‘The Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Carlyle’s French Revolution’ examines the work of Thomas Carlyle as a crucial aesthetic intervention in the modern reception of the French Revolution in Europe. It interrogates the prevalent critical constructions of Carlyle’s work and finds them to proceed predominantly from the Whig historical agenda, structured around such key nineteenth-century concepts as utilitarianism and civilisational and moral progress. Within this critical framework, Carlyle’s largely conservative cultural stance and Christian spirituality are hardly allowed any creative potential and, ever since the famous fabrication of James Anthony Froude who depicted Carlyle as ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, they have been perceived as artistically-stunted, irrational, and out of touch with the nineteenth-century political, social and cultural realities. In examining Carlyle’s involvement with German Romanticism on the one hand, and with contemporary British periodical press on the other, this thesis proposes a more comprehensive reading of Carlyle’s politics, aesthetics and spirituality in an attempt to represent his radically open, catholic and indeed cosmopolitan artistic agenda which taps into the Scottish Enlightenment concept of rationality, Calvinist scepticism towards nineteenth-century progressivism and acute perception of evil in this world, and post-Burkean Romantic aesthetics of the sublime. We chart the aesthetic movement from Carlyle’s early dialogue with Schiller and Goethe to ‘The Diamond Necklace’, Carlyle’s first artistic rendition of the French pre-revolutionary scene, delivered as a (Gothic) moral tale and anticipating The French Revolution (a historical work that uniquely employs the Gothic genre within historical narrative, arguably unparalleled in British post-Burkean Romanticism). The critical reception of The French Revolution in Britain is examined, with special attention paid to the highly unfavourable review by Herman Merivale in The Edinburgh Review, in order to challenge the Whig line in Carlylean criticism and to expose the fundamental artistic, political and moral disagreement between Carlyle and Merivale. Carlyle’s Calvinist stance sees both Merivale’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s facile exorcism of the categories of good and evil from their historical agendas as irrational given the recent French terror (which, in Carlyle’s reading, released its demons precisely through such a botched ethical deal). Similarly, I highlight Carlyle’s close dialogue with John Stuart Mill both in their correspondence, and in the publications in the London and Westminster Review, while I argue that this intellectual exchange is crucial for the reading of The French Revolution as a text challenging Mill’s utilitarianism, and written within the institutional framework of the contemporary periodical press. Finally, Carlyle is seen to make capital of the concepts of Gothic and sublime, introduced by Edmund Burke and popularised by the Anti-Jacobin Review in Britain, by applying them directly to the French mob in search of a new spiritual tongue for his times (a move that even a nineteenth-century radical liberal thinker such as Mill sees as politically, if not artistically, far too subversive and revolutionary). Creative non-conclusiveness and playful deconstruction of the prevalent post-revolutionary narratives of 1789 characterise Carlyle’s deeply spiritual and artistically-sophisticated text, which, in an orthodox Christian reading, rejoices in the messy, dark and complex residue of human history, through which Christian providence acts in mysterious and unexpected ways that do not allow for any simple, de-mythologised reading.

The present thesis is an enquiry into the nature and consistency of the idea of music as a metaphor throughout the works of the English philosopher and physician Robert Fludd (1573/4-1637). Fludd was very fond of a view of the world in which man is made of the same elements and the same proportions of the cosmos. Though this idea was slowly losing credit amongst the intellectuals of the time, Fluddean thought made some impact in the British Isles, and even more so on the continent: Johannes Kepler, for instance, wrote extensively about Fludd’s use of numerical symbolism, and stressed the differences between his own idea of harmony of the spheres and Fludd’s. After Fludd’s death, his ideas were still taken seriously amongst certain intellectual circles, e.g. in England (John Webster) and Poland (John Amos Comenius), and Fluddean thought influenced German musico-theoretical writers such as Athanasius Kircher, Andreas Werckmeister, and Johann Walther. But the subsequent centuries witnessed a general obliviousness towards Fludd. His figure began to re- emerge only in the second half of the 20th century in an increasing number of essays, papers, articles and a few books dedicated to him. What is still lacking, though, is a reassessment relying upon a more organic approach, which takes into account the entirety of Fludd’s publications and the wide range of topics covered in them. My work attempts to address this issue. The musical metaphor is one of the strongest leitmotifs in Fluddean publications, thanks to its being fit for representing man, the cosmos, and their interrelationship. Indeed the monochord, which well before Fludd was the preeminent practical and philosophical demonstration of the Pythagorean ‘divine’ proportions, rules the pages of Fludd’s earlier volumes. In later volumes, though, a new instrument takes its place: the more up-to-date weather-glass, surprisingly also linked to musical proportions. I argue that the new scientific instrument retains some of the monochord’s traits, thus representing an original re-arrangement of ‘ancient’ music; in fact, Fludd even applies it to the human pulse – an under-studied topic that I survey in detail. Following the whole Fluddean opera omnia is a task that gives one a glimpse of Fludd’s reactions to the deep changes that the intellectual and scientific world was undergoing from a perspective that has been, so far, largely neglected. This opens up to new fascinating outlooks on music, medicine and science at the beginning of the seventeenth century.