Introduction: the progress of society 1. Anglican Whig feminism in England, 1690-1760: self-love, reason and social benevolence 2. From savage to Scotswoman: the history of femininity 3. Roman, Gothic and medieval women: the historicisation of womanhood, 1750-c.1804 4. Catharine Macaulay's Histories of England: liberty, civilisation and the female historian 5. Good manners and partial civilisation in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft 6. The history women and the population men, 1760-1830 Bibliography.

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Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This major work of academic reference provides a comprehensive overview of the development of western political thought during the European Enlightenment. Written by a distinguished team of international contributors, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes that is now firmly established as the principal reference source for the history of political thought. Every major theme in eighteenth-century political thought is covered in a series of essays at once scholarly and accessible, and the essays are complemented by extensive guides for further reading, and brief biographical notes of the major characters in the text, including Rousseau, Montesquieu and David Hume. Of interest and relevance to students and scholars of politics and history at all levels from beginning undergraduate upwards, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and rewarding of all periods in the development of western thinking about politics, man (and increasingly woman), and society.

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The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the political, military, religious, social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and environmental history of early modern Ireland and situates these discussions in global and comparative contexts. The opening chapters focus on 'Politics' and 'Religion and War' and offer a chronological narrative, informed by the re-interpretation of new archives. The remaining chapters are more thematic, with chapters on 'Society', 'Culture', and 'Economy and Environment', and often respond to wider methodologies and historiographical debates. Interdisciplinary cross-pollination - between, on the one hand, history and, on the other, disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, geography, computer science, literature and gender and environmental studies - informs many of the chapters. The volume offers a range of new departures by a generation of scholars who explain in a refreshing and accessible manner how and why people acted as they did in the transformative and tumultuous years between 1550 and 1730.

The Cambridge History of Ireland

James Macpherson has proved as diffi cult and troublesome a fi gure within recent revisionism as he was back in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand he has been portrayed as a perfi dious Scottish chance, an “insolent pretender” and “sensual bully” (in the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper) who “forged” a Scottish past in order to make up for Scotland’s complete barbarity before 1707.1 Such an interpretation forms part of a tradition within English scholarship that extends from Samuel Johnson right through the 1990s in the more subtle and sophisticated work of Howard Weinbrot.2 Yet on the other hand, there is deep unease about Macpherson amongst “four nations” revisionists who see his “invented tradition” of the Highlands not as Scottish cultural nationalism but as AngloBritish cultural imperialism. This apparent sellout enables Weinbrot to talk about the rise of a “British” — by which he avowedly means an English — literature and national culture.3 Both camps see Macpherson as in some way responsible for the “museumalizing” of Scottish history, for the tartaned Disney world of the Royal Mile. But where one side attacks him in order to demolish his perceived nationalism, the other seeks to debunk his nationalist potential, its damaging false consciousness about Scotland and its past. The one thing both camps share is a disdain and suspicion regarding Macpherson, the charlatan Scottish (crypto-)Jacobite nationalist who is also a totem of Anglocentric suppression and incorporation.

James Macpherson and "Celtic Whiggism"

Irish and Roman relations: A comparative analysis of the evidence for exchange, acculturation and clientship from Southeast Ireland

It is often said that all history writing is political. This book, the first major study of Irish antiquarian and historical writing during the turbulent second half of the eighteenth century, demonstrates the truth of this maxim. It charts the ways in which contemporary politics, notably the Catholic question, legislative independence and the gathering agrarian and political crises from the late 1780s, shaped articulations of the remote and recent past. Historical and antiquarian disputes mirrored political debate, so that Catholic and liberal Protestant interpretations of the past were pitted against conservative Protestant reiterations of earlier colonialist analyses. This study sets Irish writing in a broad European focus, examining the influence of key cultural developments, such as orientalism, primitivism and the vogue for Ossian. The intention is to show the complex ways in which Irish cultural politics in this period was open to, and interacted with, British imperial and wider European Enlightenment trends. Throughout the book, Scotland forms a particular point of comparison, since antiquaries there drew on the same Gaelic heritage in much of their work.Leaman criticizes the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics and contends that it is generally misleading regarding both the nature of Islam and artistic expression. He discusses issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music and pays close attention to the teachings of the Qur'an. In particular he asks what it would mean for the Qur'an to be a miraculous literary creation, and he analyzes two passages in the Qur'an-those of Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Zuleika) and King Sullayman (Solomon) and the Queen of Sheba. His arguments draw on examples from history, art, philosophy, theology, and the artefacts of the Islamic world, and raise a large number of difficulties in the accepted paradigms for analyzing Islamic art.

Clare O'Halloran

Papers

Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800