This dissertation examines the life and career of Roger L’Estrange, an unsuccessful soldier and prisoner for the king, royalist pamphleteer and Tory apologist, licenser of books and Surveyor of the Press, scourge of Protestant dissent and the first Whig party, literary translator and amateur musician.
Violence and duelling between exiled courtiers: the case of the Caroline Stuart Court in exile, c. 1649-c. 1660
Yet, though we can clearly say that the duel was not unique to the exiled Caroline Stuart Court, we must still concede that such acts of violence occurred quite frequently there. This was especially true from 1656-59, when Charles II’s Court was in the Spanish Netherlands, and this tendency to conflict was even remarked upon by contemporary observers.
The term ‘vivisection’, which refers to the act of dissecting a live animal or human being, was coined in 1709. Yet, it celebrated a long tradition reaching back thousands of years. One of the earliest recorded accounts dates from 500 B.C., when Alcmaeon of Croton severed the optic nerves of live animals in order to understand how it affected their vision.
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
I hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling.