Thomas Young and Eighteenth-Century Tempi

Thomas Birch's 'Weekly Letter' (1741-66): correspondence and history in the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Society.

Thomas Birch (1705-66), Secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765, and Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720-90), wrote a 'Weekly Letter' from 1741 to 1766, an unpublished correspondence of 680 letters now housed in the British Library (Additional Mss 35396-400). The article examines the dimensions and purposes of this correspondence, an important conduit of information for the in...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth century in England was an age equal to the age of Augustus Caesar, when the Roman society had reached the peak of its glory. The name Augustan Age was chosen by writers who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the day of Augustus. Past ages of England were l...

Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol

The President introduced his remarks by a short survey of the social and economic conditions in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, with acknowledgments to Latimer's Annals of Bristol in the eighteenth century, Munro Smith's History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and other sources. He quoted from English Social History: " Good doctoring rather than better social conditions was the...