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73807 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1059 of 3691

  • 14 - The Surprising Lineage of Useful Knowledge

  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 277-292

  • Summary

    Great citizen of Albion! thee

    Heroic valour still attends

    And useful science pleas'd to see

    How art her studious toil extends.

    Mark Akenside, Ode VIII ‘On Leaving Holland’, 1788

    In 1744, the physician and poet Mark Akenside (1721–70) penned an ode celebrating the British national character. Chief among the features of British life which Akenside lauded was the dedicated pursuit of useful knowledge. A practical and sensible people, the British were concerned with improving themselves and the world. The tenor of Akenside's ‘Ode’ resonated in the mid-eighteenth century, amid the proliferation of societies and clubs devoted to the improvement of various aspects of society, from agriculture to literacy. The common feature of these organisations was their focus on knowledge which was ‘useful’, in the sense that it was applied to the requirements and conveniences of daily life. Yet despite the popularity of ideas about useful knowledge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the phenomenon remains inadequately understood. For the most part, scholars have assumed that useful knowledge developed as a feature of the popular education movements of liberal reformers. On this account, useful knowledge emerged in the nineteenth century and had little to do with religion; it was a hallmark of the secular traditions within liberal and radical politics.

    This essay puts forward an alternative genealogy. I argue that useful knowledge has a much older lineage, which can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Far from having secular origins, the usefulness of knowledge arose from a concerted attempt by natural philosophers in the Baconian tradition to use the theology of Christian charity to describe natural philosophy's role in the ‘relief of mankind's estate’, as Bacon put it. In short, the new natural philosophy defined itself as a project of transforming the world, and it therefore required knowledge that was useful to improve human life. This essay traces the way that, over the course of the eighteenth century, useful knowledge underwent a secularising process. Gradually, the vocabulary of useful knowledge was separated from its theological underpinnings, and was harnessed instead to a burgeoning culture of public associations, central to which were the ideals of the public good and civic peace.

  • Appendix F - Extracts from the Accounts of John Hampton 1430–2 – Purchases

  • from Appendices
  • Dan Spencer
  • Book:
    Royal and Urban Gunpowder Weapons in Late Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 219-220

  • Summary

    Purchased in diverse locations in England and France by command of the king for his aforesaid war within the time of the accounts (1430–2):

  • • Three large guns of iron, of which one called Henry, one called Hampton and one called Crown

  • • Sixteen guns of iron called fowlers, with thirty-three moveable chambers, not fixed or stocked

  • • Four guns of bronze called fowlers, with eight moveable chambers, not fixed or stocked

  • • 2,128lbs of iron worked

  • • 6,000lbs of iron not worked

  • • Twenty chaulders of sea coal

  • • Four large carts of iron and wood for moving guns, large guns and other things, each with one pair of wheels called trokels

  • • Four long carts of iron and wood made for use in the country of Picardy

  • • 1,550 gunstones

  • • Fifty chains

  • • Forty staples

  • • Forty pairs of hooks

  • • Forty plates of iron for moving oxen

  • • Eighty collars

  • • Twenty-five double oxbows containing 300 pieces

  • • 100 ‘pykeys’

  • • Fifty axes

  • • 200 shovels

  • • 200 spades

  • • Forty-two ‘scoops’

  • • Twelve ‘crowes’ of iron

  • • One axle beam of iron

  • • Seven weights of lead

  • • 996 hammers of lead

  • • Seven big pieces of lead weighing 3,525lbs

  • • One pair of bellows for smiths

  • • 800 shafts called spear shafts

  • • 710 lance heads

  • • 391 chests for arrows and bows

  • • 1,204lbs of gunpowder

  • • 5,164lbs of saltpetre liquid not dry or pestled in powder

  • • 5,200lbs of sulphur rough not dry in powder

  • • 280lbs of charcoal

  • • One stock to hold saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal

  • • 100 long pavises

  • • Five short pavises

  • • Three cords of hemp called hankers

  • • Eighteen stocks of wood and iron not bound for guns called fowlers

  • • Forty-two empty vessels

  • • Eight hogsheads

  • • Fourteen barrels

  • • Six ‘wassell’ of metal

  • • Three saddles called ‘lymour’ saddles

  • • Three cruppers for ‘lymour’ saddles

  • • Three backs (dosers) for the same

  • • Two collars of rope for cart horses

  • • Four ‘crebis of crunbz’ for great ordnance

    • £2,072 4s. 8½d.

  • Conclusion

  • George Southcombe
  • Book:
    The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    19 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 163-166

  • Summary

    ‘And ‘tis to be noted by the way, that the doctrines of king-killing and deposing, which have been taken up only by the worst party of the papists, the most frontless flatterers of the Pope's authority, have been espoused, defended and are still maintained by the whole body of Nonconformists and republicans. ’Tis but dubbing themselves the people of God, which ‘tis the interest of their preachers to tell them they are, and their own interest to believe; and after that they cannot dip into the Bible but one text or another will turn up for their purpose. If they are under persecution (as they call it) then that is a mark of their election; if they flourish, then God works miracles for their deliverance, and the saints are to possess the earth.’

    Nonconformists were, for John Dryden, doctrinaire defenders of regicide, and their understanding of Providence led them to interpret every possible situation as confirming their righteousness. His claims are strikingly similar to those that Marvell ascribed to Samuel Parker in the passage that opened this book. When satirists merely have to record rather than exaggerate their opponents’ views, it is a clear sign that mutually exclusive discourses have come into being. This was a lesson that Daniel Defoe would later learn at some cost when his 1702 tract The shortest way with Dissenters, a savage representation of the persecutory Anglican case, was not initially understood by either Anglicans or dissenters as satirical. For some dissenters it was all too plausible that Anglicans were calling for their blood, while for some Anglicans it was clear that what Defoe proposed, far from being parodically extreme, was a rational and necessary programme. What one group saw as abhorrent had become what another saw as desirable, and a vicious circle was created whereby the statement of one case merely served to reinforce the beliefs of its opponents. This has been part of the story told in this book: a story about how dissenting identities hardened in the Restoration, and the ways in which they were shaped through engagements in particular textual battles. This is most obviously the case in the account given of Robert Wild and the emergence of his Presbyterian identity.

Richard Wagner in Paris
  • Translation, Identity, Modernity
  • Jeremy Coleman
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019
  • How did Wagner's experiences in Paris influence his works and social character? And how does his sometime desire for recognition by the French cultural establishment square with his German national identity and with the related idea of a universally valid art?

  • 4 - Exile, Internationalism and Media After the Revolution

  • from PART II - DRESDEN AND ZURICH, 1842–52
  • Jeremy Coleman
  • Book:
    Richard Wagner in Paris
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 105-134

  • Summary

    IN the course of the 1840s, at a time of increasingly strident German nationalist sentiment, radical German intellectuals continued to receive French political thought with enthusiasm. Many of them even resided in Paris for a time, such as Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx (in 1843–44). For Wagner, it was only after the Dresden Uprising of May 1849 and his subsequent flight into Swiss exile that he renewed his interest in Paris both as a hotbed of radical politics and as a centre for modern European theatre. Living for the most part in Zurich until the exile was lifted in 1862, he made a “second assault” on Paris in the immediate aftermath of the uprising. In contrast with his previous Parisian period, from 1839 to 1842, many of the “translations” of Wagner's works and writings were predominantly of a literary nature, not least because Wagner hardly composed a note of music, concentrating instead on prose writings and other projects including unfinished opera drafts. He also spent relatively little time in Paris itself, only staying there from 30 May to 6 July 1849 and from 1 February to 13 March 1850. Most of his plans were carried out or contemplated in Zurich, at a distance.

    On 13 May 1849, Wagner fled from Dresden to Weimar where he lodged with Liszt, and together they plotted Wagner's immediate future and nothing less than the future of art in the wake of political failure. At least three distinct but related spheres of activity presented themselves to Wagner as routes back to Paris: operas for the French stages, political pamphlets, and articles of self-promotion. Wagner referred to his “Paris plans” – otherwise described as his “Paris opportunities” and his “Paris expedition[s]”. Even in recent surveys of Wagner's initial period of post-1849 exile, his interest in Paris has tended to be eclipsed by Zurich not only as a political haven but also as a musical, cultural and even geographical influence. The present chapter considers these plans in the context of variously Young Hegelian, internationalist and related intellectual movements which to some extent had underpinned the 1848–49 revolutions, whilst examining notions of translation in terms of global capitalist circulation as they impinged on Wagner's activities. The final part of the chapter explores the question of Wagner's handwriting as a media channel which was no less important as a means of translation within international spaces.

Page 1059 of 3691