Newtonianism and Pope and Descartes n stuff

So, it appears that the worldviews of Descartes and Newton were fighting for power over the period. Not sure what belonged where, but generally I think the idea is a world that can be explained and a world that is less about god than man.

Newton: Math, experiment, mechanistic - but also with fluids and invisible gases, Gravity really was a big deal, and ideas about how things had density and pull
Descartes: Reason, induction, mechanistic with no invisible stuff

Pope epitaph on Newton ... "Nature and Nature's Law, lay hid in night / God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light", Pope was also interested in gravity and gravitas - and he and Swift were unhappy with the dull pedantry of minor scientists. Fight between ancients and moderns and between prose and poetry writers. (See www.ourcivilization.com/smartboard/shop/hornecj/litsci.htm for more). So is wit and poetry an attempt to balance prosaic study of nature - art against science?

EME classes

Early Modern England
    Tudor to Hannover
 

Women in Early Modern Europe
   the Saint, the Witch, the Wife, and the Widow

Women in the Era of Revolutions


Women in public 18th culture class

John Styles. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven Yale University Press, 2007. Illustrations. xi + 432 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-12119-3.
 Clare Crowston, “The Queen and her ‘Minister of Fashion’: Gender, Credit, and
Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France” Gender and History 14, 1 (April 2002).

Early Modern Families
“Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic
Violence: The Case of Seventeenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History (March 2006)
“Sex and the (seventeenth-century) century city: a research note
towards the long history of leisure,” Leisure Studies (October, 2008).
Amy Erikson, “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal (59) 2005

Enlightenment in the North

Religion in Early Modern Europe

Reform and Reformation

Post-PhD blues

http://www.english-blog.com/archives/2007/12/the_post_phd_blues.php

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,37694.0.html

http://phdblue.blogspot.com/

http://anya.blogsome.com/2005/03/19/from-the-post-phd-blues-to-publication-bliss/

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_index.php?idx=119&d=1&w=5&e=333

Dissertation writing advice part II

The dissertation doctor: has good stuff on the PROCESS.
http://www.dissertationdoctor.com/index.html

The dissertation journey - breaking down the pieces:
http://www.dissertationdoctor.com/journey.html

About the lit. review, why it is important and how to do it.
http://www.deakin.edu.au/library/findout/research/litrev.php

Procrastination

Website:
http://procrastinus.com/

ABD websites:
These are sites helping people finish their doctoral dissertations.

Academic Research Group
American Psychological Association
Dissertation Doctor
Eddie's Anti-Procrastination Site

Tips:

Goal Setting

This is one of the most established ways of moving forward on your plans. Take any project you are presently procrastinating and break it down into individual steps. Each of these steps should have the following three aspects. First, they should be somewhat challenging though achievable for you. It is more satisfying to accomplish a challenge. Second, they should be proximal, that is you can achieve them fairly soon, preferable today or over the next few days. Third, they should be specific, that is you know exactly when you have accomplished them. If you can visualize in your mind what you should do, even better.

Stimulus Control

This method has also been well tested and is very successful. What you need is a single place that you do your work and nothing else. Essentially, you need an office, though many students have a favorite desk at a library. For stimulus control to work best, the office or desk should be free of any signs of temptation or easily available distractions that might pull you away (e.g., no games, no chit-chat, no web-surfing). If you need a break, that is fine, but make sure you have it someplace at least a few minutes distant, preferably outside of the building itself. If you are unwilling to take the time to get there, acknowledge that you likely don’t need the break.

Routines

Routines are difficult to get into but in the end, this is often our aim. Things are much easier to do when we get into a habit of them, whether it is work, exercise, or errands. If you schedule some of those tasks you are presently procrastinating upon so that they occur on a regular schedule, they become easier. Start your routine slowly, something to which you can easily commit. Eventually, like brushing your teeth, it will likely become something you just do, not taking much effort at all. At this point, you might add to your routine, again always keeping your overall level of effort at a moderate to low level. Importantly, when you fall off your routine, inevitable with sickness or the unexpected, get back on it as soon as possible. Your routine gets stronger every time your follow it. It also gets weaker every time you don’t.

Manuscript changes

What I want to do:

Reread Bannet

Add Wollstonecraft - at least enough to figure 0ut where she fits

Explain why the biography is important and revise to fit. It is important because:
- the circumstances of their lives provides insight into what opportunities they had (the mentors, access to resources, etc)
- the circumstances of their lives is what positioned them to HAVE other choices than gender
- the private choices they made provide insight into the strategies they used and since I am claiming that individual women could play their hand differently, I should show what sort of players they were

- I say beyond gender for two reasons - one of them is that we need to look at men and women NOT from a gendered perspective, but allowing for these other strategies - ie people listed as "women" were also other things, the other is that men and women could choose similar strategies. So yes I should have male comparisons, but in a sense I am looking at one variable to see how relevant that variable is to certain situations - and that is just fine.

- If I AM to add men, who do I do: Pope for Lady Mary, Johnson for Montagu, Hume for Macaulay, and Adams or Gerry for Warren, then Burke and Wollstonecraft.

- More on virtue?

- The literary market, read Eisenstein and Guest (small change). Consider manuscript publication at the end of the 18thC - is it still a possibility and how do we understand the marketplace at that time?

Meanwhile in France???

job stuff

Various links and info on jobs:

Negotiable items
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/careerprep/jobsearch/negotiable.html

Defense suggestions

What I should look at:

PG - newtonianism, Descartes p. 35, mentor/mentee relationships, how is a model different from the new categories I draw up here, Aristotle and the genres? and finally Pope and the Dunciad, did he really say what was wrong was gravity?

PM - Wollstonecraft, Bannet

DW - literary perspective, i.e. the persona of "author" that was not available to everyone, if looking at GENDER then you need to have male comparisons too (add a chapter on each guy?), also be more specific about textual analysis (e.g. p. 146 on the discussion of the curiously gendered gesture of Warren, saying how she should be excused as there were talented men who had failed also).

Consider the amount of biography and justify it.

Legislation that wasn't

"Wrong dates, false attributions, and a lot of plain malarky get passed on from generation to generation as scholars plunder one another's footnotes." (From Robert Hume's Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism.)


Post on C18-L by Joel Berson:
2) Writer A quotes from the 1675 diary of a young girl in New England who comments on luxurious, fashionable dress that she had seen displayed in Boston -- 40 to 65 years earlier than other writers put the arrival of fancy clothing. A cites B, who did not document his source and who told me his notes were inaccessible. Fortunately the quoted passage turned up via Google, leading to "A Puritan Maiden's Diary", discovered by Adeline E. H. Slicer and published in _The New England Magazine_ in 1894. (I also found a third writer, C, citing the same passage.) Reading the diary, my ears began to tingle -- it did not sound 17th century even to my untrained ones. Should I accept and use the Puritan maiden's quotation as evidence of the beginnings of a consumer society in Boston in 1675? Fortunately, I also found Mary Beth Norton's "Getting to the Source: Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well", in which she "demonstrates conclusively that it was in fact composed in the late nineteenth century by its nominal editor, Adeline E. Herbert Slicer" (from the abstract). Thus Norton saved me the considerable time and effort I might have spent in "vetting" the diary myself, and at least *I* have not picked it up and repeated it.

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month - apparently there is this yearly novel writing competition - looks interesting and all, but I don't think I should get involved in writing a novel in a month in November. I should have other things to do. What is interesting is the page with tips on how to EDIT your work once you have a draft. Several people talk about their approach:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/nowwhat


The best three comments are from Chris Baty. He says:

1) It will take longer than you expect - and he gives a timeline. Very helpful.

2) Get someone to help you with the plot - get a 30 page or so storyboard and then get help with nailing that down. - I think the getting help is good, but I think the 30 page storyboard is even more helpful, since it gives an OUTLINE of the whole thing without all the pesky details. It gives you a frame to work from.

3) Do not polish the details of style until you have the plot down. What you polish may end up getting cut, and you end up futsing with details that will never matter. Once you know the plot and the characters - THEN you can make it pretty.

I want to add a fourth from my own experience. Use that 30 page storyboard as a base and start filling things in as you go. I made an outline that I kept expanding and expanding until first one and then a second and a third chapter emerged. At first I tried to write linearly, from page 1 to page 200, but that is really not how I process information. When I started seeing it as a puzzle where you have bits and pieces connected and they grow bigger and then one bit suddenly connects to another and you keep an eye out for all the edge pieces because when you have those in you have a frame for the whole thing. It has also been the case several times that I have a few paragraphs that stick together but really don't belong where I first stick them, so I move three paragraphs over to another part of a chapter (or in some cases to a different chapter) just like you do with the puzzle when you realize that those particular red pieces are not part of the nose but of the scarf in the other corner of the picture.

Dissertation writing advice

These are the things that have worked for me:

Start with the primary sources as early as possible - they will lead you to the theory you need.

Having a general sense of the territory is good, but read the theory you need to answer specific questions rather than try to understand ALL of the debates just in case.

Start writing early - like right now. Get an outline up as FAST as possible so you have some place to put all your bits and pieces of writing.

Engage with the material EVERY day. You must keep it fresh in your head so you spend your off time thinking about the issues. You cannot think through things if you have to spend the first five hours remembering what the questions are.

Find your minimal block of time to be productive - for me it is three hours unless it is mechanics. I can do mechanics in shorter blocks, and try to leave them for those times, and the times when I desperately need something hands on to do that will distract me and still keep me feeling like I am moving forward.

Have a space where you do not have to put your stuff away - unpacking every time takes at least an hour. I have a writing space where I ONLY do dissertation work. I have all my books out, my laptop and music and room for tea. When I go there I know I am working on the dissertation, and so does everyone else. I get left alone. I can concentrate.

Do no think you will remember where you saw something , you will not. Find a way to write it down, preferably a place you can find the notes later.

Write notes that are explicit enough that you will understand your line of reasoning a month later. Write it to someone else - that is who you will be a month from now. You will not remember, so don't write something to jog your memory - write something that makes sense.

Possible publications

Different Directions:

Top three:
AHR
Journal of British Studies
Eighteenth Century Studies


Representations - interdisciplinary, cutting edge
The Historian
Notes and Queries
Early Modern Women (1400 - 1700)

Titles on EM

N. Clarke, Dr Johnson's women (2000) · N. Clarke, The rise and fall of the woman of letters (2004) · E. Eger, ‘Representing culture: “The nine living muses of Great Britain (1779)”’, Women, writing and public sphere, 1700–1830, ed. E. Eger and others (2001), 104–132 · E. Eger and L. Peltz, Brilliant women: 18th-century bluestockings (2008) · H. Guest, Small change: women, learning, patriotism, 1750–1810 (2000) · S. H. Myers, The bluestocking circle: women, friendship, and the life of the mind in eighteenth-century England (1990) · D. Hume, ‘Rise and progress of the arts and sciences’, Essays, moral, political and literary (1963) · G. Kelly, ed., Bluestocking feminism: writings of the bluestocking circle, 1738–1785, 6 vols. (1999) · N. Pohl and B. Schellenberg, eds., Reconsidering the bluestockings (2003)

Resource on Elizabeth Montagu

http://www.moonstonerp.com/elizabeth_montagu.htm

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - reactions

In the February of this year, 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had returned to England after many years of absence. In October of that same year, she died. Of her appearance on her return, Mrs. Montagu wrote as follows to her sister-in-law at Naples:

"February 16, 1762. You have lately returned to us from Italy a very extraordinary personage, Lady Mary Wortley. When Nature is at the trouble of making a very singular person, Time does right in respecting it. Medals are preserved when common coin is worn out; and, as great geniuses are rather matters of curiosity than of art, this lady seems reserved to be a wonder for more than our generation. She does not look older than when she went abroad, has more than the vivacity of fifteen, and a memory which, perhaps, is unique. Several people visited her out of curiosity, which she did not like. I visit her because her cousin and mine were cousin-germans. Though she has not any foolish partiality for her husband or his relations, I was very graciously received, and you may imagine entertained, by one who neither thinks, speaks, acts, nor dresses, like any body else. Her domestick is made up of all nations, and when you get into her drawing-room, you imagine you are in the first story of the Tower of Babel. An Hungarian servant takes your name at the door; he gives it to an Italian, who delivers it to a Frenchman; the Frenchman to a Swiss, and the Swiss to a Polander; so that, by the time you get to her ladyship's presence, you have changed your name five times, without the expense of an act of Parliament."

Female Solicitors

A new imperial history : culture, identity, and modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 / edited by Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge UP, 2004
page 36-37 talks about networks of women taking care of legal stuff


Prest, Wilfred. One Hawkins A Female Sollicitor: Women Lawyers in Augustan England. Huntington Library Quarterly 57 (1994) 353-8

yew

so I was working away and thought of something I should put on my blog and logged on and saw the other blog updates and read them and now I cannot for the life of me remember what I wanted to post. Damned.

I know I want to find out if ALL public people, men and women, had a male gatekeeper (or gateopener)?


Oh oh - I remember - it was about how email and blogs are blurring the line between private and public and what looked like a linear development toward increased privacy has taken a different direction and the private era might just be a brief blip ... you can see that on stock price charts - how something that looks like a trend on a three month chart can be just a dip in a five year chart. A great example is Germany - when I grew up it was this nation that was one and then was split apart - of course then I learned that it had only been one nation for about seventy years and then of course the Germanies were united and kids growing up now think of east and west G as abberations.

Which leads to my next question - what did the eighteenth century look like to the nineteenth century?

Books for women in public 18th culture class

Tim Hitchcock, “A New History From Below,” _History Workshop Journal_ 57, no. 1 (2004): 294-298.

For a more skeptical view of the "new history from below" see Nicholas Rogers, "London's Marginal Histories," _Labour/Le Travail_, 60 (Fall 2007): 217-234.

Tim Hitchcock, _Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London_ (London: Hambledon, 2004);

John Styles, _The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England_ New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Brand, Claire and Susan E. Whyman, eds. _Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London - John Gay's Trivia_ (1716). Oxford University Press, 2009.

New class for GST/HIST

Prostitutes, Politicians, and other Public Women in Eighteenth Century England.


London in 1700

Monsieur d'Eon is a woman

Mary Montagu's Embassy Letters

Georgiana,Duchess of Devonshire

Something on the Bluestockings

Something on religious women - Hanna More?

Moll King and other prostitutes

The coffee house book

Charlotte Charke

Karen Harvey on Sexuality

Vickery's Gentleman's Daughter

Evelina

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings by Elizabeth Eger, Lucy Peltz 2008

The lives and letters of an eighteenth-century circle of acquaintance / Temma Berg 2006

Bluestocking feminism : writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785 / general editor, Gary Kelly, volume editors, Elizabeth Eger ... [et al.]. 1999

Querelle des femmes titles

Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus or Concerning Famous Women (1360-74)



Martin Lefranc, Le Champion des dames (1442)



Cornelius Agrippa, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529, composed 1509)

Gratien du Pont (1534)

Thomas Elyot, The Defense of Good Women (1545)

François de Billon (1553)

Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron (1558)

Anthony Gibson, a Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, Interlarded with Poetry (1559)

Jean de Marconville (1564)

Philippe Desportes, Stances du mariage (1571)

Marie de Romieu, Bref discours de l'excellence de la femme (158?)

Thomas Nashe. An Almon for a parrot. London 1590.

Giuseppe Passi, Dei donneschi difetti (1599)

Moderata Fonte, Il Merito delle Donne or The Worth of Women (1592)

Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1600)

Alexis Trousset, alias Jacques Olivier, Alphabet de l'imperfection et malice des femmes (1617)

Marie de Gournay, Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622)

Anna Maria van Schurmann, On the capacity of the female mind for learning. (1640)

Jacquette Guillaume, Les Dames Illustres; où par bonnes et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin; (1665)

Francois Poulain de la Barre, (1675)

Sophia, Woman not inferior to man: or, a short and modest vindication of the natural right of the fairer sex to a perfect equality of power, dignity and esteem, with men, London 1739.


For more look here: http://www.womenpriests.org/traditio/list_qu.asp



E-texts of "feminist" men http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/4dads/4dads6.html