"Occom's Arrow" explores the nature of Indigenous personhood in eighteenth century America. Focusing on Jonathan Spilsbury's 1768 mezzotint portrait of Mohegan minister Samson Occom, the essay examines how cultural intermediaries such as Occom challenged widespread assumptions concerning the opposition of "Christian" and "Indian." In Occom's portrait, as well as in his life, we witness the emergence of a strategic enterprise dedicated to producing a colonial identity at once Indigenous and "civilized." The essay thus proposes a model for reading the complex and contested quality of Indigenous lives and writings under conditions of settler colonialism.

Reviewed by: Paul Rapin Thoyras and the Art of Eighteenth-Century Historiography by Miriam Franchina Michaël Green Miriam Franchina, Paul Rapin Thoyras and the Art of Eighteenth-Century Historiography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2021). Pp. 352; 2 b/w illus. $99.99 paper. The Huguenot scholar Paul Rapin de Thoyras (1661–1725) is known to historians for his publication Histoire d'Angleterre, in ten volumes (1724–1727). Yet, the author himself was the subject of a rather small number of biographical studies, with the only major one dating to the nineteenth century. In recent years, Rapin resurfaced in scholarship in a series of articles dedicated to his literary output and his career.1 No proper scientific biography of him has been written. Yet, Rapin is a fascinating figure, who, through the publication of his Histoire, influenced generations of historians and those interested in history. It is precisely this aspect of Rapin's life that Miriam Franchina analyzes in the published version of her doctoral dissertation written at the University of Halle in Germany. She focuses on how Rapin constructed his work, in particular on his impartial approach to history, something that has, until now, escaped the scrutiny of researchers, some of whom branded him as a Whig historian. In her book, Franchina analyzes various sources, which show how Rapin worked in order to establish himself as a man of letters. The author sees the publication of Histoire d'Angleterre as Rapin's attempt to become a recognized member of the Republic of Letters, which would in its turn grant him sufficient income to maintain his family. Particularly interesting is how Rapin maintained partial anonymity of his publications within the journals of Jean Le Clerc, to which he contributed a large number of articles, only having his proper name disclosed when the publication of his major work was imminent. The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introduction sets the background to the study and drafts its major goals as outlined above. Chapter 1 focuses on establishing the structure and the function of the Republic of Letters, with particular emphasis on how various "citizens" of the Republic wrote history, as well as the novelty of Rapin's approach, which, according to the author, was heavily influenced by Le Clerc. Chapter 2 sets a brief outline of Rapin's life prior to the beginning of writing his Histoire and details the events leading to his decision to engage in this major project. Although Rapin had at the time (1690s) no specific credits to his name as historian or intellectual, he was regarded as such by his peers, and actively participated in the intellectual milieu of the Huguenot refugees in The Hague. Chapter 3 is dedicated entirely to Rapin's innovative approach to history—his impartiality. Through careful analysis of Rapin's text, the [End Page 335] author solidly establishes that Rapin was conscious about his method, and was certainly not a journalist of limited thinking ability as Hugh Trevor-Roper branded him in his studies. The impact of Rapin on writing and understanding history both during his time and beyond is discussed in chapter 4. The reception of his work is traced over a long period of time and attention is given to the way that Rapin was perceived. The final chapter focuses on the Enlightenment and its influence on history writing in the eighteenth century. Rapin's approach is contrasted with that of, among others, Hume and Voltaire. Several questions remain open. One of the biggest mysteries of Rapin's life, which is impossible to solve due to the lack of primary sources is how, already in the 1690s, while living in The Hague, Rapin became part of a circle of publishing scholars, without having any publications to his own name. There is a missing link between this chapter of his life, during which he was the tutor to Henry Bentinck, Viscount Woodstock between 1693 and 1702, and the year 1707 when he finally became engaged in researching and writing his Histoire. Another question, which is beyond the scope of this book, left unanswered is how Rapin made his living after quitting his tutorship position, as the articles...

Show Me the Bibliography:Indigeneity and the Eighteenth Century Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) What is Indigenous about the eighteenth century? What is Indigenous about this special issue? What is the difference between, on the one hand, studies of the eighteenth century that trace European imperial expansion and thus necessarily talk about Indigenous peoples and, on the other, whatever is happening in this collection—or indeed, whatever is happening specifically in these two longer essays by N. S. 'Ilaheva Tua'one and Julia Lum? If the mere presence of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and worlds as objects of study or as topics of focus or as strands of interest was a satisfactory answer to these questions, it would be entirely plausible to argue that a great deal of existing scholarship about the eighteenth century could have been included in these pages, and that a special issue like this is surely redundant. An alternative answer could be that all of the people who have produced the scholarship are Indigenous—but that's not the case in this volume. Still another could be that the scholarship engages Indigenous language archives, or perhaps is written in Indigenous languages—but those aren't the cases here either. [End Page 255] Perhaps the answer is more about argument and method than about topic—that the scholarship in this special issue seeks to decenter Eurocentrism by centering Indigenous perspectives, although what such grand (and laudable) ambitions look like on the page, and in the review process, quickly becomes subjective and complex. How much less Cook does an essay need before it becomes Indigenous? Does it count if the focus is on how Cook and his peers and their crews engaged with Indigenous peoples, and if it does, how is that actually about Indigeneity and not just about non-Indigenous perspectives? How does one center "perspectives" of Indigenous peoples without resorting to stereotypes or generalization? And, for the purposes of this journal, how might one account for Eurocentrism (decentered or otherwise) or for Indigenous perspectives using the tools—and people—available through current academic conventions for ensuring and assuring rigor? A response I would proffer, which is less of a compromise and more of a stance than it might first appear, is: "all of these things and more." These questions—and my answer—may seem circular, but they sit at the heart of Indigenous literary studies and Indigenous Studies more broadly, and they provoke us to think carefully about the shapes and stakes of our research.1 None of the possible answers suggested in the previous paragraph is enough on its own, but together they weave something tangible. I use the metaphor of weaving here quite deliberately. This lineup of considerations is neither a bullet-point list of things for which keen (or cynical) scholars should aim, nor a tool for evaluating the degree—the quantum—of "Indigeneity" (or "engagement with Indigeneity") in scholarly work. Rather, it is the intersection and interlocking nature—the mutual reciprocity—of these answers that matters. In this issue, and particularly in the pair of longer essays, we find a constellation of researchers, approaches, topics, and archives. Placing pressure on any one essay to critically engage Indigeneity in the eighteenth century in its entirety would miss the point not only of a special issue but also of the broader calls for engagement with the longstanding critical work of Indigenous Studies scholarship. We might look, then, to the broader cloth in which these essays and this issue are woven: to bibliographies which direct us to broader conversations in which the researchers are enmeshed; to the positioning of authors in institutional and Indigenous contexts; to those gorgeous points where individual pieces here speak to each other in ways that stitch together communities, texts, questions, and archives that are usually separated by contemporary disciplinary configurations as well as by empire-based and state-based networks. We can hold this special issue that foregrounds Indigeneity alongside similar volumes in journals that have overlapping interests in the period or topic.2 We can consider the likelihood that each of these pieces will move around so many Indigenous kitchen tables, desks, and social media messaging platforms as Indigenous scholarly...

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson: Correspondence of Richardson's Final Years, 1755–1761 by Shelley King and John B. Pierce Louise Curran Shelley King and John B. Pierce, eds., The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson: Correspondence of Richardson's Final Years, 1755–1761 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 344. $121.00 cloth. Richardson did much to develop the capacities of the familiar letter in the eighteenth century, eulogizing its ability to make "distance, presence." Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor, in their General Editors' Preface to this volume, point out the obvious interest of Richardson's letters as those of a "practising epistolary novelist who thought longer and harder than any contemporary about the letter as a form" (ix). This is the eleventh and penultimate volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Richardson. The edition is not arranged strictly chronologically; instead, as the General Editors explain, "the profoundly transactional or dialogic nature of the epistolary sources involved … argue strongly for the retention … of a principle of organization, correspondence by correspondence, that was first established and implemented by Richardson himself" (xvii). Whilst other individual volumes print Richardson's letters to and from Aaron Hill, Lady Bradshaigh, Edward Young, and other prominent correspondents and members of their respective circles, and therefore build a sense of dialogue between participants, volumes such as this are necessarily diffuse. Some themes can be perceived: an abiding interest in the work of fledging women writers (such as Sarah Fielding and Frances Sheridan) and other contemporary writers (most notably a letter decrying Sterne's Tristram Shandy); musings on past fictional work and the possibility of further production; commentary on the printing projects of these latter years; and increasing complaints about the inability to write at greater length, due to illness and debilitating circumstances. King and Pierce characterize this period in Richardson's life and work as offering a dual narrative of progression and disruption: on the one hand, he was busily expanding his business and completing various projects, and on the other, he was embroiled in conflicts which interfered with his "Spirit of Scribbling." During the years 1755 to Richardson's death in 1761, he began writing a fragmentary "History of Mrs Beaumont" that may have been the beginning of a new novel; published his Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments … Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison; built new business premises in Salisbury Court; revised Urania Hill Johnson's novel Almira (she rejected most of the revisions by the time it was published after Richardson's death in 1761); printed Young's Conjectures on Original Composition; and made further revisions of Pamela and Clarissa. The author of some of the most prolix novels in the history of English literature was clearly not idle, though he was slowing down. Richardson also started to prepare an edition of his selected correspondence with a view to bringing out a German edition (as proposed by the Leipzig bookseller Erasmus Reich). Although Richardson eventually rejected this idea, during these years he continued preparing his letters for possible publication after his death. Richardson's work as author, editor, mentor, and printer in these final years (as King and Pierce helpfully delineate in their introductory essay) binds the contents of this miscellaneous volume together. As a collection, these letters, perhaps more so than any others in the Richardson epistolary archive, capture the [End Page 145] often-relentless emphasis he put upon progression in his quest to make his novels "more perfect" (SR to Mary Watts, 9 April 1755, 28). After 1755, Richardson began reviewing each of his three novels, Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, as a canon of works, with individual correspondents such as Lady Bradshaigh and Mark Hildesley offering improvements and corrections to his originals. Whether Grandison was completed or unfinished became a distinct point of criticism, which galvanized opinion on either side of the debate. The phrase "more perfect" recurs in a letter sent from Richardson's daughters to Lady Bradshaigh as late as March 1761 (he died on 4 July that year) requesting that she send their father her annotated copies of Pamela and...

Reviewed by: Persia and the Enlightenment ed. by Cyrus Masroori et al. Suzanne Marchand Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen, eds., Persia and the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; Voltaire Foundation in association with Liverpool University Press). Pp. 368; 1 illus. $99.99 paper. It is good to have a volume that takes on the eighteenth-century European encounter with Persia—and does not focus all of its attention on Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Edited by Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen, all professors of political science, and composed of nine essays plus a brief introduction, the volume treats topics such as French representations of the brilliant and murderous military leader Nadir Shah; Voltaire and Diderot's use of Persia; and varying deployments of the "Ghebres," a Zoroastrian sect. Although some essays mention debates about ancient Persia—for example, Marta García-Alonso's "Persian Theology and the Checkmate of Christian Theology: Bayle and the Problem of Evil" features Henri Bayle's philosophical tussle with Zoroastrian and Manichean dualism—for the most part, the volume's emphasis is on discussions of philosophers and travelers' encounters with contemporary Persia. The general line taken by all the essayists is well expressed by Mannies: "[L]ike the centuries before it, the eighteenth century appropriated what it imagined to be the Orient for its own ends. Only secondarily did the Orient function as an object of genuine inquiry" (193). The focus on what Masroori, in his essay, calls the "domestic utility" (156) of Persia, however, does not mean that the volume recapitulates Edward Said's all-encompassing portrayal of European "orientalism" as the invention of would-be imperial conquerors. On the contrary, the volume properly refuses to generalize, noting that while Enlightened intellectuals and travelers narrated Persia in ways that suited their own projects, these projects—and their inventors—were too diverse to be described as exhibiting one "gaze," much less an imperialist one. One of the most useful essays in the volume is Cyrus Masroori and John Christian Laursen's opening essay, "The background: European knowledge of Persia before the Enlightenment." Masroori and Laursen note that the handful of classical sources and Renaissance esoterica expands at the turn of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, as a handful of Italian and English travelers, missionaries, and commercial and political emissaries gradually becomes a larger fact-collecting throng, showing that some Europeans, at least, did treat Persia as a serious object of inquiry, even if (of course) they saw this world through Europe-tinted glasses. [End Page 132] The more who visited, the more, and usually better, detail resulted, and the authors do a nice job of listing and briefly characterizing the major travelogues in print by about 1715. We do not hear in this essay, or in this volume as a whole, anything about traffic moving in the other direction: the massive trade in Persian and Ottoman manuscripts that commenced in the sixteenth century and became a flood by the eighteenth. Those works were chiefly of interest to Europe's (mostly) stay at home "orientalists," some of whom became skillful and more sympathetic readers of Islamic scientific, poetic, philosophical, and grammatical texts. But these manuscripts, too, formed the backdrop to Enlightened thinking about Persia and the Ottoman lands, some theological, some (like Bayle's philosophy) Euroskeptical and religiously radical, some antiquarian, and some produced purely for entertainment. Of course, there is always more to add to any collected volume, but Persia and the Enlightenment might have offered readers a fuller picture of what made up the "Persia" known to Europeans in this period had two further essays been included, one on the availability and circulation of Persian manuscripts and a second on Persian poetry in eighteenth-century Europe. A reviewer cannot hope to analyze each essay in a collection, but this reader found particularly interesting John Marshall's "Religious tolerance, intolerance, and absolutism in Safavid Persian and their representation in early Enlightenment European travel literature." Marshall points out that while European travelers were aware of Shi'ite animosity towards Sunni Muslims and the "multitude of sects of Mahometans" in Persia (60), for the most part, at least in...

Reviewed by: The Convent of Pleasure by Hannah Cowley Angelina Del Balzo Hannah Cowley The Convent of Pleasure. ERRATA An online reading presented by Red Bull Theater in New York, NY in collaboration with R/18 Collaborative, presented live and recorded on Zoom on March 14, 2022 and available on Video On Demand from March 14–18, 2022. Directed by Kim Weild. With Heidi Armbruster (Madame Mediator), Becca Ayers (Servant to Lady Happy/M. Facil), Talley Gale (Lady Virtue/M. Advisor), Cloteal Horne (Lady Happy), Anthony Michael Martinez (Take Pleasure/Ambassador), Rami Margron (Princess/Prince), Maria-Christina Oliveras (Lady Amorous/M. Courtly), and Josh Tyson (Dick/Mimic). Program Notes by Liza Blake (University of Toronto). Even as theaters in North America are beginning to resume traditional live and in-person programming, Zoom theater has not gone away, and there are signs that online staged readings and productions will continue with more frequency and higher professionalism than before the pandemic. Red Bull Theater, a New York company that specializes in performing lesser-known classic drama, continues its robust programming of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama by women from the last two years, productions that have included benefit readings of Frances Burney's The Woman-Hater and Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (reviewed in Eighteenth-Century Studies 54.4, Summer 2021), now joined by Margaret Cavendish's closet drama The Convent of Pleasure. The March 2022 production embraced Cavendish's experimental approach to dramatic form as well as the play's inventive depiction of gender presentation and desire. This production of The Convent of Pleasure, presented in collaboration with the R/18 Collective, a group of eighteenth-century theater scholars dedicated to "re-activating Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre for the twenty-first century,"1 is one of the most high-profile productions of the group since its founding in 2019. As universities are more than ever emphasizing public engagement, the R/18 Collective suggests one effective possibility open to theater scholars. Liza Blake, [End Page 125] co-director of the Digital Cavendish Project, served as the primary interlocutor for this iteration of Red Bull's usual robust supporting programming. In addition to providing the program notes, Blake introduced the form and content of the play to its nonacademic audience in a five-minute video introduction with director Kim Weild that related Cavendish's dramatic work with that of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, two frequently staged dramatists at Red Bull. Blake highlighted Cavendish's thematic exploration of the seeming difference between the natural and the unnatural, a focus of the plot and of the play's metatheatrical conventions. This production was also publicized by a panel discussion, "The Closet or the Stage? A Conversation about Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure," that was hosted by the R/18 Collective a week before the live performance, at which Misty G. Anderson, Liza Blake, Julie Crawford, and Kristina Straub explained matters including the eighteenth-century "closet" and its relationship to the public stage, Cavendish's Royalist circles, and women playwrights after Cavendish. (Anderson also served as the production's uncredited dramaturg.) The format of the panel and the energy and insight with which the panelists conversed resulted in a lively post-panel Q&A, exemplifying successful engagement beyond the academy with eighteenth-century drama and encouraging future readings and future productions. In her pre-show conversation with the audience, director Kim Weild emphasized the ways that Cavendish pushed drama forward as a genre, and the production emphasized this innovation by creatively making the most of the Zoom format. The opening minutes of the play, in which Lady Happy's suitors bemoan their unsuccessful attempts to woo various women, were projected in black and white, with background images from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prints. As Lady Happy began to describe the appearance of the convent through the seasons, the screen changed to color, as when Dorothy steps into the technicolor world of Oz, and the interior backgrounds became colorful photographs from seventeenthcentury palaces such as Versailles. The production did not return to the colorless landscape of the play's opening, subtly pushing the audience to register that the play's conclusion in...

From Periphery To Center In Early American Historiography James Sidbury (bio) When Richard S. Dunn published Sugar and Slaves in 1972, the study of Anglo America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was very different. During the 1950s, the William and Mary Quarterly, the flagship journal for the study of British-colonial American history, published roughly twenty-eight articles or substantial notes on colonial New England. It devoted two to the Caribbean. During the 1960s the number of significant pieces addressing Caribbean history grew to seven, but there were fully fifty on colonial New England. By comparison, during the 2010s, the Quarterly published thirty significant studies of the Caribbean, as compared to eighteen on colonial New England. Sugar and Slaves was instrumental in effecting this change, but its influence did not appear immediately. The 1970s saw eight Caribbean articles in the Quarterly, the 1980s eight more, and the 1990s only eleven. It was not until the first decade of the 2000s, when nineteen-and-a-half essays on the Caribbean were published, that the reconceptualization of the British colonial world that Richard Dunn had done so much to initiate made an indelible imprint on the field's most prominent journal.1 The lag reflects a couple of different things. On the most obvious level, historical scholarship has a long gestation period. It takes time for an influential book to be read by and begin to affect the research projects of undergraduate [End Page 21] students, and even longer for those undergraduates to go to graduate school and longer still before they begin publishing. But the lag also reflects a less obvious and counter-intuitive effect of the power and influence of Sugar and Slaves. As Carla Gardina Pestana noted in a 2012 review of three "New Histories of the Early Caribbean," Dunn's book was long assumed to tell us "all we needed to know about the early Caribbean."2 His careful reconstruction of the social history of the seventeenth-century planter class includes clear narratives of the colonial occupation of the different islands. It also traces the political factions and struggles that emerged among the islands' elite planters as they became incredibly wealthy by forcing enslaved Africans to grow and process sugar. The book is beautifully written and thus fun to read, a standard not always met by other examples of the New Social History. Sugar and Slaves has long been required reading in graduate seminars throughout the United States, and it immediately created a scholarly consensus about the previously underappreciated importance of the Caribbean to Britain's American colonial project. Everyone who read it agreed that more work needed to be done, but it may have been too easy to be satisfied with how much Dunn had already accomplished. Many (by which I mean me, but I don't think I was alone) found themselves calling in asides at academic conferences for new studies of the Caribbean, and then returning to their work on British societies on the North American mainland. Dunn had already told us so much. Such was the standing of Sugar and Slaves by the early 2000s. Its ascendance in a historiography unaccustomed to paying attention to the West Indies probably benefitted from Dunn's background. He did not begin his career working on the Caribbean. His first book had been squarely within the mainstream of early American history at the time—a study not only of early New England, but of the Winthrop family no less. He followed that with a book on Europe's Wars of Religion, which appeared as a volume in the highly visible Norton History of Modern Europe.3 Sugar and Slaves was not the work of an outsider storming the New England-centered establishment; it was produced by a fully vetted member of that establishment teaching at an Ivy League university. There is no way to know how much that contributed to the immediate acceptance of the book's then slightly heretical claim for the centrality of the West Indies—perhaps the clarity of the argument and the unimpeachable depth of Dunn's research would have won the day on their own. But his scholarly pedigree didn't hurt...

The article considers the spatial typology of the garden as a critical case study to expand our understanding of how gender and space intersected in early-modern ideology. Focusing on the transformation of German garden discourse during the long eighteenth century, it explores how both male and female authors instrumentalized the motif of the garden in their efforts to affirm or critique gendered social positions. The selected material, spanning from oeconomic literature to proto-feminist writings, challenges the notion that gender norms were exclusively framed against the backdrop of "private" homes and "public" streets, and sheds light on hitherto unexplored processes and narratives through which spatial structures became inscribed into modern gender relations.