This thesis seeks to define how Francis Barrett’s The Magus, Or Celestial Intelligencer is indicative of a transitional period (1800–1830) of English Magic. The intention and transmission of Barrett’s The Magus is linked to the revival of occultism and its use as a textbook for occult philosophy. This thesis provides a historical background preceding this revival. The aim of the thesis is to establish Barrett’s text as a hybrid interpretation of Renaissance magic for a modern audience. It is primarily by this hybridization that a series of feedback loops would begin to create the foundation for modern occultism. This study utilizes a careful study of primary sources, including a systematic examination of The Magus within its intellectual and social contexts.

In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician. A multifaceted man, Beddoes corresponded with many of Britains leading industrial and intellectual lights, especially members of the Lunar Society, had a brief career as an Oxford lecturer, devised air delivery apparatus with James Watt, and wrote extensively to distribute useful medical knowledge to the public and argue for medical reform, all the while attracting the ire of the government and scientific community for his outspoken, radical, republican politics. <br><br> I track Beddoes career as a Friend of Liberty, set within the context of the British reform movement, from 1792, when he began involving himself publicly in agitation, to 1797, when the death-knell of the British reform movement sounded and the French Revolution seemed to have utterly failed. In doing so, I seek to determine to what extent Beddoes was a radical, a revolutionary, and a fifth-column threat to the British, whether or not his ideology was in any regard the product of his science, and what the nature of his radicalism and the lineage of his ideas can tell us about the intellectual culture of his era. <br><br> I conclude that Beddoes fiery rhetoric belies an otherwise moderate and pacific approach to political change, based in British Enlightenment ideas rather than emerging science. The republic, rather than a goal to be achieved through violent overthrow, was simply the only logical organization for a society of innately equal citizens, a fact he believed obvious to the enlightened mind. He defended the French Revolution while he could still cast it as a moderate endeavor led by rational men, but, like so many of its early British supporters, grew disillusioned as France descended into mob violence and the tyranny of Robespierre. Following the Priestley Riots of 1791, he harboured deep fears of a sans-culotte-like British mob, which threatened not only the Church and King, but the interests and liberty of those men like Joseph Priestley and James Watt who were generating valuable knowledge and industry around him. <br><br> My analysis supports Roy Porters theory of a unique British Enlightenment, a social fermentation which emphasized Lockean personal liberty, improvement, and private property (which evolved into the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Hume), and which was, critically, defensive of liberties already gained. Beddoes constellation of political, religious, scientific, and economic influences reflect the characteristic Englishness of the enlightenment culture around him, distinct particularly from France, and helps illustrate the links between scientific and political ideas in the late Enlightenment.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the early eighteenth century, and in the 1720s, her output alone accounted for a significant percentage of all writing being published in English by women. Until the late twentieth century, her large and influential body of work was largely ignored by critics and excluded from the current eighteenth-century cannon. Haywoods body of work is immense, and much remains to be done to fully illuminate her involvement in early modern literature. My study focuses on Haywoods very early career, 1719 1726. My goal is to examine how Haywood achieved her early success in an industry that was relatively inhospitable to women, and what reaction her texts garnered from the marketplace, and the reading public.<p>Part One: The Marketplace, focuses on the construction of Haywoods early career in the context of early eighteenth-century print culture. I investigate the cultural reception and influence of Haywood as author within her social milieu. Haywoods writing emerged from a period when women were beginning to write in large numbers; Haywood was one of the first, the most popular, and the most prolific women writers of the eighteenth century. She achieved a high profile presence in the marketplace and became an example that womens writing could be a lucrative product.<p>Part Two: The Works explores the subject material of Haywoods popular early novels; I argue these works not only function as entertaining amatory fiction, but also contain meritorious social criticism and even possess a didactic tone previously exclusively associated with her later work. While her writing often contests the status quo, it also sometimes replicates it. She simultaneously affirms yet challenges mainstream culture.<p>Overall, this dissertation aims to explore and demystify the complexities, tensions, and contradictions involved in Haywoods writing, and Haywood as a cultural figure. We can only achieve a full understanding of the cultural influence of her texts and career by considering the content of her work alongside the marketability she achieved. Additionally, by exploring Haywoods work during her early career, I hope to contribute to a broader, more accurate understanding of Haywoods body of work as a whole.

My thesis is a historical and cultural study of how the womb was visualized in Britain circa 1660-1775 as well as during the twenty-first century. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the womb was frequently explained as an occult phenomenon, which is to say, as an enigmatic object with inexplicable powers. Because of the social significance and personal investment involved with reproduction, the womb was continually the subject of speculation and conjecture. Additionally, the womb was considered as crucially influencing female well-being, psychology, and sexuality. Following the prerogative of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century empiricism and human science, the womb was increasingly the subject of inquiry, especially as it had been long perceived an occluded phenomenon that had been rarely examined or described visually. The progression of the visualization of the womb during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century incorporated and instituted certain features in the visual illustrations that continue to act as precedents for medical scientific uterine imaging today.<p> Having traced the dissolution and influence of earlier occultist beliefs about the womb, I found that a regular set of metaphors were used in explaining the womb during the eighteenth century. These metaphors provided conceptual themes for the anatomical illustrations of the womb that were contemporaneously produced. One such metaphorical understanding was the brain-womb, wherein the brain and the womb were commonly analogized through both literary tropes and medical pathologies. An overarching concept that directed how the womb was understood was the perception that the womb was an autonomous entity within the female body. This precept allowed that the womb could perform various, often malignant, activities that vitally altered the female constitution. The visual images created for anatomical and medical treatises responded to these metaphors and conceptualizations, responses which markedly altered how the womb, reproduction, and the female body were understood. My final consideration relates these metaphorical and conceptual features of eighteenth-century visualizations of the womb to modern-day uterine imaging. Although optical technology has vastly changed between these two eras, many features and conceptualizations have carried forward, crucially informing how we now perceive the uterus.

This thesis examines the role of philosophic instrument-makers within the eighteenth-century philosophic instrument trade in Britain. The instrument-maker functioned in both the realms of the philosophic elite and the burgeoning eighteenth-century public marketplace. Faced with the task of balancing the contradictory scholarly expectations of natural philosophers and the monetary pressures of the public market, these craftsmen employed sophisticated marketing strategies to reconcile these opposing realms. This project examines the careers of several London instrument-makers and their attempts to gain and maintain solid standing among philosophic circles, while using that standing to their commercial advantage in the instrument trade. By examining the way instrument-makers marketed their products one can glean insight into the role philosophic credibility played in shaping the successful instrument makers career and how the materials of experimental philosophy were promoted to a public increasingly interested in consuming natural philosophy.<p> This enquiry addresses several types of marketing techniques employed by instrument-makers in their efforts to sell their wares. However, patenting strategies receive particularly close attention as they reveal the tension found between the scholarly expectations among the philosophic elite and the commercial priority of the public marketplace.

In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician. A multifaceted man, Beddoes corresponded with many of Britains leading industrial and intellectual lights, especially members of the Lunar Society, had a brief career as an Oxford lecturer, devised air delivery apparatus with James Watt, and wrote extensively to distribute useful medical knowledge to the public and argue for medical reform, all the while attracting the ire of the government and scientific community for his outspoken, radical, republican politics. <br><br> I track Beddoes career as a Friend of Liberty, set within the context of the British reform movement, from 1792, when he began involving himself publicly in agitation, to 1797, when the death-knell of the British reform movement sounded and the French Revolution seemed to have utterly failed. In doing so, I seek to determine to what extent Beddoes was a radical, a revolutionary, and a fifth-column threat to the British, whether or not his ideology was in any regard the product of his science, and what the nature of his radicalism and the lineage of his ideas can tell us about the intellectual culture of his era. <br><br> I conclude that Beddoes fiery rhetoric belies an otherwise moderate and pacific approach to political change, based in British Enlightenment ideas rather than emerging science. The republic, rather than a goal to be achieved through violent overthrow, was simply the only logical organization for a society of innately equal citizens, a fact he believed obvious to the enlightened mind. He defended the French Revolution while he could still cast it as a moderate endeavor led by rational men, but, like so many of its early British supporters, grew disillusioned as France descended into mob violence and the tyranny of Robespierre. Following the Priestley Riots of 1791, he harboured deep fears of a sans-culotte-like British mob, which threatened not only the Church and King, but the interests and liberty of those men like Joseph Priestley and James Watt who were generating valuable knowledge and industry around him. <br><br> My analysis supports Roy Porters theory of a unique British Enlightenment, a social fermentation which emphasized Lockean personal liberty, improvement, and private property (which evolved into the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Hume), and which was, critically, defensive of liberties already gained. Beddoes constellation of political, religious, scientific, and economic influences reflect the characteristic Englishness of the enlightenment culture around him, distinct particularly from France, and helps illustrate the links between scientific and political ideas in the late Enlightenment.

Thèse - Paris. / At head of title: Université de Paris, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines. Bibliography: p. [445]-476.

Blind Items examines the multimedia production of celebrity through the eighteenth century, especially the way in which the same texts, images, anecdotes and poses were recycled and updated to evoke a series of public notables. In the multimedia explosion accompanying the Enlightenment, cultural productions typically read as static and self-contained – from mezzotint prints, shilling pamphlets and novels to popular songs, fashions, jokes and gestures – were instead constantly repurposed to suit successions of public figures, each passing luminary determined by the present cultural moment. Surveying three arenas in which eighteenth-century celebrity was manufactured – fashion, sex, and sport – my archive demonstrates that even canonical authors and artists of the period built their careers on the passing celebrity of others, and indeed maintained the relevance of their productions by perpetually remaking and updating their celebrity referents. Blind Items contests critical assumptions regarding the singularity of celebrity, instead focusing on interchangeability, commutability and disposability. In so doing, the project troubles ongoing assumptions regarding the rise of the individual, as it explains why modern-day celebrity still retains aspects of the Enlightenment mold that first gave it shape. / text

This thesis examines the origins, aftermath and legacy of the Birmingham Priestley Riots of 1791. Since the 1950s, the historiographical elevation of the crowd has generated a renewed interest in popular protest. The Priestley Riots have proved to be a prominent focal point, with historians persistently revisiting the debates surrounding their origins. The first part of this thesis returns to the issue of what caused the tumults. Rather than examine the riots in isolation, the thesis traces the longer-term decline in relations between Anglicans and Dissenters in Birmingham and Britain. The Priestley Riots are then placed into the context of the wider British reaction to the French Revolution. It is argued that the outbreak of rioting was caused by a combination of both religious and political grievances. The second part of the thesis examines the prosecutions of the rioters and the compensation claims made by the victims. It is suggested that the acquittal of the majority of rioters and the victims’ inability to claim full financial remuneration resulted from three factors. Firstly, the failures of the local law enforcement agencies; secondly, the sustained animosity directed towards Dissenters; and thirdly, the idiosyncrasies of the eighteenth century legal system. Finally, the thesis considers the longer-term legacy of the riots for Birmingham’s Dissenters. The conventional perception, that the riots had a ruinous impact, is overturned. Through examining Dissenters’ congregational sizes, their choice of ministers and their involvement in wider Birmingham society, it is argued that, given the tumultuous events of July 1791, Birmingham Dissenters underwent a surprisingly rapid recovery.

The invasion of the Western Hemisphere by empire-building Europeans brought European forms of rhetoric to the Americas. American Indians who were exposed to European-style education gradually adopted some of the cultural ways of the invaders, including rhetorical forms and operations that led, via literacy in European languages, to autobiographical writing, historical consciousness, and literary self-representation. This dissertation uses rhetorical criticism to analyze autobiographical discourse of six eighteenth-century American Indian writers: Samuel Ashpo, Hezekiah Calvin, David Fowler, Joseph Johnson, Samson Occom, and Tobias Shattock. Their texts are rhetorically interrelated through several circumstances: all of these men were educated in a missionary school; most of them probably learned to read and write in English at the school; they left the school and worked as teachers and Christian missionaries to Indians, sharing similar obstacles and successes in their work; and they are Others on whom their teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, inscribed European culture. The six Indian writers appropriate language and tropes of the encroaching Euro-American culture in order to define themselves in relation to that culture and make their voices heard. They participated in European colonial culture by responding iv to, and co-creating, rhetorical situations. While the Indians' written discourse and the situations that called forth their writing have been examined and discussed through a historical lens, critiques of early American Indian autobiography that make extensive use of rhetorical analysis are rare. Thus this dissertation offers a long-overdue treatment of rhetoric in early American Indian autobiography and opens the way to rhetorical readings of autobiography by considering the early formation of the genre in a cross-cultural context.