Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland explores for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The … Continue reading
Believing in an Age of Enlightenment
Editors of Belief and Politics in Enlightenment France, Mita Choudhury and Daniel J. Watkins argue that Enlightenment did not signal the end of religious tradition and show how religious belief in France continued to function in dynamic ways throughout the long eighteenth century. Over the past few decades historians have justly complicated the narrative of the … Continue reading
Middlebrow Matters – In Conversation with Diana Holmes
Middlebrow Matters is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century. The book has recently … Continue reading
International Development Planning Review 41.1 Featured Article
The editors of International Development Planning Review have selected 'Contesting socialist state visions for modern mobilities: informal motorbike taxi drivers’ struggles and strategies on Hanoi’s streets, Vietnam' by Sarah Turner and Ngô Thúy Hạnh as the Featured Article for IDPR 41.1. The paper will be free to access for a limited time here. When asked … Continue reading
From catechisms to Voltaire: Religious tradition and change in eighteenth-century novels
Alicia C. Montoya explores how eighteenth-century readers might have moved from catechisms to Voltaire in her chapter of Les Lumières catholiques et le roman français (edited by Isabelle Tremblay), the latest volume to be published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. Scholars of the Enlightenment have tended – like intellectual historians generally – to stress … Continue reading