Huntington Library Quarterly Spring 2018

Paul Chase Discussion

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: His Childhood and Experience at Oxford 
pp. 171 - 189 

Existing accounts of Rochester’s early years are thin or in error in terms of historical context. His father was a notable Royalist exile and favorite of Charles II—indeed, his companion on his flight from Worcester in 1651. His own childhood was spent under the aegis of his mother in the household of her first husband. Rochester’s enrollment at Wadham College, Oxford, was probably a precaution against the possibility that General Lambert’s radical army would return triumphant from its confrontation with Monck’s troops on the Scottish border and exact revenge on Royalist houses. He was given extraordinary prominence in the university’s collections of verses celebrating the restoration of the monarchy and again in the triumphalist degree ceremony of 1661. Indeed, Rochester’s treatment at Oxford bordered on what would have been appropriate for a royal prince. The Lee connection, and especially the background presence of his mother, also remained important, even during the years of Rochester’s “debauchery.”

“All Lingua’s are to thee Vernaculus”: The Bilingualism of Horatian Imitation in Early Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture 
pp. 191 - 226 

In this essay, Sara Hale examines evidence of bilingualism in a cluster of Latin epistolary odes composed by English authors and the responses to them in both Latin and English. Such a study sheds light on the social and interactive nature of eighteenth-century literature and extends the force of contemporary epistolarity to include extended correspondence between languages. This is important not only for the study of Horatian reception but also for a full understanding of the manuscript and literary culture of the period in Britain, in which Latin poetry played a prominent role. An appendix presents editions of three of the poems.

Re-Orienting the Bluestockings: Chivalric Romance, Manliness, and Empire in Joseph Emin’s Letters 
pp. 227 - 255 

In this essay, Humberto Garcia examines the chivalric romance tropes informing the correspondence between the Armenian freedom fighter Emin Joseph Emin (1726–1809) and his patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot. To master English politeness, Emin played a humble knight-errant or “Persian Slave” before his exotic Queen Montagu. The working-class foreigner thereby presented himself as a patriotic gentleman, while his female friends expanded their gender roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities. This reciprocal self-fashioning responded to a crisis in British masculinity caused by military setbacks during the Seven Years’ War. The essay points to transnational affiliations that were wider than the ethnocentric patriotism that scholars have assigned to Bluestocking correspondents’ nationalist self-conception.

Notes and Documents

Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558–60) 
pp. 257 - 275 

This essay is the first study of a ninety-foot-long pedigree roll made for Elizabeth I in 1558–60 and now preserved at Hatfield House. Conceived and supervised by Edmund Brudenell of Deene Park—a Catholic gentleman and an amateur antiquary and genealogist—the pedigree traces Elizabeth’s descent from the Creation, via Adam and Eve, to the mythical and historical British, Saxon, and Norman kings. It also features the genealogies of European royal houses, the descent of the most important English aristocratic families, numerous textual extracts containing historical information, and lavish heraldic decorations. In the present essay, Sara Trevisan explores the sources and content of the pedigree roll—an intersection between medieval and early modern traditions of royal genealogical discourse—and discusses its making, its social and political function, and the strategies it employed to construct a celebration of the queen’s right to rule.

Incorporating Cantillon: A Face and a Family for the First Modern Economist? 
pp. 277 - 289

Richard Cantillon, an Irish-French economic theorist and financier, is not well known today, despite his influence. But he may be pictured in a famous family portrait by Nicolas de Largillière that now hangs in the Louvre. In this essay, Mark Thornton examines evidence of Cantillon’s connections to Largillière as well as related paintings to argue that the Cantillons could be the subject of the portrait.