Pierre Bayle and the QAnon “Skeptics”
The seventeenth century faced cultural division and a concern over the erosion of truth and authority. What can we learn from Pierre Bayle and his call for tolerance?
The Jane Austen-Bernie Sanders Memes: Too Funny or Too Political?
Guess where else Bernie Sanders showed up: in Jane Austen’s Regency England.
Heterogeneous Blackness: Peter Brathwaite’s Eighteenth-Century Re-portraits
During the Covid19 lockdown, opera singer Peter Brathwaite has recreated nearly 70 works of Black portraiture from the 16th century to the present, subversively repicturing for our moment of reckoning images that had once served a racialized hierarchical economy of servitude and enslavement.
“This is not the end!”: 1719!, Jacobite Ballads, and Scotland’s Cyclical History of Resistance
Since January 2019, the Scottish Opera has been holding interactive performances of a Jacobite-themed production entitled 1719! in dozens of primary schools across Scotland. Examination of Jacobite ballads printed around 1719 in relation to 1719! reveals shared patterns of thought: both 1719! and Jacobite ballads instrumentalize the past to cultivate a unique Scottish identity and sense of a cyclical history that resonates with contemporary cultural and political aspirations.
“Prompted by the Violence of her Passion”: Gendered Crime in the 18th Century and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess
Crimes committed by females during the eighteenth century were thoroughly addressed by popular fiction writers to much acclaim. Eliza Haywood’s criminalization of love makes way for a larger examination of patriarchal institutions and interrogates the gendered nature of criminality during this period.
Human Waste and Wasted Humans: Flotsam and Jetsam in the Anthropocene
Like many human-made environmental disasters, Mobil Oil Company’s Colocotroni oil spill in 1973 is remembered today as a freak accident aggravated by human error; an exception rather than the rule of oceanic commerce. It would be more appropriate, however, to locate in this incident something emblematic about maritime trade in the Anthropocene.
She-Pirates: Early Eighteenth-Century Fantasy and Reality
“The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates” provides a vivid portrayal of she-pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny as crossdressing women seafarers.
“My Poor Nerves”: Women of a Certain Age on the Page
When women’s lives are divided into maid, mother, crone, it is easy to overlook the moment between early motherhood and old age. How did (and how do) women deal with life in their forties when their children are entering those “most interesting” and “most trying” times of their lives while they themselves are in “the most dangerous”? Are they objects of ridicule?
Paragons of wisdom? Are they even visible at all?