerly a reformer, was increasingly associated with the government of Pitt and Dundas. In 1807 the reputation of William Cullen became a matter of political debate, as the House of Commons considered, critically, the pension granted to Robert Cullen.

These conflicts are not irrelevant to those faced by William Cullen himself. On the one hand, he, who coined the phrase 'ornate physician', had been ambitious to join a landed elite, whose patronage he respected and within whose lifestyle conspicuous consumption and a culture of debt was accepted. On the other hand, he respected the values of professionalism, domesticity and frugality, allied to the Whig and radical politics with which his younger children were associated. The history of Cullen's reputation, as of his life, requires some integration of the personal, the political and the medical, an integration which may enable us to recover more effectively the transitional world of the end of the 'Old Thing', the older Edinburgh order.

11 March Dr. Anthony Jarrells (University of South Carolina): "The Time of the Tale: Romanticism, Genre, and the 'Intermixing' of Enlightenment"
According to publishing figures provided by Peter Garside, the British Romantic period was quite literally a time of tales. By the year 1820, the term “tale” surpassed “novel” and “romance” to become the most popular generic description for prose fiction, accounting for over 34% of fiction titles published in the decade. But to describe the period as a time of tales requires that we alter our understanding of the national and period-specific configurations that have long regulated this traditional category. One effect is that the period starts to look less exclusively English: writing and publishing from the borders of the nation * and beyond * comes to the fore when the generic focus of the period shifts from lyric or novel to tales. A second effect is that Romanticism itself looks different: it looks less exclusively counter-Enlightenment. It is the latter effect in particular that will concern me in this paper. Looking at John Galt’s “Tales of the West” and at Galt’s characterization of his own works as “theoretical histories,” I will argue that Enlightenment-era theories of modernity play a crucial role in the way writers of Romantic-era tales apprehend and describe their post-Enlightenment world, local and fantastic as it may have appeared to readers. At the same time, I’ll suggest, many tales of the period resist the developmental or historicist logic of such Enlightenment theories. Tales, in other words, use time differently; they account for it and relate it in ways that enable us to grasp the tale as a genre fully distinct from, say, the novel.

Workshop Series: Autumn 2007

16 October Dr. William Christie (University of Sydney) "Twilight of the Godless: Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review in Scottish Cultural Commentary after Waterloo"
This paper looks at the establishment in October 1817 of William Blackwood's Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine as the culmination of more than a decade's anxiety on behalf of Edinburgh's Tory intellectuals over the success of the Whig Edinburgh Review and at the various ways in which Blackwood's John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson set out self-consciously to correct what they took to be the Edinburgh's pernicious influence on the political, cultural, and religious life of Scotland in particular and, beyond that, of Britain more generally. Central to an otherwise indiscriminate and often hysterical campaign, however, we find a profound ambivalence expressed towards Francis Jeffrey himself, as the Edinburgh Review's influential editor and as an Edinburgh (and Scottish) cultural phenomenon.

23 October Dr. Tom Toremans (Catholic University, Brussels) "Figuring the End of Romanticism: Thomas Carlyle and the Philosophy of Common Sense"
As a brief reconstruction of the history of its reception will demonstrate, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus has haunted literary critics and historians from the time of its publication until recent theoretical reassessments of the work. Presenting itself as a highly singular mixture of (semi-)fictional biography, philosophical treatise and (anti-)novel, Sartor eludes traditional generic categorizations. Moreover, narrating the transmission of a fictional German idealist manuscript to an all too empiricist British reading public, it is also caught up in an attempt to formulate a transcendentalist aesthetic and a corresponding theory of rhetoric that would ideally establish metaphor and symbol at the heart of its linguistic representation of the Divine Idea. While Sartor Resartus thus both employs the linguistic symbol and attempts to establish it in an idealist theory of language, it has persistently resisted any straightforward classification as a Romantic (or, for that matter, Victorian or transitional) work.

In the face of Sartor's unaccomplished Romantic idealism, two particularly instructive strands of Carlyle criticism have emerged since the 1980s that have suggested a double path towards a revision of Carlyle's canonical position. On the one hand, critics such as Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller have urged for a rhetorical reading of Sartor Resartus and have staged the work as a performative critique, rather than a thematic confirmation, of Romantic aesthetics. On the other hand, Ralph Jessop's Carlyle and Scottish Thought has compellingly argued for the necessity of readdressing the position of the Philosophy of Common Sense and the materialist tradition in Carlyle's early works. This paper will argue that both a sustained rhetorical reading of Carlyle's early works and a closer investigation of its critique of the empiricist tradition should be pursued so as to reappraise Sartor Resartus with specific emphasis on a lingering materialism that substantially conditions its establishment as a monument of idealist aesthetics. Close readings of key passages of Carlyle's and Thomas Reid's respective theorizations of linguistic representation and transcendental vision will allow for a reassessment of the historical relationship between both thinkers in rhetorical, rather than genetic or thematic, terms.

6 November Dr. John Macarthur (Reader in Architecture, University of Queensland) "The Picture in the Picturesque: Reynolds, Price and Puttfarken on Titian's Madonna ça Pesaro"
(This workshop is arranged in association with Architecture, University of Edinburgh)
It is usual to understand the picturesque as the result of architects and gardeners taking and reapplying concepts and techniques from painting. This is roughly correct, but modern commentary tends to exaggerate the role of pictorial composition in this exchange. In fact, the concept of the picture, as a tableau, or easel painting-that is, as a delimited autonomous surface-was relatively novel at the time, and concepts of composition were barely coherent. William Gilpin developed his theory of the picturesque from Roger de Piles' late 17th century theory of the pictorial surface. Until the 18th century the paradigm of painting had been large-scale wall and ceiling frescos, which operated under rhetorical rather than visual concepts. The picturesque arises from the concept of the picture, in the sense that modern concepts of composition, both pictorial and architectural, are immanent in it, and also because this new relation between painting and architecture on the basis of visual form replaced the common surface that they had shared in fresco.

These complex issues of intellectual and technical history can be grasped in a particular example. Sir Uvedale Price, in one of his many attempts to explain and defend the picturesque, considers Titian's Madonna ça Pesaro, 1519-26. Although Price does not say so, his remarks are a circuitous disagreement with Sir Joshua Reynolds' earlier comments on the same painting. The Titian also plays a crucial role in Thomas Puttfarken's The Discovery of Pictorial Composition (2000), which is a strong argument for composition being an issue of the history of the painting support. The arguments of Puttfarken, Reynolds and Price all rest on whether or not the painting implies a specific viewpoint. Comparing their analyses of the painting and the arguments that are entailed can lead to a better understanding of what the 'picture' is doing in the 'picturesque'.

[N.B. Dr. Macarthur will be giving a second lecture on Friday 9 November at 1 p.m. in Seminar Room 2, Architecture, 20 Chambers Street: "The Picturesque: Architecture, disgust and other irregularities"]

20 November Professor Paul Shore (Saint Louis University) "Habsburg Jesuits, Autonomy, and the Enlightenment: An Exploration".
The differences between the eighteenth and ninetenth century Jesuit order have long been recognized. While the Jesuits before their suppression in 1773 were often scientific innovators and in dialogue with Enlightenment thinkers, after the Society of Jesus was restored in 1814 it quickly gained a reputation for extreme conservatism and ceased to be a significant innovator in education or science. Yet in both periods the Jesuits were bound by the same rules, and formed by the same pedagogical and theological principles. This lecture will examine the training and contributions of Jesuits active in the Habsburg lands before 1773 in an effort to identify not merely the individual contributions of these men, but also the evidence regarding the corporate culture of the Society. This culture demanded obedience and loyalty in an Enlightenment Europe that was placing increasing emphasis on autonomy. Among the elements of Jesuit culture to be considered are the role of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the relation of the Jesuits to the fine and performing arts, Jesuit traditions of narrative construction, and the role of Jesuit brothers or coadjutores temporales in the Society.

MONDAY 3 December Professor Daniel Woolf (University of Alberta) "'A most indefatigable love of history': Female Epistolary Discussions of History and Historians, 1740-1790"
Over the past ten years or so there has been a good deal written about women's engagement with history in pre-modern England, whether through the writing of it or through more informal engagement with the past. Some scholars, myself among them, have argued for the existence and development of a distinctive "feminine sense of the past". We now know a great deal about the work of particular women, such as Catharine Macaulay. This paper will not explore female-authored histories, nor even prescriptive pedagogical literature, look at another way in which mid-eighteenth century women contributed to history-writing, and at their attitudes to certain histories and historians, conveyed in familiar letters. Beginning with an introductory section on the principal changes in eighteenth-century historiography, the paper continues with an examination of the epistolary discussions of history, historians and historical personages of three different women, all of whom are well-known but who have not to my knowledge ever been studied from this perspective. The three cases are the aristocrat Lady Mary Coke; the Greek translator and scholar Elizabeth Carter; and Carter's fellow "Bluestocking", Elizabeth Montagu. In addition to their published letters and works, I hope to make use of some of their unpublished correspondence in the Huntington Library and elsewhere. I will explore the following possibilities through these studies: that women had in fact developed a quite sophisticated historiographic capacity by the late eighteenth century, well beyond the sort of prescriptions to be found in works like Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind; that their approach to this bridged the often-perceived gap between those who wrote history and those who read it; and that their sense of history and of the historical derived from reading was inseparable from their sentimental reaction to particular places, objects and monuments which they observed in the English landscape and abroad. Finally, it will demonstrate that "women", even learned women cannot be lumped into a bloc audience for history, since all three of our cases had very different opinions on particular books, authors and episodes from the historical past.

Tuesday 26 June 2007 at 2 p.m.
Workshop on "The Enlightenment on America: a confrontation of the Histories of Robertson and Clavigero"

Presentation by Dr. Silvia Sebastiani (Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Florence; Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH)

Abstract:
The presentation will focus on the comparison between Clavigero’s History of Mexico (1780) and Robertson’s History of America (1777). These were in many respects at odds. The personal situation and methodological approaches of the two authors differ significantly: Creole, Jesuit, exiled and historian from the margins, Clavigero; moderator of the Church of Scotland, Principal of the University of Edinburgh and historiographer of the strongest and richest existing empire, Robertson. The historical approach of the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, based on a perspective of distance, projected a universal light on men. By contrast, Clavigero adopted a ‘closer’ view, which challenged this historical method and its sources, providing an alternative universalistic reading of history.

My aim is also to reconstruct Clavigero’s reception in Scotland. Translated into English by Charles Cullen in 1787, Clavigero’s History of Mexico became the main source of the entry “America” in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was part of the attack on the historiography of the Enlightenment, undertaken by the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s new editor, the Episcopalian George Gleig.

Monday 5 and Tuesday 6 March 2007 at 5.15 p.m.
The Playfair Library, Old College, South Bridge

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

"The Inner Life of Empires"
(previously delivered at Princeton University in 2005-6)

Professor Emma Rothschild
(Director of the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge; Visiting Professor of History, Harvard University)

Abstract:
The lectures explore the history of eighteenth-century globalization, by looking at the experiences of a family of seven brothers and four sisters, their involvement in the East and West Indies and North America, and their descriptions of the vicissitudes of domestic and political life. The history of the Johnstones and their extended connections, the lectures will suggest, can contribute to the larger enterprise of a history of sentiments and values; and to seeing eighteenth-century empires (in Adam Smith's expression) "with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them."

Workshop Series Spring 2007 - Tuesdays at 4 p.m. -

"Sociability Contested: construing Human Nature in the Scottish Enlightenment"

The Spring semester workshops will be devoted to considering the spectrum of attempts - philosophic, literary, historiographic, medical/physiological and theological - to reinstitute theories of sociability following the impact of Hume's sceptical account of human nature. The project of formulating a "science of man" in the Scottish Enlightenment is mainly associated with David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, though Hume was not the only or even the first Scottish theorist to propose such a comprehensive inquiry into human nature. Francis Hutcheson, for example, may not have used the same term as Hume but he had argued that the study of human nature was the key to understanding sociability. George Turnbull, like Hume, believed that a science of human nature based on "experimental" principles was necessary before other areas of knowledge, such as moral philosophy and political theory, could be improved.

The publication of Hume's Treatise, however, changed the terms of the debate on human nature and the basis for sociability. His sceptical philosophy undermined central assumptions on which the moral systems of philosophers like Hutcheson and Turnbull had rested: in particular, their firm belief in natural religion and divine providence. Most thinkers assumed that without this underpinning sociability would lack a firm foundation and would inevitably degenerate into a selfish Epicureanism. Hume's argument that religious truths couth not be demonstrated with the limited resources of the human understanding, and that sociability, even in the absence of such a support, was nonetheless demonstrably intrinsic to human nature, provoked a wide range of responses. These set the terms for debate on religion, human nature and sociability in the Scottish context for the remainder of the century. The sociability of human nature was itself a contested notion: the work of Adam Ferguson, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Thomas Reid all raise questions about it in historical and philosophical contexts. There were also traditionalist defences of natural religion by figures such as John Witherspoon or George Anderson. Moderate clergymen such as Hugh Blair and William Robertson shared Hume's belief in the limited value of natural religion but used this to emphasise instead the importance of Scriptural revelation as a guide to moral action and - in Blair's Sermons - to set up 'character' as an internal location for the moral sense.

Discussions of character and sociability become prominent across a range of genres and fields of study. It is arguable that Hume's own turn towards using the polite essay form after the publication of the Treatise reflects a belief that his sceptical ideas were liable to be misconstrued in the conventional format of an academic treatise. The essay form as he used it, and as further developed it in Henry Mackenzie's Edinburgh periodicals The Mirror and The Lounger, both embodied and advocated sociability, and presented their arguments about human nature in a context which studiously avoided the challenge of religious and theological discussion. Medical theorists developed nosology and therapeutics based both on the character of the patient and assumptions about natural sociability (as a cure for melancholy, for example). History, ethics and legal theory in the Scottish Enlightenment all bear the marks of the contested relation between religion, human nature and sociability that will be the focus of these workshops.

23 January 2007: Moritz Baumstark (History, University of Edinburgh): "Human Nature and the Concept of Manners in David Hume's Agenda for a New Cultural History, 1748-52"
This paper represents part of a wider project concerned with the reassessment of a crucial but hitherto neglected period in David Hume's intellectual career, a period of intense literary activity which resulted in the publication of his mature works on moral philosophy, political economy and the history of religion. The paper seeks to advance the proposition that these years witnessed a decisive shift in Hume's thinking on human nature, which is best illustrated by reference to the different treatments of this subject in the section entitled 'Of Liberty and Necessity' in Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and the brief 'Dialogue' attached to his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). A close comparison between these two works reveals the extent to which Hume was reformulating his earlier position on the universality of human nature and in the process came to emphasise its historical contingency. The significant development in his thinking on this matter is indicative of his growing conviction that human actions and motives could only be properly apprehended as well as assessed once they had been set in their particular political, social and economic contexts.

Hume's moral philosophy, therefore, came increasingly to depend on the meticulous reconstruction of past states of customs, habits, religious beliefs and moral standards as well as the political and economic circumstances that sustained them; in short, it required attention to be paid to the entire cultural and moral fabric of past societies. This is reflected in the prominence Hume accorded to the concept of manners in a number of short pieces he composed between 1748 and 1752 which taken together comprise a sustained exploration of classical civilisations. My paper will demonstrate, moreover, that in these pieces Hume effectively formulated an agenda for a new kind of cultural history which is crucial for the understanding of his remarkable transformation from moral philosopher to philosophical historian. Despite having been largely ignored by modern scholarship, this novel agenda had a profound and discernable impact on the shape of Hume's History of England (1754-62) to the degree that this grand narrative of English constitutional history cannot be properly reappraised without a thorough reassessment of the remarkable development in Hume's thinking on history that took place during this period of his life.

20 February 2007 : Professor Martin Bell (Department of Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University): "Hume on Religion, Passion and Society"
Hume compares the institutions and practices of justice with those of religion, noting that both make artificial (non-natural) distinctions between people, places and things (property; sacred and profane etc.). Justice is an artificial virtue, while the origin of religion in human nature is not any primary passion but is 'secondary'. However we should approve of justice because of its utility, whereas the institutions and practices of religion are 'burdensome and frivolous'. His explanation of the conventions of justice in society shows their origin in relation to passions which promote social cohesion. This is why we do and should approve of justice. But does his explanation of the origins of religion (in The Natural History) show that religion originates in passions that are detrimental to social cohesion? If not, why cannot the institutions and practices of religion sometimes be approved for their utility?

20 March 2007: Dr. Neil Vickers (Department of English, King's College, London): "Scottish Enlightenment medicine and eighteenth-century German psychology: Dr Thomas Beddoes reads Karl Philipp Moritz".
Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), father of the author of Death's Jest Book and sometime physician to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, took his MD at Edinburgh in the late 1780s. His writings on the preservation of health are stamped with the distinctive influence of Edinburgh Enlightenment medicine in emphasizing the links between health and social virtue. Following Cullen, Smith and Hume, Beddoes assigns a central place to 'self-command' as the means by which the individual may keep himself and his fellow citizens healthy. He also attends to the often counterproductive role of 'custom', Hume's 'great guide of human life'. In the early 1800s, however, with the abandonment of his (always highly conditional) Brunonianism and through renewed engagement with German 'psychological' writings, Beddoes became increasingly preoccupied by the potentially pathogenic effects on the body of hidden or unconscious passion. This paper will consider the influence how these concerns complicated Beddoes' sense of the relationship between individuals' health and that of society.

Workshop Series Autumn 2006 - Tuesdays at 4 p.m.

26 September 2006: Dr. Jeffrey Bell (Department of History and Political Science, Southeastern Louisiana University): "Instituting Culture: Hume, Deleuze, and the Problems of the Scottish Enlightenment"
 Despite the amount of attention the work of Gilles Deleuze has received, especially in recent years, there has been very little written about his early writings on Hume. I argue that there are at least two important reasons for addressing Deleuze's work on Hume. First, one can find Deleuze, through his readings of the problems he sees Hume grappling with, developing the conceptual tools that will be put to use throughout the rest of his career. Secondly, and more generally, we will find that the problems Hume was addressing were also the problems of the Scottish Enlightenment; more to the point, as Hume develops an account of the relationship between subjectivity, institutions, and culture as part of his effort to address key philosophical problems, the result, we will see, bears directly upon understanding the cultural flowering that has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment. Moreover, as Deleuze develops these same ideas and applies them to an understanding of creative processes in general, though especially cultural and political processes, we will find that Deleuze's extension of Hume is extremely relevant to a number of current fields. For instance, in Deleuze's reading of Hume, and implicitly at work throughout his later writings, institutions are understood to play a creative role in systematizing the heterogeneous array of partialities, interests, beliefs, etc., into a more homogenous sense of what it means to be cultured, or polite and learned as it would have been termed in Hume's day. With this theory of institutions in place, read as a theory largely derived from Hume, we will in the end gain not only greater insight into the work of Deleuze but also, and perhaps more importantly, we will acquire a unique and potentially fruitful perspective that can be added to the burgeoning discourse concerning the study of culture, including, as will be the focus of this paper, the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment.

10 October 2006: Dr. Cliona Ó Gallchoir (Department of English, University College, Cork): "Fashioning Gender and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Ireland"
This presentation confronts the persistent absence of gender as a category in discussions of eighteenth-century Irish culture by turning to the concept of fashion and its multiple potential meanings in an Irish context. Fashion provokes ambivalent reactions, being regarded in eighteenth-century Europe both as a necessary stimulus to commerce and an aspect of an improving and progressive mentality (and thus characteristic of an advanced civilization), but also as a potentially addictive and destructive pursuit, stigmatized furthermore as irrational. The widespread association of women with the pursuit of fashion encompasses both the progressive and the destructive tendencies of fashion-oriented behaviour. In this workshop I will present a variety of commentaries on fashion from eighteenth-century Ireland, including Swift's 'Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures' and 'Letter to a Young Lady', Joseph Cooper Walker's Historical Essay on the Dress of the Ancient and Modern Irish (1788) and Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court (1780). Of particular interest is the relationship between cultural production/constructions of authorship and gendered discourses of fashion.

24 October 2006: Dr. Derya Gurses (University of Mersin, Turkey): "Alternative Conversations: Eighteenth-Century challenges to Institutions of Enlightenment: The Case of the Fair Intellectual Club"
Enlightenment Sociability is a popular subject for eighteenth-century scholars, though studies on the ways in which it manifested itself still needs a fresher look. The Institutions of Enlightenment and universities being one of them does not seem to immediately spring into mind when sociability is concerned. What is worthwhile to consider are the societies and clubs that provided certain challenges to the institutionalized spaces for learning. Fair Intellectual Club, which was founded in 1719 in Edinburgh by women, provides one such example. It represents certain challenges to the scholars of enlightenment. One to mention is the possibility of a search for a wider vehicle for enlightenment ideas other than the institutional sphere. That a study of this Club is neglected could be a symptom for such a tendency will be the general argument this paper is concerned with.

7 November 2006: Dr. Celina Fox: "Societies of Arts: Mechanical Invention, Professional Aspiration".
This workshop is devoted to economic, patriotic and arts societies which were formed in the eighteenth century to encourage the improvement of arts, manufactures and commerce. I argue that members moved easily between theory and practice, between science and the fine and mechanical arts. However, such societies were 'opposed' or undermined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: by the increasing professionalization of fine artists who were anxious to separate themselves from mechanical manufactures; by engineers who formed their own professional societies; and by gentlemen of science who wanted to claim the achievements of 'mechanics' like James Watt as part of their own territory as 'science'.

21 November 2006: Prof. M. A. Stewart (University of Aberdeen): "The law v. the press: the church v. the natives. Colonial enlightenment and unenlightenment in the mid eighteenth century"
In 1752 James Parker, printer of the New York Gazette, publishes a supposed Indian chief's attack on a missioner's Christian orthodoxy and the Genesis story by Patrick Carryl, a NY apothecary. Outrage among the NY establishment at the apparent hoax leads to legal proceedings. Benjamin Franklin intervenes with the NY politician Cadwallader Colden (Scots ex-pat, author of an important study of the Amerindians) to get the Governor to abort proceedings, because Andrew Bradford of Philadelphia had put out the same piece years before and it had quickly died. It was not a complete hoax - there was a real missionary encounter - but comparison of Carryl and Bradford texts shows Carryl's version has been spiced up. The establishment backs down in the public interest. Parker prints a retrospective piece on liberty of the press, mangling Hume's essay on the subject: the first recorded mention of Hume in the colonies. The author of that turns out to be William Smith, a Scots émigré who had a soft spot for Hume as a literary personality and a softer spot for the Amerindians. A typical exponent of humane British 'enlightenment' values, Smith goes on to be first provost of the College of Philadelphia, where he helps to promote much of the contemporary Scottish thinking, but not Hume. Enlightenment, however, is equated with the conversion of non-British peoples (whether Amerindian or German, or romance-language Papists) to British Protestantism, so that Smith and the Anglican church are identified as forces for reaction.

What would Hume have thought of being implicated in this debate? His attitude to native peoples was equally patronizing, and his view of press freedom ambiguous. But he rejected British imperialist claims on the world, and was happy to employ the Chevalier Ramsay's critique of orthodox theology that sounds uncannily like Carryl's Indian chief.

Workshop Series 2005-6 - Tuesdays at 4 p.m.:


11 October 2005: Professor Stephen Latham (School of Law, Quinnipiac University): "Religious and Medical Authority in Puritan New England"
This paper will discuss the emergence of a new kind of scientific/ medical authority in late Puritan New England, and its struggle with the old religious order for control over the meaning of such events as earthquakes, smallpox outbreaks, incidents of witchcraft, and illness. It will also speculate on the influence of religious institutional structures (covenant, congregation) on the emerging institutions of the American medical profession.

25 October 2005: Dr. Geoff Parker (Department of English and American Studies, University of Flensburg): "Editorial Policy and the Institution of Criticism in Adam Smith's "Edinburgh Review" (1755-56) and Smollett's "Critical Review" (1756-63)"
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the first ‘Edinburgh Review’ (1755-56), this paper outlines editorial policy on the journal by analysing the cultural politics of its program and its literary organisation, identifying its anonymous reviewers, pinpointing tensions within the editorial group as evidenced by the journal’s internal development and its clash with the Orthodox wing of the Kirk, and re-assessing explanations conventionally advanced for its cessation in March 1756. The central argument is that of continuity: the institution of Scottish literary criticism flourished without hiatus after the ‘Edinburgh’ closed, but it did so under the auspices of the London-based ‘Critical Review’, launched in March 1756, edited by Tobias Smollett, and soon to be dubbed the “Scotch Tribunal”. Smollett augmented and deepened the line of Scottish and International criticism of letters as specified in March 1756 by the ‘Edinburgh's Glasgow correspondent Adam Smith, and he recruited a galaxy of anonymous reviewers, many of whom were products of the Scottish universities. Francis Jeffrey’s successor ‘Edinburgh Review’ of 1802, launched into the new public sphere of the British-Irish union authorized by the editor of the first (Alexander Wedderburn, now in his capacity as Lord Chancellor), can be re-valued as combining the northern metropolitan mind-set and politics of its earlier namesake with the tough-minded qualities of professionalism, opposition and outspoken critique so distinctive of the successful editorial formula on the ‘Critical’.

22 November 2005: Dr. Elspeth Jajdelska (Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde): "The Enlightenment renewal of rhetoric: speech and the public sphere in an age of silent reading"
Lectures and tuition on elocution - the art of reading aloud and speaking in public - enjoyed a huge success in eighteenth century Edinburgh. Elocution was hailed as an important innovation. Yet spoken delivery had been part of rhetorical education in Scotland and elsewhere for centuries. Why was elocution so popular and why was it perceived as new? The answer lies in changing reading practices. As silent reading gained ground at the start of the century, and as the social contexts of reading aloud began to change, new rules were required for reading and speaking in public.

6 December 2005: Dr. Heidi Poon (School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh): "'A Tale of Two Cities': towards an institutional interpretation of the origin of a controversy over the nature of life, 1816, London and Edinburgh compared"
A fierce controversy over new scientific theories on the nature of life broke out in London in 1816, involving the Royal College of Surgeons and the ecclesiastical establishment aligned with the University of Cambridge. No equivalent controversy took place in Edinburgh, even though similar ideas were in currency. This paper offers an interpretation of the origin of the London controversy on the institutional level, and seeks an answer for the absence of an equivalent controversy in Edinburgh in her institutions: the university, professional medical bodies, and the Kirk.

17 January 2006: Dr. Kai Merten (University of Giessen): "Adam Smith's theatre of sympathy and the Romantic text "
 This paper reconsiders the role Adam Smith's theory of sympathy (as laid out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) has played for British Romantic writing. Smith's model of the encounter of a 'spectator' and a 'sufferer' has been analysed as a theatrical constellation. I will examine how this theatre was taken up in Romantic texts, particularly in some of William Wordsworth's earlier poetry. It will be asked whether British Romantic literature can be seen as an attempted 'institution' (both a 'form' and a 'practice') of the sociality implied in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

31 January 2006: Dr. Katerina Deligiorgi (Philosophy Department, Anglia Ruskin University): "Public Reasoning: An Agonistic Model of Enlightenment"
The paper examines Immanuel Kant's idea that enlightenment is to think for oneself and that for this 'all that is needed' is the freedom to make public use of one's reason. By examining both the historical context of the German Aufklaerung and the questions posed by Kant's contemporaries, the paper seeks to flesh out the basic elements of this interpretation of enlightenment. This requires a radical revision of our ideas about reason and enlightenment. What Kant proposes is a dynamic and agonistic model of social interaction that privileges criticism over assent - not simply because the treatment of dissenters is a touchstone of the degree of toleration of a particular social arrangement, but also because it is through disagreement or difference of opinion that we encounter each other's efforts to think independently.

28 February 2006: Professor Dr. Christoph Bultmann (Theology and Biblical Studies, University of Erfurt): "Religion and the Enlightenment in Berlin"
 While an investigation of the intellectual climate in Berlin during the age of Frederic the Great would be a vast project, one relevant aspect might be to ask the question in what ways Protestant theologians at the time justified the continuing existence of a traditional church and how their reflections on the church in turn affected elements of traditional church doctrine. The paper will focus on a publication by Johann Joachim Spalding, who in 1764 became a minister in Berlin and a leading figure in the Lutheran church in Prussia. Spalding, who translated works by Shaftesbury, James Foster and James Butler into German as well as engaging with David Hume's writings, published a treatise "Ueber die Nutzbarkeit des Predigtamtes und deren Befoerderung" in 1772, and the question will be addressed in what sense this book might be called a theological classic of the Enlightenment.

Thursday, 25 May 2006
Workshop on the Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh and
Tthe Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh

 
9.30 a.m. Professor M.A. Stewart (Hon. Research Professor in the History of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen): Hume and the Historiography of Philosophy
10.30 a.m. Coffee
11.00 a.m. Professor John P. Wright (Philosophy, University of Edinburgh; Central Michigan University): The Science of Human Nature in George Turnbull and David Hume
12 noon Lunch (see note below)
2.00 p.m. Dr. Hannah Dawson (Philosophy and History, University of Edinburgh): The impact of Locke's philosophy of language on his political project
3.00 p.m. Dr. James Harris (Philosophy, University of St. Andrews): Butler and Reid on the Authority of Conscience
4.00 p.m. Tea
4.30 p.m. Dr. Thomas Ahnert (History, University of Edinburgh): The Connections between Religion, Moral Philosophy and History in William Robertson's Writings
5.30 p.m. Close

Further information from John Wright wrigh1jp@cmich.edu or Pauline Phemister P.Phemister@ed.ac.uk

 

Wednesday, 29 March 2006
One-day Symposium
"Acts of Union: Irish and Scottish thought and culture, 1707-1801"

This symposium was organised in association with the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. It considered different aspects of Scottish and Irish cultural connections in the long eighteenth century.

PROGRAMME
9.15 am Registration & Welcome: Dr. Jim Kelly (University of Edinburgh)
9.30 am Dr. Elspeth Jajdelska (University of Strathclyde): Reading aloud in the eighteenth century: new rules for new contexts
10.15 am Dr Stephen Dornan (University of Aberdeen): Brothers in Misfortune and the Muse: Scottish and Irish Poets and their Predecessors
11.00 am Coffee
11.20 am Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir (University College, Cork): Ossianism and The Wild Irish Girl
12.30 pm Lunch
1.30 pm Dr. Catherine Jones (University of Aberdeen): National History Painting and the Development of Irish and Scottish Aesthetic Philosophy
2.30 pm Dr. William O'Reilly (Cambridge University): 'Map-mindedness' and Orientalism in Enlightenment Ireland
3.45 pm Tea
4.15 pm Dr Michael Brown (Trinity College, Dublin): The Meal at the Saracen's Head: Edmund Burke and the Scottish Literati
5.20 - 6.00 pm Wine Reception

 

Monday, 27 March 2006
Joint meeting with colleagues from the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics's Mellon programme on "Exchanges of Economic and Political Ideas since 1750". Informal discussion of projects on "Race and the Atlantic", "Institutions and Oppositions of Enlightenment" and "Enlightenment and Antiquarianism"

Tuesday, 14 February 2006 at 3 p.m.
"Enlightenment and Popular Culture"

The Enlightenment had an impact on the ways that ordinary men and women thought and lived their lives. Yet research on the enlightenment and research in the broad field of popular culture rarely cross over.

This event, which has had its genesis in informal discussions among a number of colleagues in the Schools of History and Classics and in Literatures, Languages and Cultures, is intended to identify the level and range of interest in the theme of 'enlightenment and popular culture' and map out in detail some areas for future discussion and future events, leading possibly to future coordinated research.

The format for the session is a two-hour round-table discussion, based on selected themes, with associated 10 minute presentations. The present themes are -

  • Basic links between the enlightenment and popular culture (both terms to be defined)
  • Did the enlightenment agenda address the issue of impact on popular culture?
  • The circulation, reception and impact of key enlightenment texts on the wider population
  • Relationships between enlightenment thought/texts and popular visual and material culture, including 'collecting'
  • Relationships between enlightenment thought/texts and popular music, poetry and theatre

For further information please contact Dr Stana Nenadic (s.nenadic@ed.ac.uk).

Saturday, 7 May 2005

Colloquium:
Medicine and Poetry in Edinburgh: Early-Enlightenment Connections

As symbolised in the figure of Apollo, the divine figure of poetry and healing, the alliance between the arts of doctoring and poetry is ancient. But why did poetry, with its unique expressive abilities, distinguish the intellectual as well as social atmosphere of the newly-founded Edinburgh medical school (1726)? The Newtonian physician Archibald Pitcairne, who helped to import Leiden pedagogy to Edinburgh at the turn of the eighteenth century, considered poetry a badge of politeness, a vehicle for medical didacticism, and even an alternative source of income. Successive Edinburgh medical students defined themselves as poet-physicians, including John Armstrong, Mark Akenside, Archibald Pennecuik, James Grainger, and Hugh Downman. What role did literary stylistics play in the medical world of Enlightenment Edinburgh? And how did their joint careers as physician-poets affect or reflect their social standing and professional practice in the years following their Edinburgh training?

The colloquium sought to define the connections between Enlightenment literary values, stylistics, and medical theory in the unique intellectual climate of the newly-founded Edinburgh medical school.

Programme:

10.00 am Welcome and Opening Remarks
Dr. Karina Williamson (University of Edinburgh)
10.15 am Dr. David Shuttleton (University of Aberystwyth): "Edinburgh's Physician-Poets, An exploratory Cultural Mapping"
11.15 am Coffee
11.30 am Dr. Adam Budd (University of Edinburgh): "Medical Training and London Patronage: John Armstrong (M.D. Edin. 1732)"
12.30 pm Lunch
1.45 pm Dr. Robin Dix (University of Durham): "Embryology, Poetry, and Aesthetics in the Mid-Eighteenth Century"
2.45 pm Tea and General Discussion
4.00 pm Close

The Speakers:

Dr. David Shuttleton lectures in English Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His cross-disciplinary research interests concern medico-literary culture, pathography and representations of disease and embodiment in the long eighteenth century. He has published widely, including essays on the Scottish medical figures John Arbuthnot, George Cheyne and Archibald Pitcairne. He recently co-edited 'Women and Poetry, 1660-1750' (Palgrave-Macmillan: 2003) and contributed to G. S. Rousseau et al. (eds) 'Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History' (2003). A forthcoming monograph is entitled 'Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1650-1820'. As a contributing editor to the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, David was recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Dr. Adam Budd is a Fellow of the Centre for the History of the Book and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He has held fellowships at the Wellcome Trust and at the University of Toronto, where he completed his PhD. He has contributed articles on the eighteenth-century anglo-Scottish book trade, the poet Mary Barber, novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, and on the aesthetic writings of David Hume. He is currently at work on a critical edition of the correspondence and business ledgers of the Scottish bookseller Andrew Millar, an excerpt from which recently appeared in the TLS.

Dr. Robin Dix took his BA and D Phil at New College Oxford, before going on to teach at London University. He has been a Lecturer at Durham University since 1991, and published a critical edition of the poetical works of Mark Akenside in 1996. He has also edited a collection of essays on Akenside, and has published numerous articles on eighteenth-century poetry and bibliographical theory and practice. His latest project, a critical study of Akenside's poetry, is currently in press with Associated University Presses.

 

 

IASH Homepage / IASH Research Themes / Theme: Institutions and Oppositions of Enlightenment / Future/Recent Events