This book arises out of a conference held at Newnham College, Cambridge in July 1998. We would like to thank the Wellcome Trust and the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge for their financial support of the conference. We would also like to thank all the conference participants and in particular, the commentators, Anne Goldgar, Rob Iliffe, James Raven and Rosemary Sweet – for their contributions to the discussions we had, and for stimulating our enthusiasm to produce this collection of essays. Vivian Law, who also made invaluable contributions to the sessions as a commentator, sadly died before this book was completed.
Chapter 5 by Anna Marie Roos, ‘Polite society and perceptions of the sun and moon in the Athenian Mercury and the British Apollo, 1691-1711’, draws on material from Chapter 6 of her book, Luminaries in the Natural World: The Sun and the Moon in England, 1400-1720 (Bern and New York, 2001). We thank Peter Lang Publishing for permission to use this material.
Chapter 6 by Michèle Cohen, ‘French conversation or “Glittering Gibberish”? Learning French in eighteenth-century England’, draws on material from her book, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 83-7. We thank Routledge for permission to use this material.
We have intervened in the reproduction of original material within the essays as little as possible, except where confusion might arise, notably in the use of archaic typography (for example, ‘heauen’ is given as ‘heaven’).
References are given in full in the footnotes, with the exception of standard reference works: the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter referred to as OED) and the Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter referred to as DNB).