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Thoroughly English : county natural history, c.1660-1720
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Beck, David (Researcher in history) (2013) Thoroughly English : county natural history, c.1660-1720. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2691148~S1
Abstract
This thesis focuses upon the county natural history, a genre of writing unique to
England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century which spanned
subjects which we might now refer to as genealogy, heraldry, cartography,
botany, geology, and mineralogy, among others, while retaining a focus on a
single county. It situates the genre firmly as a successor to local antiquarianism
and chorography in Tudor and early Stuart England.
In focusing on a single genre which spans both historical and natural
topics, methodologies of enquiry from several historiographic fields are utilized:
particularly heavily drawn upon are historical geography, historical epistemology,
as well as cultural histories of both history and religion. The thesis aims to make
two specific historiographic contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates the value of
integrating cultural histories of natural objects and the landscape with historical
epistemology. As well as being an object of philosophical or “scientific”
knowledge, nature and the landscape held significant cultural meaning,
particularly when located in historical narratives and understood as part of God’s
world. This is exposed particularly clearly in chapter four’s discussion of physicotheology’s
duality: both biblical and natural study combined to emplace God in
the landscape. Secondly the thesis offers a reflection on the meanings of locality,
place, and the construction of the landscape utilized in historical geography and
the history of science. In this period both the nation and physical landscape were
envisaged as constructed from discrete “parts”, counties. This is set in the
context of earlier, and better known, ‘nation’ constructions, Camden’s
construction of the nation by analogy to the human body around the turn of the
seventeenth century, and Defoe’s construction of the nation as a trade network
centred upon London in 1724.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Natural history literature -- England -- History and criticism, Natural history literature -- History, England -- Intellectual life, Historical geography -- England, Historiography | ||||
Official Date: | July 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of History | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | [Not provided]. | ||||
Extent: | v, 348 leaves : illustrations. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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