Thanks in part to the influence of Friedrich Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon, a German encyclopedia inaugurated in 1796, biographies of the living had become unremarkable in Europe’s encyclopedias by the early nineteenth century. Today, they are pervasive. Between 1674 and 1750, they remained rare and controversial in the alphabetical ancestors of the modern encyclopedia. In this article, I explain why, and show how encyclopedists’ practices evolved in the period in which the historical dictionary and other alphabetical proto-encyclopedias burst onto the European literary scene, that is, the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. I begin by exploring early encyclopedists’ motives for not treating the living. My second section then examines the most influential historical dictionaries as well as the encyclopedia that best covered the living, tracking how practices regarding contemporary biographies evolved. Finally, I consider some of the broader social and cultural changes, both internal and external to the history of encyclopedia-making, that are reflected in encyclopedias’ growing coverage of the living and the recently deceased.

Book Review| January 01 2021 London, by Accident Spence, Craig. Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016). Pp. xii + 273. $115 Seth Stein LeJacq Seth Stein LeJacq Duke University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2021) 45 (1): 114–120. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-8794000 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Seth Stein LeJacq; London, by Accident. Eighteenth-Century Life 1 January 2021; 45 (1): 114–120. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-8794000 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEighteenth-Century Life Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Religion and the Georgian world of goods are rarely discussed in tandem. The modern history of consumerism is secular in conceptualization. The booming literature on the Georgian world of goods has engaged only glancingly with religious ideas. A series of prejudices about the Hanoverian Church has militated against sustained inquiry into the religious challenges of the Georgian world of goods. The strenuously Christian are conspicuously absent from the history of consumerism. The fashion victim and shrewd consumer matron have their historians, but what of the pious and judgmental? This essay brings two often disconnected schools of historical inquiry into conversation, through an exploration of the spiritual and material for two devout female Anglicans: Katherine Plymley (1758–1829) and Anna Larpent (1758–1832). It charts the negotiation of material ambivalence and the performance of both studied restraint and social status.

Literary historians of the long eighteenth century have rarely considered nonbook publications in their efforts to construct narratives of canons, the reception of texts, and the reputation of authors. They have traditionally studied editions, their editors and publishers, and, more recently, the paratexts that provided glosses to help readers make sense of the text. The focus on the "literary" as opposed to "literacy" has artificially demarcated one field of cultural production from a significantly larger realm of print culture where the literary was frequently subsumed by a large body of material that facilitated cultural, textual, and visual literacy. Literary historians have thus privileged the printed codex in the shape of the textual edition at the cost of a complex media economy that engaged with literature and promoted cultural literacy. This media economy includes a hitherto largely uncharted literary material culture that thrived throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. It reflected the popularity of texts and, in turn, catered to demand for such items as chairs embroidered with such fashionable visual media as William Kent's illustrations of John Gay's Fables, porcelain featuring iconic scenes derived from prints illustrating such popular works as James Thomson's The Seasons, Salomon Gessner's Death of Abel, and J. W. von Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, and fans embellished with

While John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, seems to be mostly obsessed with sexual activity, it is actually just as much about the burgeoning free-market capitalist economy of mid- eighteenth-century England. In the explicit references to precise amounts of money, focus on characters’ financial situation in their introductions, and extensive economic metaphors, the novel drives home the point that capitalist economic structures determine all other social and affective structures, including sex.

Book Review| September 01 2018 Fragonard and the Académie Royale: The Artist and the Institution Reconsidered Williams, Hannah. Académie Royale, A History in Portraits (London: Routledge, 2015). Pp. xx + 358. 123 ills. $120 hardcover. $49.95 paperStein, Perrin; Dupuy-Vachey, Marie-Anne; Williams, Eunice; Brosna, Kelsey. Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant: Works from New York Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016). Pp. xix + 301. 254 ills. $65 Adelheid M. Gealt Adelheid M. Gealt Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2018) 42 (3): 64–70. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-6988773 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Adelheid M. Gealt; Fragonard and the Académie Royale: The Artist and the Institution Reconsidered. Eighteenth-Century Life 1 September 2018; 42 (3): 64–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-6988773 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEighteenth-Century Life Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review Essay You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| September 01 2018 Appearing Nightly: Overexpression, Overexposure, and Celebrity on the Eighteenth-Century Stage Fawcett, Julia. Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2016). Pp. 304. $65 Misty G. Anderson Misty G. Anderson University of Tennessee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Eighteenth-Century Life (2018) 42 (3): 76–80. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-6988795 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Misty G. Anderson; Appearing Nightly: Overexpression, Overexposure, and Celebrity on the Eighteenth-Century Stage. Eighteenth-Century Life 1 September 2018; 42 (3): 76–80. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-6988795 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEighteenth-Century Life Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay asks us to rethink the evidentiary basis for the claims we make in historical scholarship and criticism. How certain can we be of what we think we know? What evidence do we have, and can it be tested or otherwise verified? Many biographical questions cannot be answered with any confidence. Was Jonathan Swift a virgin? Opinions differ, and evidence is lacking. In theater history huge gaps in performance records prior to the advent of daily newspaper ads post 1700 leave us ignorant of what was performed on more than 80 percent of nights in Restoration London. In some realms we can dig up lawsuit testimony, but plaintiff and defendant rarely agree. What seems plausible is not always true, and the improbable can sometimes be proven. Attribution is a particularly knotty problem, as the horrible messes in the canons of Defoe and Fielding remind us. Memoirs are treacherous, even if not demonstrably laced with lies, and the temptation to use a bad source in the absence of any other needs to be resisted. Reliability must always be questioned, and if possible, tested. We should always remember that when trying to answer a historicist question, we may find ourselves at any of five points in a spectrum stretching from (1) what we believe is proven fact to (5) what may well be irresolvable indeterminacy. A level below “fact” is (2) high probability. Two steps down we have (3) plausible but not proven. Below that we have (4) incertitude, where the evidence is sufficiently limited or conflicted that no sound judgment can be rendered. When we get down to (5) indeterminacy, the reason is usually either complete lack of necessary evidence or fatally contradictory evidence. To fail to admit the inadequacy or unreliability of evidence is to build on rotten foundations. If our scholarship is to be anything more than wishful thinking, we must be prepared to ask ourselves, and to demand of our colleagues, “How do you know that? Prove it!”

This article argues that Charlotte Lennox innovates with nonstandard narrative techniques to conjure up lively new discursive communities. In her most famous work, The Female Quixote (1752), Lennox experiments with the formal feature of chapter titles, whose insouciant, disembodied voice emerges as the text's most distinct and powerful narrative force. This voice presents itself as corrective and collective, demonstrating the benefits of a community and redefining the authority of the author. In her less well-known periodical, The Lady's Museum (1760-61), Lennox introduces an eidolon, “The Trifler,” whose lively voice recalls The Female Quixote's chapter titles. As the periodical continues, the Trifler's individual voice gives way to an even livelier assortment of voices, which debate the Trifler's right to her “title”. In both works, Lennox explores the tension between instruction and delight. Her writing offers far more than a straightforward, laudable project of female education, as she imagines pleasing discursive communities in which meaning in general, and “titles” in particular, are debated, challenged, and in flux.