‘Belching it Forth their Sooty Jaws’: John Evelyn's Vision of a ‘Volcanic’ City
Abstract Observers of seventeenth-century London often used anatomical or geographical metaphors when writing about an early modern city undergoing rapid physical, commercial, and demographic expansion. Between the 1640s and 1680s, the writer and diarist John Evelyn regularly used volcanic language and imagery to evoke a cityscape blighted by dense clouds of smoke emitted by the city's industrial furnaces. This vision of a ‘volcanic’ city was personal, inspired by Evelyn's exploration of Vesuvius in 1645, while reflecting a broader scientific and popular fascination with volcanic activity. Considered in the immediate political context, the ‘volcanic’ city was both a powerful expression of royalist anxiety about the instability of the capital, and an assertion of the need for a powerful monarch to actively regulate the social and commercial energies of the metropolis.
To the Reader
Based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink
The Origins of the Foundation Stories Genre in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
This article examines two types of foundation narrative prevalent in the biblical literature in light of as-yet-undiscussed parallels from ancient Greek and Mediterranean texts. The first type, embodied in the Genesis narratives and Greek genealogical traditions, portrays the founders as leaving a distant land to settle peacefully in a new land. The second is exemplified by the central hexateuchal theme of the Israelites’ migration to Canaan by dispossessing the native population as well as the Dorian migration traditions. Several factors indicate that the foundation story genre also became central and foundational in other small kingdoms around the Mediterranean—as indicated, for example, by the Phoenician–Luwian inscriptions referring to bt Mpš/Mopsus and related classical sources. The popularity of the genre in the ancient Mediterranean is striking in light of the fact that, while experiencing tribal migrations and wanderings, the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian kingdoms never represented themselves as “immigrants.” It is suggested that this genre may have emerged with the rise of the new, small-scale kingdoms in the Mediterranean basin toward the end of the second millennium b.c.e. The Phoenician and Greek colonization enterprises of the first third of the first millennium b.c.e. in particular increased awareness of the newly emerging states and focused attention on ethnic identity.