Leonie Hannan

Women, Letter-Writing and the Life of the Mind in England, c.1650–1750:

Drawing on national and regional letter collections dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this article explores womens experiences of the life of the mind through an analysis of their letter-writing. This study also highlights the shortcomings of the compartmentalised nature of scholarship on womens writing and intellectual lives and proposes the letter both as a beneficial historical source and methodological tool for research on womens mental worlds. By employing an inclusive definition of intellectual and creative life, and eschewing traditional benchmarks of achievement, this article contends that women took a full part in the cultures of knowledge of their time.

Making Space: English women, letter-writing, and the life of the mind, c.1650–1750

This article uses womens letter-writing from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to explore the home as a site of female intellectual endeavour. Far from representing a static backdrop to the action of domestic life, the home played a dynamic role in womens experiences of the life of the mind and shaped the ways in which women thought and wrote. Letters were penned in dining rooms, parlours and closets, by firesides, and on desks and laps. In their letters, women projected images of themselves scribbling epistles to friends in order to maintain their mental intimacy. Space was both real and imagined and the physical realities of a hand-written and hand-delivered letter gave way to the imaginative possibilities brought by networks of epistolary exchange and the alternative spaces of creative thought. By reinstating the home more fully in the history of female intellectual experience, a more nuanced view of the domestic arena can be developed: one that sees the home not as a site of exclusion and confinement, but as a space for scholarship and exchange.

Experience and experiment: The domestic cultivation of silkworms in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland

ABSTRACT This article explores the home as a site of ‘scientific’ enquiry in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland via the experiences of female experimenters. The focus of their investigation was the cultivation of silkworms for the purposes of making silk and substituting expensive foreign imports with domestic manufacture. This research argues that enquiry was just one of many domestic practices and that the relationship between domestic labour and intellectual work was enmeshed. The spaces and objects of home, alongside the tacit knowledge of its inhabitants, provided a flexible context for experiment, which was accessible to a broad section of eighteenth-century society.

Return and Repetition: Methods for Material Culture Studies

Repetition has long been an important tool in such fields of humanities research as literary studies and art history, in which scholars repeatedly return to texts and images to develop critically engaged understandings. Historians also need to adopt repetition as a distinct methodology, particularly in relation to the material world. Repetitive engagement with the material world has the potential to open up new research avenues for historians, through a greater awareness of the questions prompted by things. It also provides a means of developing much-needed material literacies and extending and expanding modes of attention.

Collaborative Scholarship on the Margins: An Epistolary Network

This article explores collaborative scholarship on the margins of intellectual life in eighteenth-century England via a close examination of George Ballards collected correspondence from women letter-writers. Ballard was both a man of trade and an antiquary, and his modest social status inhibited his freedom to move in scholarly circles. Ballards only published book documented the lives and works of “learned ladies” of Britain from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and his female correspondents included the Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob. His collected correspondence provides an insight into a network that operated outside of the major institutions of scholarship and far from the coffee houses of metropolitan life, but which supported its participants in their intellectual endeavours. By examining the collection materially, and by plotting the correspondents geographically, a more precise picture can be drawn of how women and lower-status men could engage in intellectual life from the peripheries of scholarly society.