Brian Cowan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3767451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian Cowan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | Cowan |
| SIGNATURE | COWAN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Early Modern British History, McGill University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Defoe’s Life and Times
This chapter situates Daniel Defoe’s life and writings in the literary, social, and political history of Britain from the Restoration to the period following the Hanoverian succession. Defoe was born in the wake of the regicidal revolution that produced the Civil War and a brief period of republicanism; he lived his early life in the context of the legal clampdown on religious dissent, and he started out as a businessman. He was an avid supporter…
Daniel Defoe in Context
Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society
The title of Inn Civility is more than a pun. It also identifies the two main subjects of Vaughn Scribner's monograph: the inns, taverns, and coffeehouses of colonial British North America as well as the culture of civility that many colonists wished to promote within those commercialized spaces for consumption and sociability. These spaces were central to concepts of sociability and even national identity throughout the eighteenth-century Britis…
The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse
What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and c…
Elizabeth Yale. Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain
The recent Brexit vote in the UK has brought the question of national identity in the British Isles back to the forefront of both popular and scholarly attention. Should Britain be considered part of Europe or a distinct entity with a rather different culture and a distinct history? To what degree are the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland part of the same national story? Elizabeth Yale’s Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Natio…
A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830 by Janet E. Mullin
Reviewed by: A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830 by Janet E. Mullin Brian Cowan Mullin, Janet E. – A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015. Pp. 228. Card games and gambling on the outcomes of those games was a key aspect of social life for all classes in eighteenth-century England. Gaming was most visible amongst the aristocracy due to the attention p…
Rachel Weil. A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England
Who should one trust after one regime has been replaced by another? How can one be sure that the new regime is here to stay? In 1688, the reign of King James II came to an abrupt end when he was forced to flee England in the face of an invasion led by his son-in-law, William of Orange. When William became king in 1689, these questions were no longer theoretical exercises. They moved to the forefront of people's minds as the post-revolutionary reg…
Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability
The concept of sociability was introduced as an analytic term by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Sociability has figured prominently in recent histories of consumer society and material cultures. It has become increasingly clear to historians and social theorists that the places where consumption took place, or where consumer desires were stimulated, and the social milieux in which consumers were located, are just as important to understand …
The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell's Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society
Henry Sacheverell's speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was, by all accounts, a show‐stopping performance. The speech was an effective political performance at a show trial originally designed to condemn the principles he had enunciated in his controversial 1709 sermons at Derby and St Paul's Cathedral. Sacheverell avoided any forthright or elaborate defence of his beliefs with regard to the legit…
Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post‐Namierite to the Post‐Habermasian
This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the ‘public sphere’ in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign,…
The Curious MR Spectator: Virtuoso culture and the man of taste in the works of Addison and Steele
This paper examines the relationship between the aesthetic thought of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and early modern virtuoso culture. It argues that both Addison and Steele did not reject virtuoso culture so much as to attempt to reform and redefine it. It is observed that Addison in particular wrote a virtuoso travel narrative in his Remarks on Italy as well as contributing to the discourse on antiquarian medal-collecting. In their writings…
The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered
This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second s…
What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in post-Restoration England
Reading Early Modern London
Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to huma…
The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered
This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second s…
Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to huma…
The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell's Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society
Henry Sacheverell's speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was, by all accounts, a show‐stopping performance. The speech was an effective political performance at a show trial originally designed to condemn the principles he had enunciated in his controversial 1709 sermons at Derby and St Paul's Cathedral. Sacheverell avoided any forthright or elaborate defence of his beliefs with regard to the legit…
What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in post-Restoration England
Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post‐Namierite to the Post‐Habermasian
This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the ‘public sphere’ in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign,…
Reading Early Modern London
Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to huma…
What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in post-Restoration England
The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered
This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second s…
The Curious MR Spectator: Virtuoso culture and the man of taste in the works of Addison and Steele
This paper examines the relationship between the aesthetic thought of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and early modern virtuoso culture. It argues that both Addison and Steele did not reject virtuoso culture so much as to attempt to reform and redefine it. It is observed that Addison in particular wrote a virtuoso travel narrative in his Remarks on Italy as well as contributing to the discourse on antiquarian medal-collecting. In their writings…
Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post‐Namierite to the Post‐Habermasian
This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the ‘public sphere’ in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign,…
Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability
The concept of sociability was introduced as an analytic term by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Sociability has figured prominently in recent histories of consumer society and material cultures. It has become increasingly clear to historians and social theorists that the places where consumption took place, or where consumer desires were stimulated, and the social milieux in which consumers were located, are just as important to understand …
The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell's Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society
Henry Sacheverell's speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was, by all accounts, a show‐stopping performance. The speech was an effective political performance at a show trial originally designed to condemn the principles he had enunciated in his controversial 1709 sermons at Derby and St Paul's Cathedral. Sacheverell avoided any forthright or elaborate defence of his beliefs with regard to the legit…
Rachel Weil. A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England
Who should one trust after one regime has been replaced by another? How can one be sure that the new regime is here to stay? In 1688, the reign of King James II came to an abrupt end when he was forced to flee England in the face of an invasion led by his son-in-law, William of Orange. When William became king in 1689, these questions were no longer theoretical exercises. They moved to the forefront of people's minds as the post-revolutionary reg…
A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830 by Janet E. Mullin
Reviewed by: A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830 by Janet E. Mullin Brian Cowan Mullin, Janet E. – A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680-1830. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015. Pp. 228. Card games and gambling on the outcomes of those games was a key aspect of social life for all classes in eighteenth-century England. Gaming was most visible amongst the aristocracy due to the attention p…
The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse
What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and c…
Elizabeth Yale. Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain
The recent Brexit vote in the UK has brought the question of national identity in the British Isles back to the forefront of both popular and scholarly attention. Should Britain be considered part of Europe or a distinct entity with a rather different culture and a distinct history? To what degree are the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland part of the same national story? Elizabeth Yale’s Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Natio…
Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society
The title of Inn Civility is more than a pun. It also identifies the two main subjects of Vaughn Scribner's monograph: the inns, taverns, and coffeehouses of colonial British North America as well as the culture of civility that many colonists wished to promote within those commercialized spaces for consumption and sociability. These spaces were central to concepts of sociability and even national identity throughout the eighteenth-century Britis…
Defoe’s Life and Times
This chapter situates Daniel Defoe’s life and writings in the literary, social, and political history of Britain from the Restoration to the period following the Hanoverian succession. Defoe was born in the wake of the regicidal revolution that produced the Civil War and a brief period of republicanism; he lived his early life in the context of the legal clampdown on religious dissent, and he started out as a businessman. He was an avid supporter…
Daniel Defoe in Context
History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)