INTERPRETATION AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Also by Joan H. Pittock

ABERDEEN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT (co-editor) THE ASCENDANCY OF TASTE: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton

Interpretation and Cultural History

Edited by

Joan H. Pittock Senior Lecturer in English

University of Aberdeen

and

Andrew Wear Lecturer in History of Medicine

Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

M MACMILLAN

© Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-52494-7

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First published 1991

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Interpretation and cultural history. I. Pittock, Joan H. II. Wear, A. Andrew 352.556094 ISBN 978-1-349-21274-3 ISBN 978-1-349-21272-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21272-9

Contents

List of Plates vii Acknowledgements xiv Notes on the Contributors XV

1 Introduction 1 Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear

2 Reflections on the Origins of Cultural History 5 Peter Burke

3 Cultural History in a New Key: Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve 25 George Rousseau

4 Bodies of Thought: Thoughts about the Body in Eighteenth-Century England 82 Roy Porter

5 The Representation of the Family in the Eighteenth Century: A Challenge for Cultural History 109 Ludmilla jorda11ova

6 'Intellectual Ornaments': Style, Function and Society in Some Instruments of Art 135 Martin Kemp

7 Inventing the Common Reader: Samuel Johnson and the Canon 153 Lawrence Lipking

8 Rewriting the Caribbean Past: Cultural History in the Colonial Context 175 Peter Hulme

vi Contents

9 Provincial Town Culture, 1640-80: Urbane or Civic? Jonathan Barry

10 Ignorance and Revolution: Perceptions of Social Reality in Revolutionary Marseilles, 1789-92 William Scott

11 The Emergence of a Modern Vernacular Culture in North-East Scotland Paul Dukes

198

235

269

List of Plates

Section I

1 Descartes' Nervous Man. 1662. French edition, facing titlepage.

2 The Tlzird Vision of Christoph Haizmann which Occurred while He was Most Seriously Ill. Source: Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MSS 14,084. Date: 1677. The Bavarian man Christoph Haizmann was seized in August 1677 with nervous convulsions and acute mental illness. The record of his derangement survives in a diary, nine paintings showing his visions while afflicted, and in dozens of statements made by priests and holy men, medics and lay people who observed his derangement. This is the third of the nine paintings and contains these words (translated from the German): 'The third time he [the Devil] appeared after one and a half years in this loathsome guise, with a book in his hand, which was full of sorcery and black magic. I was able to amuse myself with it, and drive away melancholy.' Haizmann's case was studied by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine in Schizophrenia 1677 (London, 1956).

3 Thomas Rowlandson, engraving of Justice, Philanthropy and Sensibility. ca. 1780. Notice 'Sensibility' on the right, personified with a haggard look and wracked by nervous illness. Tearful and sullen and possessed of straggly hair, she has mounted a candle on a muff on her left hand and holds a copy of a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in her right. Her left foot is wrapped up for the gout.

4 Thomas Rowlandson's Anatomy of Melancholy. 1808. Caption: 'Tis a Misery to be born, a pain to live, a trouble to die.' The old melancholic is seated in his chair before his fire on the right. Above are his pills and potions and three important signs adorn the walls: the skeleton portending imminent death; the portrait of Democritus referring to Burton (whose title-page of The Anatomy of Melancholy reads 'by Democritus

vii

viii List of Plates

Junior'); and a painting or drawing above the fireplace with snakes at the top containing an inscription reading 'Sorrow and grief,' and a dagger held by disembodied hands with another inscription reading 'in suffering is all.' A sheet titled 'Remedies against Discontents - Cure of jealousy' is pinned to the wall. At the table behind him are a man and woman enjoying wine and song, suggesting that lechery is the cure-all and the poor man's antidote to melancholy.

5 Portrait of Pierre Pomme. Frontispiece of the English translation of A Treatise on Hysterical and Hypochondriacal Diseases (London: Elmsly), 1777.

6 James Gillray's Following the Fashion, 9 December 1794. Two women of very dissimilar proportions, the thin one fashionable, the other obese and clearly unfashionable, yet each defining the extremity of fashion. Under the fashionable thin lady is written: 'St James's giving the TON. a Soul without a Body'; under the fat one, 'CHEAPSIDE aping the MODE. a Body without a Soul.'

7 Title-page of James Makittrick Adair's Treatise on Fashionable Diseases, Edinburgh, 1786.

8 Thomas Rowlandson's The Hypochondriac. 1788. Here, again, the hypochondriac is male, seated in illness and daydreaming: His visions in sequence from left to right: 1. A pagan male satyr with a goblet holding out the cup of libation and lust. 2. Another pagan Hercules/St George-like figure with his knife killing the serpent who is behind him. 3. A mad driver in a carriage filled with women, who seems to be abducting them, why or wither is not at all clear. 4. A huge hand holding out a gigantic knife - but with no body, so perhaps a paranoid vision and fear. 5. The upper half of a torso whose gender is unclear and who seems to be plunging or falling, perhaps even drowning. 6. The heads of two males in states of extreme fear, especially if read according to the principles of physiognomy and the temperaments. 7. An elderly hag holding out a rope and pistol for him to commit suicide. 8. Death in the form of a skeleton with an arrow about to pierce through his heart. 9. A dagger above his head also for him to end himself. His table is

List of Plates ix

littered with pills and potions and uneaten food, and his servant and the physician (identified by his wig and cane) mourn his sorry state in the right hand corner. The tetrameter verse attached underneath reads:

The Mind distemper' d - say what potent charm, Can Fancy's Spectre- breeding rage disarm? Physics prescription, art assails in vain, The dreadful phantoms fleating cross the brain!

Until with Esculapian skill, the sage M.D. Finds out at length by self taught palmistry The hopeless case- in the reluctant fee: Then, not in torture such a wretch to keep. One pitying bolus lays him sound asleep.

The box next to his chair may be filled with his important belongings and papers.

9 The Hypochondriac by John Atkinson (1775-1831), drawn at the end of the eighteenth century. Atkinson, like Rowlandson and Gillray, was one of the best-known caricaturists of the day. Here the male hypochondriac is viewed sitting in his parlor, having converted it into a sick man's ward, his bed near by and dressed as a hospital invalid. His hands clasped, he is cold and sick and praying, his eyes shut, and his mouth chewing on a pill whose identity is not clear in the engraving. A sheet of paper hangs over the table; he has been writing something and let it go. His dog's bone is on the floor but there is no dog; perhaps in his anxiety over his ailments he has let the dog die.

10 Lunatic in a Cell. ca. 1770. Engraving in the Huntington Library. The eyes suggest that he is a madman, the mouth, lips and teeth anguish and delusion. The position of his hands is significant, with his left hand holding his chest/intercostal diaphragm area and the right clutching his genital area. He has removed his breeches or undergarment, which now lies on the rack.

11 Madwoman in Terror, 1775, Mezzotint by W. Dickinson after a painting by Robert Edge Pine. Engraving in the Wellcome

X List of Plates

Institute in London. The portrait illuminates the female iconography of madness, in this instance a young woman of perhaps twenty or so whose wild hair is strung with straw, and whose eyeballs flash with terror and fear. A bandana is wrapped around her head; in fury she has torn the garment from her breast which now lies bare. A feathery or animal garment clings loosely around her, and she is chained and roped, evidence that she poses a threat to others and is dangerous to herself. Window high up in the left corner makes clear that this is a cell where she has been incarcerated.

12 Lavater's Physiognomy. An iconography of the male from the Holcroft 1793 translation, plate 4, n.p. No nervous figure here but notice the melancholic male at the bottom, especially when he is aligned with the madman and lunatic. His eyes and lips are crucially expressive, as in the iconography of the humours or temperaments.

13 Early nineteenth-century engraving of the temperaments, derived in part from LeBrun: lymphatic; sanguine; bilious; nervous. The expression of the eyes and lips provide the clue and the cheeks reflect the degree of passion. All are male because the temperaments generally were iconographically understood as masculine. The nervous male resembles a minister of state: driven, engrossed, professional, perhaps a statesmen or aristocrat who has been idolised and romanticised.

The above illustrations are reprinted by kind permission of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

Section II

1 Galileo's Objective Lens with Ivory Mount of 1677 by Vittorio Croster, Florence, Museo di Storia della Scienza.

2 Girolamo della Volpaia, Armillary Sphere, 1564, Florence, Museo di Storia della Scienza.

3 Giovanni Bologna, Astronomy, 1573, Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum.

List of Plates xi

4 Leonardo da Vinci, Draftsman drawing an Armillary Sphere on a Glass 'Window', Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codice Atlantico, f.lra.

5 Perspective Device by Tommaso Laureti, from I. Danti, Le due regale della prospettiva pratica, Rome, 1583.

6 Hemicylindrical Perspective Machine by Baldassare Lanci, from Danti, Le due regale.

7 Baldassare Lanci, Universal Surveying and Hemicylindrical Perspective Machine, 1557, Florence, Museo di Storia della Scienza.

8 Baldassare Lanci, Florentine Scene Design for 'La Vedova', 1569, Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe.

9 Antonio Santucci dalle Pomerance, Large Armillary Sphere, 1588-93, Florence, Museo di Storia della Scienza.

10 Ignazio Danti, with paintings by Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli), Ceiling of the Torre dei Venti, c. 1581, Rome, Vatican.

11 Ottaviano Mascherino, Lorenzo Sabbatini and Giovanni Antonio Vanosino da Varese, Ceiling of the Sala Bologna, 1575, Rome, Vatican.

12 Joost Aman, Portrait of Wenzel ]amnitzer, engraving.

13 Wenzel Jamnitzer, Composition of Geometrical Solids, from Perspectiva corporum regularium, Nuremberg, 1568.

14 Johannes Kepler, Geometrical Scheme for the Planetary Orbits, from Mysterium cosmographicum demonstratum per cinque copora geometrica, Tubingen, 1596.

15 Ludovico Cigoli, Components of the Universal Perspective Machine, from Prospettiva pratica, Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe.

16 Ludovico Cigoli, Universal Perspective Machine in Use, detail of title-page from Prospettiva Pratica.

xii List of Plates

17 Cigoli's Universal Perspective Machine, from Jean Frant;ois Niceron, La Perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle, Paris, 1638

18 Christoph Scheiner, Uses of the Pantograph, title-page from Pantographice, seu ars delineandi, Rome, 1631.

19 Sir Christopher Wren's Perspective Machine, from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, IV, 1669.

20 Drawing of a Physionotrace, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.

21 Physionotrace Portrait of P. H. Cochois by Bouchardy of Paris, Chalon-sur-Saone, Musee Nicephore Niepce.

22 Thomas Jefferson's Writing Machine, Monticello, Jefferson's Study.

23 Camera Lucida with Box, London, Science Museum.

24 Basil Hall, Camera Lucida Sketch of Sir Walter Scott and Abbotsford, Edinburgh, National Portrait Gallery.

25 Sir John Herschel, Camera Lucida Drawing of Tintern Abbey, 1829, Nash Collection.

26 Paul Sandby, A Sketching Party at Rosslyn Castle, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art.

27 Cornelius Varley's Graphic Telescope, London, Science Museum.

28 John Sell Cotman, Palais de Justice, Rouen, 1818, Art Market, 1978.

29 Sir Francis Ronalds, Perspective Machine in Operation, from Mechanical Perspective ... , London, 1838.

30 Lenticular Stereoscope of the Brewster Type, London, Science Museum.

List of Plates xiii

31 Zograscope or Optical Diagonal Machine, London, Science Museum.

32 Pierre Edmond Frere, The Zograscope New York, Brooklyn Museum.

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the generous sponsorship of the British Academy, of Waterstone's Ltd, and of BP, which enabled the Cultural History Group of the University of Aberdeen to hold its 1987 symposium.

xiv

JoAN H. PITTOCK

ANDREW WEAR

Notes on the Contributors

Jonathan Barry is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Exeter. He has published several articles on early modern Bristol, based on his doctoral dissertation, The Cultural Life of Bristol, 1640-1775, which he is currently revising for publication. He has edited the Tudor and Stuart volumes in the series Readers in Urban History and is currently editing a book on the middling sort, 1550-1800, for Macmillan. He is General Editor of Exeter Studies in History and active in Exeter's Centre for South-Western Historical Studies.

Peter Burke taught at the University of Sussex from 1962 to 1978 and is now Reader in Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His publications include Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy; Venice and Amsterdam; Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; and Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy.

Paul Dukes is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen where he has taught since 1964. He is the author of a wide range of books and articles on Russian, European and Comparative Hi­story. His most recent publication is The Last Great Game: USA versus USSR: Events, Conjunctures, Structures. Together with John Dunkley he has edited Culture and Revolution, a collection of essays drawn largely from the 1988 Aberdeen Cultural History Group Conference.

Peter Hulme was educated at the Universities of Leeds and Essex. Since 1979 he has taught in the Department of Literature at Essex, where he was involved with the Essex Sociology of Literature Conferences (1976--84) and the publication of their proceedings. His articles have appeared in Literature and History; Forum for Modern Language Studies; Critique of Anthropology; New Formations and he is the author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.

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xvi Notes on Contributors

Ludmilla Jordanova is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Essex, where she has taught since 1980. She is the author of Lamarck and Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Me­dicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. She edited and contributed to Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature. Among her current interests are the cultural history of the biomedical sciences and the family in eighteenth-century Europe. She is presently writing a book on the latter.

Martin Kemp has been, since 1981, Professor of the Department of Art History at the University of St Andrews. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute, Univers­ity of London. He has been a lecturer at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia and at the University of Glasgow. He was Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge, 1987-8 and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1988. His publications include Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, for which he won the Miller Prize, and The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. He is the current Chairman of the Association of Art Historians.

Lawrence Lipking is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, a post he has held since 1979. Previously he taught at Princeton University. His teaching and professional interests include eighteenth-century English Literature, Compa­rative Literature, Women's Studies and Romantic Poetry. His publications include The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England; The Life of the Poet, for which he won the Christina Gaus Award; and Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition.

Joan H. Pittock is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen and is Convener of the Cultural History degree. She was founder-editor of the Journal of the British Society for 18th Century Studies in 1978 and President of the British Society for 18th Century Studies 1980-2. Her publications include The Ascendancy of Taste. She has recently written on Chatterton, Boswell and the Scottish Enlightenment and is currently completing her account of the Oxford Chair of Poetry.

Roy Porter is Senior Lecturer at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London and was, 1988-9, William Andrews

Notes on Contributors xvii

Clark Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of, among others, A Social History of London; English Society in the Eighteenth Century; and Mind Forg'd Manacles. He is currently working on a history of Bethlem.

George Rousseau is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, having been Professor of English 1970-9. Among his many books are English Poetic Satire: Wyatt to Byron (with Neil Rudentine); Organic Form: The Life of an Idea; The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Science (with Roy Porter); Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (with Roy Porter). He has been Osgood Fellow in Literature at Princeton University, 1965-6, Senior Fulbright Research Professor at the Sir Thomas Browne Institute at Leiden, The Netherlands, 1983; and Clark Library Professor at the University of California 1985-6.

William Scott is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen and a member of the University's Cultural History Group. A specialist in French History, especially the Enlighten­ment and the French Revolution, he is the author of Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseille and has recently finished a work on attitudes to certain key problems of reform as expressed in the unpublished essays submitted for the concours of French provincial academies in the period 1774-93.

Andrew Wear lectures in the History of Medicine at University College, London, and the Wellcome Institute. He has written on renaissance medicine and early modern social history.