‘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.
A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ‘Germanus Incredibilis’: With a Selection of his Unpublished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of his Autobiography
Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit in 17th-century Rome, was an enigma. Intensely pious and a prolific author, he was also a polymath fascinated with everything from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the tiny creatures in his microscope. His correspondence with popes, princes and priests was a window into the restless energy of the period. It showed first-hand the seventeenth-century's struggle for knowledge in astronomy, microscopy, geology, chemistry, musicology, Egyptology, horology... The list goes on. Kircher's books reflect the mind-set of 17th-century scholars - endless curiosity and a substantial larding of naivete: Kircher scorned alchemy as the wishful thinking of charlatans, yet believed in dragons. His life and correspondence provide a key to the transition from the Middle Ages to a new scientific age. This book, though unpublished, has been long quoted and referred to. Awaited by scholars and specialists of Kircher, it is finally available with this edition.
The English urban renaissance: The development of provincial urban culture c. 1680‐c. 17601
The English provincial town in the century or so immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution has remained remarkably unexplored territory. Was it still in the grip of the economic and cultural malaise which many towns are believed to have suffered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?2 Or was it undergoing some sort of change and revival that may have helped to lay the foundations for the transformation of England into an industrial urban society? Given the present paucity of research, any approach to answering these questions must be made with caution. However, allowing for this proviso, my essay presents a tentative thesis which I hope will help to disturb certain entrenched assumptions about post-Restoration urban society, as well as promote further investigation into the history of the town during this period. The pioneering work of Professor Everitt on the pre-industrial town, and Professor Plumb on the commercialization of leisure, has suggested a fruitful angle from which the problem of the post-Restoration town may be approached: that of the growth and changing nature of its cultural life.3 With this in mind, I have concentrated on the way in which two elements, leisure and luxury, influenced the development of provincial urban culture between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. In the first half of this essay I sketch in four areas of urban life where these influences were felt: leisure facilities, the economy, public amenities and architecture. This examination suggests that a transformation was occurring in the nature of provincial urban culture, which with some justice could be called an urban renaissance. In the second half of this essay some explanations are offered of why this renaissance took place, of what towns were most likely to benefit from it, and of what social function it fulfilled. I conclude by speculating on a number of ideas raised by this thesis.