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Department of History

Suggestions for our extra weeks

If any of the many topics we skip over during the first term attract your attention, please let me know. You're welcome to suggest general topics, specific texts, questions you would like to consider, or any combination thereof. As suggestions come in, I will check the viability of running a seminar on them (i.e. does the library have appropriate resources, and is there a suitable (set of) primary text(s)) and if viable add them to the below. These seminars will be run in weeks 15, 19 and 20.

My current plan is to run each of these weeks in the normal manner. However there is room for innovation and your input here, too. For instance, last year my students enjoyed a 3-hour session as a whole group which consisted of a short lecture followed by a few sets of "group work" (with you defining the groups yourselves)- obviously this included breaks and drinks/snacks were supplied. Or- we could have some of you take the "lecture" as a group or series of individuals, probably with me spending 10 minutes at the end linking things together. Or anything else you would like, as long as you can convince me it will work.

All this will be discussed towards the end of the autumn term- but please make your suggestions earlier either by e-mail (D dot C dot Beck at warwick dot ac dot uk) or by popping in during my office hours.

To add: "political economy", "Financial and personal credit", "The meanings of corruption", "writing morality"

Rhetoric and "Plain Speaking"

Presentation: To what extent was "plain speaking" rhetorical?sprat

Primary texts: Sprat, History of the Royal Society, "Their manner of discourse", part 2 section XX

Secondary text: Peter Dear, 'Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society', Isis 76.2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 144-161

Seminar Questions:

  • Why did 'new scientists' prefer plain speaking?
  • What was the relationship between science and politics in the late seventeenth century?


Erotica and Pornography

Primary text- any one of:the school of venus

  • The school of venus, or, The Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules of Practice (1680), in Mudge (ed.), When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature, pp. 1-58
  • The Whore's Rhetorick, Calculated to the Meridian of London, and conformed to the rules of art (1683)- EEBO
  • The Cabinet of Venus Unlocked, and her secrets laid open. Being a translation... [of] Latin Authors never before in English (1658)- EEBO
  • The Present State of Betty-Land (1684)- EEBO

Secondary text: Manuela Mourão, 'The representation of Female Desire in early modern pornographic texts', Signs 24.3 (Spring 1999), pp. 573-602- available online via JSTOR

Seminar Questions:

  • What was the relationship between erotica/pornography and politics?
  • What were the aims of the author or the primary text you read?

Women's Writing

Primary texts: Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder (1679) and The Female Tatler at http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/female_tatler/issue67.html for December 7-9 1709women

Secondary text: Susan Wiseman, 'Women's Poetry' in N.H.Keeble (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (2001) - available as a library e-text

Seminar questions:

  • Is the Female Tatler a good example of the periodical press in the early eighteenth century?
  • What was Lucy Hutchinson aiming to achieve through her writing?


Life-Writing

Primary texts: Aubrey on Hobbes; Samuel Pepys, Diary; Beadle, John, The journal or diary of a thankful Christian (1656) and Margaret Cavendish's autobiographypepys

Secondary text: selections from S.Greenblatt Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980)

Seminar questions:

  • How were ideas of the "self" expressed in the period?
  • How typical was the diary of Samuel Pepys of seventeenth century diaries?