My First Booke of My Life
My First Booke of My Life

Author: Alice Thornton

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 080325430X

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An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, My First Booke of My Life depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626–1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. Her memoir documents her perspective on the Irish rebellion and English civil war as well as on a plethora of domestic dangers and difficulties: from her reluctant marriage, which sought to rescue the sequestered family estate and clear her brother’s name, to financial crises, to the illnesses and deaths of several family members and six children, to slanderous criticisms of her fidelity and her parenting. This first complete edition of an autobiographical apologia begins with recollections of Thornton’s childhood and ends with the death of her husband, restoring almost half of the original text omitted from the nineteenth-century edition. The image she fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal. Inseparable from the praise of God and family is the distinctive sense of identity that emerges from the introduction, text, and annotations, all of which provide a significant contribution to early modern woman’s writing.

Augustan England
Augustan England

Author: Geoffrey Holmes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1040229840

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First published in 1982, Augustan England provides ample substance to reinforce the thesis that the years from 1680 to 1730 mark the most decisive stage in the rise of the English professional classes before the 19th century, and that this had profound consequences in maintaining the relative ‘openness’ of 18th century society until the advent of industrialization. This book provides the first ever authoritative study of the professions, as a whole, before the Victorian age. The spectacular growth and prosperity of the professional sector of English society at a time when population growth was minimal is seen by Professor Holmes as a mirror of the transformation of England herself in these same years. The Augustan age was one of high English achievement in many fields, from the flowering of literary genius to the acquisition of a sophisticated financial system and the attainment of Great Power status through two consuming wars. It witnessed a ‘commercial revolution’ and important aesthetic, cultural and scientific advances, many of them centered on the growth of London and on a rejuvenation of provincial urban life. From all these developments the professions derived stimuli; on all of them they left their distinctive stamp. In this study, therefore, they are presented not merely as institutions but as an integral part of the very texture of Augustan England. This is a must read for students and scholars of British history.

Literary Sociability in Early Modern England
Literary Sociability in Early Modern England

Author: Paul Trolander

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-05-29

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1611494982

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This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725. Correspondents include a significant sampling from among antiquarians, natural scientists, poets and dramatists, philosophers and mathematicians, political and religious controversialists. The author addresses how early modern letter writing practices (sometimes known as letteracy) and theories of friendship were important underpinnings of the actions and the roles that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors and readers used to communicate their needs and views to their social networks. These early modern social conditions combined with an emerging view of the manuscript as a seedbed of knowledge production and humanistic creation that had significant financial and cultural value in England’s mercantilist economy. Because literary networks bartered such gains in cultural capital for state patronage as well as for social and financial gains, this placed a burden on an author’s associates to aid him or her in seeing that work into print, a circumstance that reinforced the collaborative formulae outlined in letter writing handbooks and friendship discourse. Thus, the author’s network was more and more viewed as a tightly knit group of near equals that worked collaboratively to grow social and symbolic capital for its associates, including other authors, readers, patrons and regulators. Such internal methods for bartering social and cultural capital within literary networks gave networked authors a strong hand in the emerging market economy for printed works, as major publishers such as Bernard Lintott and Jacob Tonson relied on well-connected authors to find new writers as well as to aid them in seeing such major projects as Pope’s The Iliad into print.