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This essay examines the physicist John Tyndall's journal writing in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on how Tyndall used his journal during a series of transitions that occurred when he was a young man: when he went from being a surveyor to a public school instructor and then from a Ph.D. student and budding experimenter in Germany to Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in London. As well as providing insight into these various transitions, the journal more importantly shows how Tyndall developed a particular ethical conception of self, based on his readings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte, and how that sense of self shaped—and was shaped by—his early experimental practices. Thus, the article is a case study in the development of a particular scientific self that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, whose novel claim to authority was based on a particular fusion of the ethical and the epistemological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the social lives of gaming stones, a significant number of which have been found at the Late Bronze Age farming settlement of Aredhiou Vouppes , Cyprus. The number of gaming stones found at the site is unprecedented within a Late Cypriot context. Comparatively few are found in the contemporary urban centers, and in general they appear to be more typical of the Middle Cypriot social world. The purpose of this article is to investigate the agency of these gaming stones, and to consider them as social mediators within the community of Aredhiou. It explores the social and cognitive lives of these objects, examining how they might be transformed and reimagined as they moved through myriad states of existence throughout their object-life, and thus the various ways in which they were entangled in the social life of the settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Cavendish's and Lucy Hutchinson's sartorial presentations have often been regarded as largely apolitical: Cavendish's a part of her eccentric public persona, and Hutchinson's a badge of puritanism and wifely sobriety. This essay argues instead that Cavendish and Hutchinson deploy politically charged (and surprisingly comparable) rhetorics of dress in their writings, both harnessing the power of fashionable singularity to express intra-party dissent. Examining two of Cavendish's plays, A Piece of a Play and A Comedy of the Apocriphal Ladies , and Hutchinson's biography of her husband, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson , this analysis shows how both writers push back against a politic of modish copying as expressed by writers such as John Evelyn, whose Tyrannus imagines standardized fashion as a way to underscore the power of bureaucratic gentry regulators after the Restoration. Analyzing the ways that Hutchinson and Cavendish both harness discordant dress as a form of political critique (albeit to disparate political ends) reveals how powerful rhetorics of dress travelled across seventeenth-century political divides, and helps push our understanding of the sartorial sensibilities of both writers beyond the frameworks of austere puritan wife or extravagant dresser. [K.L.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson used similar generic strategies, borrowed from the mid-century petition, when composing biographies of their husbands, The Life of William Cavendish and Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. While both authors use their prefaces to frame their biographies as dispassionate recitations of historical fact, rather than defending a purely documentary regime, such pronouncements obliquely prompt readers to search for deviations from the authors' biographic agendas. This essay will argue that Cavendish and Hutchinson used the biographies of their husbands to disguise and promote political critiques that ultimately reveal the autocratic impulses of Charles II in the early years of the Restoration. Such critiques, I propose, are grounded in the complementary self-presentations of the authors. Informed by their common experience as petitioners of unfriendly bureaucracies, Cavendish and Hutchinson style themselves as advocates for constitutional monarchy and particularly the preservation of rights and privileges due to English citizens. Finally, by examining the intersection of biography and autobiography, petition and legal testimony, this essay challenges the scholarly tendency to assign highly gendered critical frameworks to Memoirs and Life of William , which are more likely to be described as wifely romances than as political treatises. [L.D.F.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas" is an anthology edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder. The book consists of twenty-four essays that explore the meaning of freedom and the strategies used by individual women, mostly of African descent, to obtain it in slave societies in the Americas and in the post-abolition context. The essays cover a wide range of time periods and geographic locations, including the British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish empires. The collection emphasizes women's agency and resistance in the face of slavery and societal limitations, challenging the notion that enslaved people were given their freedom. The essays also highlight the various tools and strategies women used to fight for their freedom, such as legal maneuvers, spiritual autonomy, and economic and social networks. The book concludes with essays that examine post-abolition efforts by women to define social inclusion for African-descended people and to memorialize their survival and dignity. [Extracted from the article]

The following article provides significant new evidence of John Locke's interest in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). The evidence derives from the collection of manuscripts amassed by the historian Thomas Birch (1705–66), the author of The History of the Royal Society of London (1756–57). Within this collection are several documents in the hand of Pierre Des Maizeaux (1672/3–1745), the Huguenot journalist and biographer. In 1718–19, Des Maizeaux set about compiling A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke , a posthumous edition of lesser-known works and manuscripts by Locke, edited with the guidance of Anthony Collins (1676–1729). In preparing the volume, Des Maizeaux interviewed one of Locke's friends, whose recollections he recorded in an anonymized memoir, in French. The article reveals that the anonymous friend was James Tyrrell (1642–1719), one of Locke's closest acquaintances. Tyrrell's claim that Locke "almost always" had Hobbes's Leviathan on his table in Oxford, ca. 1658–67, is one of several in the memoir that revise our understanding of Locke's intellectual formation and the history of one of his best-known friendships. The article contextualizes and translates the memoir and revisits the debate surrounding Peter Laslett's relegation of Hobbes's significance to the development Locke's political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows that comparable notions of humanism emerged independently in two twentieth-century scholars, Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) and George Sarton (1884–1956). They met as young men at Harvard University and found themselves to be compatible thinkers. They both respected the so-called facts of science, perhaps more than theories in science. They saw their task as assembling these facts for a future synthesis. They recognized the diversity of the world's civilizations, and they actively participated in trying to unite scholars of good will. At the end of their lives, they remained optimistic about the future of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the collage Bible Harmonies produced by the members of the religious community at Little Gidding has been articulated in terms of the creativity and intricacy of handiwork the books showcase in relation to the community's unique devotional practices. My purpose here, in concert with this more recent work, is to consider the particularly affecting relationship between sensual experience and holiness embedded in the pages of these books. However, instead of looking solely at the material components of the books as artisanal objects, I want to extend the discussion of the harmonies' incarnational materiality to include the curious narrative that lies at the heart of what we know about the books' making. Our principal source of information about how the harmonies were compiled is the never-completed biography of the community's leader Nicholas Ferrar. The biography was assembled by his brother John, probably in the 1650s, and certainly after Nicholas' death in 1637. This strange account of Nicholas' life and of the community established at Little Gidding is often cited in studies of the harmonies but is rarely considered as an intricate act of figuration in its own right, deserving a place in the compendium of the community's creative output. [P.B.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on re-creating the life of Mary Hays, a religious and philosophical commentator, radical novelist, periodical writer, and pioneer of women's biography, who requires an expansion of the parameters of the various networks in which she moved during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and mentions that creating an accurate biographical text of Mary Hays requires an examination of the social, familial, religious, and geographical contexts.

The article discusses the 1688 correspondence of French Ambassador to the States General Jean-Antoine de Mesmes, comte d'Avaux. It considers how these letters provide information regarding the foreign policy of the court of French King Louis XIV, the Glorious Revolution of Great Britain, and the invasion of England by William of Orange, later British King William III.

The article focuses on the contributions of lawyer, chemist and educator Thomas Cooper on the modern scientific progress of freedom and the Jeffersonian Republicans in the U.S. Topics discussed include Cooper's contribution to the Manchester Constitutional Society, the Loyalist Association and for the development and cultivation of the Loyal Sock real estate in Pennsylvania. Other topics include his literary works on nature and raucous humor.

The article examines the connection between crime, mass culture, and interwar British popular journalism through a case study of life stories about criminal Josephine O'Dare, who was convicted of forgery in 1927. The author explores how O'Dare's life story, or "crook life," demonstrates a relationship between British subjectivity during this period and life writing. Also addressed is O'Dare's libel suit against the popular journal "Reynolds's Illustrated News."

The article focuses on the academic study on ancient Greek literature concerning action and reason. It offers opportunity to evaluate the development of a literary genre which provides details on the understanding of the nature of Greek literature. It discusses the understanding of biography as a literary form.

An essay on Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins born into slavery in the 19th-century U.S., is presented. Particular focus is given to the ideas of agency and authority as related to a promotional biography of the twins. According to the author, scholars have mistakenly accepted the biography as a reliable account of their lives. It is suggested that evidence of the twins' agency can be found not in this putative first-person narrative but in their effects on other discourses.

The article discusses U.S. statesman John Dickinson (1732-1808) and four works either wrongly attributed to him, or works by him wrongly attributed to someone else. These include: "A Receipt to Make a Speech, by J---- G----, Esquire," attributed to John Galloway; "Remarks on a Late Pamphlet entitled Plain Truth," signed Rusticus; and "Common Sense," signed Fabius.

The article discusses the career of French intellectual François Ewald, a onetime radical who studied under 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault and later went on to work with the French insurance industry and employers' groups on ways to reform the welfare state. Ewald's work with Foucault's ideas about power and "governmentality" is discussed, as is his atypical interpretation of Foucault as undermining the basis of revolutionary politics, and instead creating a rationale for engagement with the political and social system.