Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies articles from September 2008

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies archives from September 2008

Introduction: eco-historicism.
September 22, 2008... Climate has long been the third rail of professional historiography. Climatic determinism, with its roots in Hippocratic theory, figures among the great embarrassments of the early modern history of ideas: an intellectual adjunct to European...

"Casualties and disasters": Defoe and the interpretation of climatic instability.
September 22, 2008... Abstract The Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, that struck Southern England and Wales became a benchmark throughout the eighteenth century for the destructive potential of Nature. This article examines Daniel Defoe's 1704 text The...

Traveling the world with a real friend: the eighteenth-century novel reconsidered.
September 22, 2008... Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 550 + xiii pp. $199.95. [David] spent whole Days... wishing he could meet with a Friend that he...

Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberg, eds. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870.
September 22, 2008... STAFFAN MULLER-WILLE AND HANS-JORG RHEINBERG, EDS. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 496 pp. $52. Deep passions among relatives, wayward kin attempting to...

Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefevre: Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology.
September 22, 2008... Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefevre Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 345 pp. $40.00. The goal of this study, as the authors note in the introduction, is an ambitious one: "to...

The volcano lover: climate, colonialism, and the slave trade in Raffles's History of Java (1817).
September 22, 2008... Abstract This essay revisits Montesquieu's racialized theories of climate in the context of the British Interregnum in Java, 1811-16 and the devastating eruption of Mt. Tambora. In his History of Java (1817), Stamford Raffles, would-be...

Chilling Allahabad: climate control and the production of anglicized weather in early modern India.
September 22, 2008... Abstract March 1775 proved to be an exciting time for Sir Robert Barker, stationed in India, traveling between Allahabad and Calcutta. Suffering as many British East India Company members did from the extreme heat and other forms of...

"O happy earth! Reality of heaven!": Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology.
September 22, 2008... Abstract This essay responds to Jonathan Bate's call for a "Global Warming Criticism" by reconsidering strains of Romantic utopianism in relation to current perspectives on a changing climate. The relation between melancholy and utopian...

Hard frost, 1684.
September 22, 2008... Abstract A series of severe winters in the seventeenth century moved observers to attend carefully to the weather and to attribute a powerful agency to the cold. Drawing on Hippocratic theories on how specific climatic conditions confer...