Review of 'Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815'

The Fleeting Art: Fashion and Culture in Eighteenth Century France

Dress is the most fleeting of the arts, a prey to the arbitrary dictates of novelty and the attacks of critics, subject to endless speculation – and quite meaningless out of historical context. It is, on the other hand, the only art that relates so closely to the narrative of our lives, both as individuals and in relation to the wider world; for clothing is simultaneously intensely personal (a ...

Review of Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity

Review of Marilyn Francus. Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Xi + 297pp. Index. ISBN 978-1-4214-0737-1.

1 Introduction: culture and power during the long eighteenth century

In December 1774, seventeen-year-old Carl August, Prince of Saxe Weimar, met the celebrated young author Johann Wolfgang Goethe in a Frankfurt hotel room. The meeting was cordial, indeed the two men got along together so splendidly that, less than a year later, Goethe accepted the prince’s invitation to move to Weimar, where he would spend the rest of his long and incredibly productive life. I ...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe