This interdisciplinary project offers new research to introduce the American cult of the bosom, which emerged in the years following the Revolutionary War and helped shape the discourse around women’s roles in the early republic. The cult of the bosom sought to shift the way in which the female body, and especially the bosom, was regarded and represented by identifying it as the locus of a number of positive qualities associated with women, including virtue, modesty, beauty, and grace. This shift constituted, in the minds of citizens, a significant way in which American culture honored and celebrated women. Additionally, the cult of the bosom tied the bosom’s privileged status to a broader patriotic rhetoric that celebrated the special differences of America’s women and American culture as a whole, and insisted that, while most citizens of the world saw its potential to gratify lust, Americans were sufficiently enlightened to consider and celebrate the bosom’s ‘true’ function as a signifier of sacred womanhood. Through a variety of cultural materials, this project traces the points at which beauty, virtue, femininity, and the female body intersected in the early republic and the implications of these intersections for the political and social status of women. The study consists of five thematic chapters, which address textual foundations for the discourse on the bosom and female modesty in early republican America and examine female portraits of the period in order to identify the visual codes that represented patriotic ideology and signified the bosom.

In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground between literature and theatre studies, I borrow useful tools from both, to create what might be styled a New Historicist Dramaturgy. I urge a re-examination of the period 1708-28. The standard reading of theatre of the period is that it was static. This "dry spell" of English theatre, most critics agree, was filled with stock characters and predictable plot lines. But it is during this so-called "dry spell" that Centlivre refines her stagecraft, and convinces cautious managers to bank on her work, providing evidence that playwrights of the period were subtly experimenting. The previous trend in scholarship of this cautious and paranoid era of theatre history has been to shy away from examining the plays in any depth, and fall back on pigeonholing them. But why were the playwrights turning out the work that they did? What is truly representative of the period? Continued examination may stop us from calling the period a "dry spell." For that purpose, examining some of Centlivre's early work encourages us to avoid the tendency to study only a few playwrights of the period, and to avoid the trap of focusing on biography rather than text. I propose a different kind of aesthetic, stemming from my interest in the text as precursor to performance. Some of these works may not seem fertile ground for theorists, but discarding them on that basis fails to take into account their original purpose: to entertain.

This thesis is devoted to the keyboard concerto in the second half of the 18th century. The main focus is Johann Baptist Vanhal and selection of his keyboard concertos, the analysis should clarify the position in contemporary production. Comparative context consists of works by four composers - G. Ch. Wagenseil, J. G. Lang, J. S. Schröter and L. Kozeluh. The work includes an introduction to the methodological problems of concerto form and theoretical reflection of period opinion on the issue of the concert.

The task is to describe the music activites of ursuline monastery in Kutna Hora in the 18th century. This was achieved using non-music resources of this monastery preserved in the State Regional Archive Praha-Chodovec, and music collection located in the Czech Museum of Music. The music collection was subsequently analyzed according to various criteria. Musical activity of the Ursulines of Kutná Hora was compared with musical activities of the Ursulines of Prague and Bratislava and the Cistercian nuns of Staré Brno. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

In the first instance the work is concerned with the historical background of Broumov. It also focuses on the operation of both Broumov schools in the 18th century (the monastic school and the municipal schools) with an emphasis on local music education and activities. Further, the work deals with two Broumov collections of music, monastery and church ones. They provide valuable information about local music service in the 18th century, regarding both spiritual figural music and choral practice. Product sheet music of monastic collection from the 17th and 18th centuries, is one of the attachments. A description of the sources, with which study works, is provided. These are five manuscripts by Anthony Celestýna Mentzel (1684? -1740) containing a total of thirteen of his compositions, which are in this work analyzed from the music and text point of view. Their editions are also attached to the work. In conclusion, the study focuses on the rare occurrence of the viola d'amore in some of Mentzel's compositions.

The master thesis deals with the Antonio Salieri's opera Axur, Re d'Ormus and its premiere in 1788 at Nostitz Theatre in Prague. First part of thesis represents source research. On the basis of printed librettos, playbills and periodicals we can observe presence of Salieri's operas in repertory of Prague theaters from 1773 to 1806. Main part of thesis constitute musical and dramatic analysis of Salieri's Axur. This analysis is focused to Prague "version", which represents printed libretto. Musical and textual sources, used in analysis, was furthermore properly investigated. Through mutual comparison was suggested stemma, indicated to relations between these sources and simultaneously to processes, proceeded during transfer of work between particular theaters. I pay attention especially to axis Vienna-Prague-Dresden in period 1788-1789.

The progress of criminal law in 18th century in our country The main theme of this graduation thesis is the progress in substantive criminal law and procedural criminal law in the 18th century in our countries. Part of the work focuses on the codex published in 1803, as it was highly progressive for the period. Its inclusion in the thesis was, therefore, logical and necessary. The whole development of criminal law in Czech countries has been derived from the progress of criminal law of the Habsburg monarchy, which Bohemia was a part of. As a secondary theme the thesis elaborates the historical development of the monarchy in this period, philosophical and religious orientations and beliefs, the greatest thinkers and previous legislation drawn by policy makers in the 18th century and often accepted in the first half of the 18th century. This work also discusses the progress of the structure of capital justice in our country, which focuses mainly on personal and material equipment and the reason for the gradual reduction of capital court. In a special chapter the correction progress of crimes against divine majesty, on which the opinion has changed over the century, is discussed; namely the change from strictly punishable crime to offenses and then their return back to crime. This chapter also includes a...

The diploma thesis contributes to study of the Italian and Czech origins of the sacred music by Neapolitan composers from the first third of the 18th century. The first chapters of the thesis concentrate on classification of manuscripts with music by the Neapolitan composer Domenico Sarri (1678-1744) whose many works have been preserved in Czech music archives. Though Sarri demonstrably was a significant representative of the Neapolitan music production of his time, his work has not yet been adequately explored. This thesis therefore also includes a complete reconstruction of Sarri's psalm Dixit Dominus F major. In the last part of the thesis, this piece is analyzed and compared within the selection of few works by Sarri and his contemporaries with the aim to specify some of the general and individual aspects of Sarri's musical thinking.

The demographic development of the population in the city of Litoměřice in the years 1700-1799 Abstract The aim of Thesis is capturing the development of natural change in city of Litomerice and its suburbs in the 18th century and characterizing the basic demographic indicators. Absolute number of marriages, births and deaths was found by using Name excerpts from parish registers. Based on the aggregate method, the data was classified according to the needs analysis for individual years or decades. The development of natural change of Litoměřice was compared with the results of local probes in southern Bohemia, on the estate Stahlavy, in Usti nad Labem and in the cities of Frydek and Mistek. Comparator sites were chosen to represent different areas as well as geographically close or distant cities. Results of comparation confirmed the different demographic developments in urban and rural areas and showed the influence of geographical distance of each city. Keywords: development of natural change, 18th century, Litoměřice, the population estimates

Jane Austen champions practicality and compatibility versus purely romantic or mercenary sentiment in her novels, and through narrative techniques she preserves her heroines from imprudent marriages. Austen's heroines do not fall madly in love at first sight, but rather they acquiesce to marriage through reason and discernment. She endows her heroines with qualities that make them worthy of her interference in the marriage plot: intelligent although inexperienced, possessed of realistic expectations and sensibility and reason, and, importantly, financial instability. She carefully cultivates heroes worthy of her heroines through plot twists. However, to show her dissatisfaction with the limited roles available to the 19th century woman, she denies the reader the opportunity to witness the wedding that concludes her narratives. The narrator demonstrates her approval or disapprobation by choosing what scenes to narrate and what scenes to dramatize, the latter often representative of her disapproval, her silence signifying her acceptance.