Mary Peace | Sheffield Hallam University (original) (raw)
Papers by Mary Peace
Women S Writing, 2002
ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hall both in relation... more ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hall both in relation to the contemporary economic theories with which it engages, and in the light of the anonymous Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, upon which Scott's text is ...
At the Borders of the Human , 1999
In 1775 a translation of a French medical text was published in London entitled Nymphomania, or... more In 1775 a translation of a French medical text was published in London entitled Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. This essay reads this eighteenth century text as part of a history of hysteria and in the context of contemporary debates about luxury and female desire.
This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hallboth in relation to the co... more This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hallboth in relation to the contemporary economic theories with which it engages, and in the light of the anonymous Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-Houseupon which Scott's text is substantially modelled. ...
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, 2013
This article examines the relationship between Methodist and sentimental discourses in the secon... more This article examines the relationship between Methodist and
sentimental discourses in the second half of the eighteenth century
through the lens of John Wesley’s abridgment of Henry
Brooke’s sentimental novel The Fool of Quality (1765–70). John Wesley’s
abridgement was published in 1781 under the title the History of Henry
Earl of Moreland. This article asks who a worldly
Enlightenment text such as Brooke’s Fool might have seemed ripe for the
propagation of a Methodist theology that had abandoned the possibility
of any true virtue existing in the world. In considering the relationship
between Brooke’s Fool and Wesley’s abridgment, I hope to shed light
more generally on how sentimental ideas came retrospectively to be
identified with the conservative forces of Evangelical thought. I argue
that sentimentality and Methodism, though apparently in many ways
opposed, can be identified as part of a spectrum of ideas about human
nature and about political economy that spans them both.
Transits is the next horizon. Th e series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend recent ... more Transits is the next horizon. Th e series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend recent achievements in eighteenth-century studies and to publish work on any aspects of the literature, thought, and culture of the years 1650-1850. Without ideological or methodological restrictions, Transits seeks to provide transformative readings of the literary, cultural, and historical interconnections between Britain, Europe, the Far East, Oceania, and the Americas in the long eighteenth century, and as they extend down to present time. In addition to literature and history, such "global" perspectives might entail considerations of time, space, nature, economics, politics, environment, and material culture, and might necessitate the development of new modes of critical imagination, which we welcome. But the series does not thereby repudiate the local and the national for original new work on particular writers and readers in particular places in time continues to be the bedrock of the discipline.
The Eighteenth Century, Volume 48, Number 2, pp. 125-148, Aug 2007
Introduction Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of t... more Introduction
Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes, on August 10, 1758, was a product of the ascendancy of sentimental ideas in mid-eighteenth-century British culture. There is, however, a richer, more complex story which remains to be told about the relationship between sentimentality and the Magdalen House.
The adjective "sentimental," with reference to eighteenth-century cultural discourse, does not designate a single coherent literary or philosophical tradition, but a complex, evolving, and frequently contradictory set of discourses. To characterize the evolution of these ideas most starkly, at the start of the century "sentimental" is applied to the cultural productions associated with the Moral Sense philosophy of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. "Sentimental" here designates a Whiggish optimism about the role of the senses in the improvement and refinement of modern social manners, morals, and tastes. By the last three decades of the eighteenth century, however, the adjective "sentimental" designates predominantly a literature which has turned its back on the modern world. Sentimental literature of the late century is more insistent than its forebear on the native goodness of the human senses and particularly the heart, but here this goodness is no longer seen with any conviction as a tool for the improvement or refinement of society as a whole. Instead the native goodness of the heart is shown to be contaminated, exploited, or abused when it comes into contact with the world.
My contention in this essay is first that the founding of the Magdalen Hospital should be read as the cultural high-water mark of the earlier sentimental, Whiggish discourse of improvement. It was a moment at which the merchants and bankers who dreamt up the institution discovered, in their embrace of this sentimental discourse, the authority to assert a truce between virtue and commerce. They discovered the authority to assert, in the face of traditional Christian theology and classical models of political economy, that desire was not utterly incompatible with cultural probity. As I will argue later in this essay, the extraordinary popularity of the Magdalen Hospital throughout the 1760s and 1770s was material testimony to the authority of the Whiggish sentimental discourse and its power to reassure the public that even the most destructive of commercial appetites were really only the result of misunderstanding and miseducation.
My second contention in this essay is that the Magdalen Hospital would prove to be a limit-case of Whiggish sentimentality. The Whiggish sentimental narrative which engendered the Magdalen Hospital can be traced back most immediately to the sentimental novels of the 1740s—to the "romantic" plots of sentimental fiction rather than to any observable social reality. Embrace of a narrative, whose provenance was literary, for the legitimation of a project of social reform, would foreground the ideological tensions that underpinned this Whiggish sentimental discourse. The Magdalen Hospital of the late 1750s and 1760s, I will argue, presaged and perhaps even precipitated the moment when the "romantic," primitivist, and ultimately more pessimistic aspects of the discourse would cut adrift from their Whiggish moorings to be accepted as the new character of sentimentality. The hospital harbored the seeds of its own subsequent but brief decline in the 1780s and of its own ideological reformation later the same decade as a "sanctimonious sweatshop." This essay will chart the ideological origins and early history of the Magdalen Hospital in relation to this discursive sea change.
At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and …, Jan 1, 1999
Textual Practice, Jan 1, 1997
For many years,'the eighteenth century'meant political corruption, Augustan sat... more For many years,'the eighteenth century'meant political corruption, Augustan satire and the rise of the novelor, in the words of Sylvia Plath,'all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason'. 1 Academic accounts of the period were ...
English, Jan 1, 1997
Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravin... more Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravings, portraiture, and propa-ganda, Toni Bowers examines the eighteenth-century struggle to develop new ideals for virtuous motherhood. She shows how popular representations ...
Women S Writing, 2002
ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hall both in relation... more ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hall both in relation to the contemporary economic theories with which it engages, and in the light of the anonymous Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, upon which Scott's text is ...
At the Borders of the Human , 1999
In 1775 a translation of a French medical text was published in London entitled Nymphomania, or... more In 1775 a translation of a French medical text was published in London entitled Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus. This essay reads this eighteenth century text as part of a history of hysteria and in the context of contemporary debates about luxury and female desire.
This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hallboth in relation to the co... more This article examines the politics of female pleasure in Millenium Hallboth in relation to the contemporary economic theories with which it engages, and in the light of the anonymous Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-Houseupon which Scott's text is substantially modelled. ...
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, 2013
This article examines the relationship between Methodist and sentimental discourses in the secon... more This article examines the relationship between Methodist and
sentimental discourses in the second half of the eighteenth century
through the lens of John Wesley’s abridgment of Henry
Brooke’s sentimental novel The Fool of Quality (1765–70). John Wesley’s
abridgement was published in 1781 under the title the History of Henry
Earl of Moreland. This article asks who a worldly
Enlightenment text such as Brooke’s Fool might have seemed ripe for the
propagation of a Methodist theology that had abandoned the possibility
of any true virtue existing in the world. In considering the relationship
between Brooke’s Fool and Wesley’s abridgment, I hope to shed light
more generally on how sentimental ideas came retrospectively to be
identified with the conservative forces of Evangelical thought. I argue
that sentimentality and Methodism, though apparently in many ways
opposed, can be identified as part of a spectrum of ideas about human
nature and about political economy that spans them both.
Transits is the next horizon. Th e series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend recent ... more Transits is the next horizon. Th e series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend recent achievements in eighteenth-century studies and to publish work on any aspects of the literature, thought, and culture of the years 1650-1850. Without ideological or methodological restrictions, Transits seeks to provide transformative readings of the literary, cultural, and historical interconnections between Britain, Europe, the Far East, Oceania, and the Americas in the long eighteenth century, and as they extend down to present time. In addition to literature and history, such "global" perspectives might entail considerations of time, space, nature, economics, politics, environment, and material culture, and might necessitate the development of new modes of critical imagination, which we welcome. But the series does not thereby repudiate the local and the national for original new work on particular writers and readers in particular places in time continues to be the bedrock of the discipline.
The Eighteenth Century, Volume 48, Number 2, pp. 125-148, Aug 2007
Introduction Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of t... more Introduction
Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes, on August 10, 1758, was a product of the ascendancy of sentimental ideas in mid-eighteenth-century British culture. There is, however, a richer, more complex story which remains to be told about the relationship between sentimentality and the Magdalen House.
The adjective "sentimental," with reference to eighteenth-century cultural discourse, does not designate a single coherent literary or philosophical tradition, but a complex, evolving, and frequently contradictory set of discourses. To characterize the evolution of these ideas most starkly, at the start of the century "sentimental" is applied to the cultural productions associated with the Moral Sense philosophy of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. "Sentimental" here designates a Whiggish optimism about the role of the senses in the improvement and refinement of modern social manners, morals, and tastes. By the last three decades of the eighteenth century, however, the adjective "sentimental" designates predominantly a literature which has turned its back on the modern world. Sentimental literature of the late century is more insistent than its forebear on the native goodness of the human senses and particularly the heart, but here this goodness is no longer seen with any conviction as a tool for the improvement or refinement of society as a whole. Instead the native goodness of the heart is shown to be contaminated, exploited, or abused when it comes into contact with the world.
My contention in this essay is first that the founding of the Magdalen Hospital should be read as the cultural high-water mark of the earlier sentimental, Whiggish discourse of improvement. It was a moment at which the merchants and bankers who dreamt up the institution discovered, in their embrace of this sentimental discourse, the authority to assert a truce between virtue and commerce. They discovered the authority to assert, in the face of traditional Christian theology and classical models of political economy, that desire was not utterly incompatible with cultural probity. As I will argue later in this essay, the extraordinary popularity of the Magdalen Hospital throughout the 1760s and 1770s was material testimony to the authority of the Whiggish sentimental discourse and its power to reassure the public that even the most destructive of commercial appetites were really only the result of misunderstanding and miseducation.
My second contention in this essay is that the Magdalen Hospital would prove to be a limit-case of Whiggish sentimentality. The Whiggish sentimental narrative which engendered the Magdalen Hospital can be traced back most immediately to the sentimental novels of the 1740s—to the "romantic" plots of sentimental fiction rather than to any observable social reality. Embrace of a narrative, whose provenance was literary, for the legitimation of a project of social reform, would foreground the ideological tensions that underpinned this Whiggish sentimental discourse. The Magdalen Hospital of the late 1750s and 1760s, I will argue, presaged and perhaps even precipitated the moment when the "romantic," primitivist, and ultimately more pessimistic aspects of the discourse would cut adrift from their Whiggish moorings to be accepted as the new character of sentimentality. The hospital harbored the seeds of its own subsequent but brief decline in the 1780s and of its own ideological reformation later the same decade as a "sanctimonious sweatshop." This essay will chart the ideological origins and early history of the Magdalen Hospital in relation to this discursive sea change.
At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and …, Jan 1, 1999
Textual Practice, Jan 1, 1997
For many years,'the eighteenth century'meant political corruption, Augustan sat... more For many years,'the eighteenth century'meant political corruption, Augustan satire and the rise of the novelor, in the words of Sylvia Plath,'all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason'. 1 Academic accounts of the period were ...
English, Jan 1, 1997
Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravin... more Through detailed examination of a wide variety of novels, plays, sermons, songs, popular engravings, portraiture, and propa-ganda, Toni Bowers examines the eighteenth-century struggle to develop new ideals for virtuous motherhood. She shows how popular representations ...