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This dissertation uncovers women healers' vital role in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century healthcare marketplace. Euro-American women healers participated in networks of health information sharing that reached across lines of class and gender, and included female practitioners in American Indian and African American communities. Although their contributions to the healthcare labor force are relatively invisible in the historical record, women healers in the Delaware Valley provided the bulk of healthcare for their families and communities. Nonetheless, apart from a few notable monographs, women healers' practices and authority remain understudied. My project complicates a medical historiography that marginalizes female practitioners and narrates their declining healthcare authority after the mid-eighteenth century due to the emergence of a consumer society, a culture of domesticity, the professionalization of medicine, and the rise of enlightened science, which generated discourses of women's innate irrationality. Using the Philadelphia area as a case study, I argue that women healers were not merely static traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the march of science, medicine, and capitalism as this older narrative suggests. Instead, I assert that women healers of various classes and ethnicities adapted their practices as they found new sources of healthcare authority through female education in the sciences, manuscript authorship, access to medical print media, the culture of sensibility, and the alternative gender norms of religious groups like the Quakers. Building on a longstanding foundation of recognized female practitioners, medically skilled women continued to fashion healing authority by participating in mutually affirming webs of medical information exchanges that reflected new ideas about science, health, and the body. In addition, women doctresses, herbalists, apothecaries, and druggists empowered themselves by participating in an increasingly commercialized and consumer-oriented healthcare marketplace. Within this unregulated environment, women healers in the colonies and early republic challenged physicians' claims to a monopoly on medical knowledge and practice. The practitioners analyzed in this study represent a bridge between the recognized and skilled women healers of the seventeenth century and the female healthcare professionals of the nineteenth century. / History

This thesis investigates gossip and rumours through a narrative lens in order to understand what kind of stories emanated from eighteenth-century Stockholm, and what these stories reveal about the moral values and concerns of the urban community. Using records from the consistory court and the lower courts of Stockholm, the thesis sheds some light on the stories which tend to go under the radar, and gives insights into the subtle facets of urban life, wherein gossip nurtured a culture of speculation and suspicion.  By uncovering the narratives which preoccupied the urban population of Stockholm, some thematical patterns have emerged: people gossiped about sexual immorality, marital disorder, financial dishonesty, and perceived threats against the Lutheran faith. Typically, these stories seem to have emanated from the neighbourhood or the household. The study also shows that gossip and rumours told the stories of those who violated core moral values – stories that heavily relied on a repertoire of narrative tropes and figures to portray those who transgressed social and moral boundaries. These stories reveal a deep concern for – even fear of – the hidden threats in the urban fabric: immoral characters disguised as honest members of the community. As inversions of core values, these narrative stereotypes were perceived as dangerous threats to social order and unity, whose actions could have far-reaching implications for society at large. As such, these were symbolically charged and value-laden stories. Through highlighting the coercive aspects of these stories, this thesis also argues that gossip provided urban communities with an opportunity to voice collective concerns and protect community values by unmasking hidden threats, and control or stigmatise transgressors.

Cette thèse porte sur l’œuvre littéraire de trois romancières anglaises du XVIIIe siècle : Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe et Jane Austen. À travers l’analyse de leurs romans, je démontre comment elles ont utilisé ce genre littéraire relativement nouveau, pour aborder les problèmes philosophiques centraux de cette époque. Afin de soutenir que ces écrivaines ont utilisé le roman pour aborder des problèmes philosophiques, je dois démontrer, dans un premier temps, la capacité des œuvres littératires en général à produire un contenu cognitif et à générer des connaissances. Mon propos me conduit ensuite à démontrer comment elles ont contribué significativement à problématiser et explorer ce que j’appelle « Le problème de la Modernité », soit le sentiment d’aliénation produit à l’époque moderne par la séparation entre le sujet humain, le monde et les autres humains. J’expose alors comment ce sentiment d’aliénation est au cœur des romans de Frances Burney, dont les héroïnes, dépossédées de leur identité sociale, errent sans protection, dans un monde hostile. Je démontre également comment les romans gothiques d’Ann Radcliffe, malgré leurs horreurs, offrent un moyen « esthétique » de faire face à cette aliénation. J’explique finalement comment Jane Austen tente de reconstruire le rapport du sujet humain au monde par l’entremise de l’imagination et de la fiction, d’une part, et de notre engagement moral envers autrui, d’autre part. Enfin, l’analyse de leurs œuvres permet de démontrer comment leurs réflexions au sujet de la précarité du sujet moderne rejoint les préoccupations des philosophes avec lesquels ces romancières sont en discussion. / This dissertation looks at the work of three prominent women novelists of the long eighteenth century: Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. Through a close analysis of their novels, I demonstrate how mid-eighteenth-century to early nineteenth-century British women authors used the novel, a relatively new literary genre, to engage with some of the central philosophical problems of their time. I explore how novels, being works of fiction, contain certain “truths,” notably forms of knowledge about humans and the world, thus serving as important sources of learning. Since the philosophical problems addressed by philosophers in the eighteenth century were numerous, I narrow their scope significantly, focusing on what I call “the modern predicament,” that is, the sentiment of alienation produced by the separation of the human subject from the world and other humans. I demonstrate how this sentiment of alienation is at the core of Frances Burney’s novels, whose heroines, dispossessed of social identity, wander without much protection in a hostile world. I also demonstrate how Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, in spite of their horrors, provide an aesthetic way of coping with personal alienation and imagining a better state of the world. Finally, I show how Jane Austen’s novels suggest ways of reconciling the subject, others, and the world through the literary imagination and mutual sympathy. Most importantly, I show how these women novelists engage with and revise the ideas of modern philosophers.

This study explores the rediscovery and development of a tradition of Ciceronian academic scepticism in British philosophy between c.1660-c.1760. It considers this tradition alongside two others, recently recovered by scholars, which were recognised by contemporaries to offer opposing visions of man, God and the origins of society: the Augustinian-Epicurean, and the neo-Stoic. It presents John Locke, Conyers Middleton and David Hume as the leading figures in the revival of the tradition of academic scepticism. It considers their works in relation to those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Bernard Mandeville, whose writings refashioned respectively the neo-Stoic and Augustinian-Epicurean traditions in influential ways. These five individuals explicitly identified themselves with these late Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and sought to contest and redefine conventional estimations of their meaning and significance. This thesis recovers this debate, which illuminates our understanding of the development of the ‘science of man’ in Britain. Cicero was a central figure in Locke’s attempt to explain, against Hobbes, the origins of society and moral consensus independent of political authority. Locke was a theorist of societies, religious and civil. He provided a naturalistic explanation of moral motivation and sociability which, drawing heavily from Cicero, emphasised the importance of men’s concern for the opinions of others. Locke set this within a Christian divine teleology. It was Locke’s theologically-grounded treatment of moral obligation, and his attack on Stoic moral philosophy, that led to Shaftesbury’s attempt to vindicate Stoicism. This was met by Mandeville’s profoundly Epicurean response. The consequences of the neo-Epicurean and neo-Stoic traditions for Christianity were explored by Middleton, who argued that only academic scepticism was consistent with Christian belief. Hume explored the relationship between morality and religion with continual reference to Cicero. He did so, in contrast to Locke or Middleton, to banish entirely moral theology from philosophy.

During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.

La dissertazione si pone due principali obiettivi: la ricostruzione della biografia della scrittrice settecentesca Clara Reeve e la presentazione della sua vasta produzione letteraria nella quale l'autrice sperimenta diversi generi, dalla poesia (Original Poems on Several Occasions) al saggio di critica (The Progress of Romance), dal romanzo gotico e storico (The Old English Baron, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon) al romanzo pedagogico-sentimentale (The Two Mentors, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, The Exiles, Destination), cimentandosi in svariate tecniche espressive quali l'epistolario, il dialogo e la conversazione, il memoriale. Le opere sono state affrontate seguendo principalmente l'ordine cronologico al fine di valorizzare le peculiarità di ciascuna e al contempo rappresentare il processo di maturazione della scrittrice. Ne deriva una monografia inedita che pone particolare enfasi sul contesto storico e sull'ambiente culturale in cui le opere fecero la loro apparizione al fine di comprendere meglio i processi di ricezione presso i lettori e i critici coevi. Chiudono lo studio tre importanti appendici: la prima fornisce i contenuti delle opere reeviane in sintesi; la seconda propone l'integrale trascrizione dai manoscritti della corrispondenza di Clara Reeve a Joseph Cooper Walker; la terza offre una consistente documentazione fotografica. / The dissertation focuses on two main objectives: the reconstruction of Clara Reeve's fragmentary biography and the presentation of this eighteenth century authoress' literary production in which she attempts different literary genres, from poetry (Original Poems on Several Occasions) to the essay (The Progress of Romance), from the gothic and historical novel (The Old English Baron, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon) to the sentimental and didactic novel (The Two Mentors, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, The Exiles, Destination), experimenting different forms such as the epistle, the dialogue and the memoir. The analysis of the text is based on a chronological perspective in order to emphasize the peculiarity of each work and simultaneously to present the progress of an artist. The result is an unprecedented monograph which stresses the historical context and the cultural environment in which Clara Reeve's works appeared so as to understand the dynamics of her public and critical reception. Three important appendixes close the dissertation: the first offers the plots of the works; the second proposes the full text transcription from the manuscripts of Clara Reeve's letters to Joseph Cooper Walker; the third collects documents and illustrations.

Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.

This doctoral thesis, entitled “Church & Society in Eighteenth-Century Geneva, 1700-1789”, will seek to reappraise the relationship between religion and the Enlightenment through the context of eighteenth-century Geneva. Based on the perspectives of the philosophes, historians have generally understood the Enlightenment as the source of secularization and a period of religious decline. However, more recent work has begun to reassess the developments of religion in the eighteenth century beyond the philosophes, resulting in an increasingly multi-faceted picture of religion in the age of Enlightenment. This thesis will contribute to that revisionist effort. Eighteenth-century Geneva offers an intriguing example because it allows one to observe the encounter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment in the figurative meeting between Calvin and Voltaire. With that in mind, this work will re-examine the legacy of Calvin from 1700 to 1789 through a socio-historical and theological approach in order to analyze the functioning of religious life in Genevan society, the theological content and development of preaching and worship, and the clerical responses to incidents of conflict in relation to the government and the philosophes. The near totality of this research has stemmed from the study of manuscript sources within the Genevan archives, such as sermons, church and government records, and official and personal correspondence. Through the perspective of Geneva’s church and clergy, a far more complex picture of the dynamic between religion and the Enlightenment will emerge supporting the understanding that the Enlightenment occurred differently in different contexts and challenging the widespread attribution of the secularization theory and the decline of religion thesis to the eighteenth century.