To mark this year’s British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference taking place in Oxford from the 8th-10th January, we’ve put together a reading list of essential titles on Eighteenth-Century studies from MUP.
If you’re attending BSECS 2025, our Commissioning Editor in Early Modern History, Siobhan Poole, will be there to talk you through our titles, series, and how you might publish with us.
Don’t worry if you can’t make it, you can get 30% off any of the titles on our reading list below using our exclusive conference discount code online – use EVENT30 at checkout on Manchester University Press.
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Women and madness in the early Romantic novel
This book argues that early Romantic-Period women novelists used female madness to critique patriarchal structures of control and to revise misogynistic medical and popular sentimental models that blamed inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body for women's mental and emotional afflictions.
This book presents for the first time a coherent analysis of the British Isles as an imperial setting understood through its buildings, spaces, and infrastructure. It considers 'internal' colonisation and its infrastructures of order and suppression, alongside wider relationships between architecture, imperialism, and cultural identity.
This book presents a wide-ranging and original meditation on cartographies of connection in all the arts of the baroque period.
This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera, redefining it as method not genre, and recontextualising it among many artforms which created new works from pre-existing parts. Its history is interwoven with society's transition from a predominantly oral to literate culture and evolutions in conceptualising the self.
This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution. Using a vast range of sources, it argues that the poor owned greater numbers and varieties of items with each generation and that poverty did not always mean living in squalor.
Murky waters explores the ambivalent representations of spas in eighteenth-century medicine and literature. It gives a wide cultural perspective of the numerous spas, springs and wells of Britain, well beyond Bath, and focuses on specific political and cultural tensions while reasserting the centrality of health in spa towns.
Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas
Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas presents the important yet largely untold stories of a diverse group of women exiled across the Atlantic world in the early modern period. The book provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile and also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.
Ideas of poverty in the Age of Enlightenment
This collection of essays examines the ways in which poverty was conceptualised in the social, political, and religious discourses of eighteenth-century Europe and North America.
This book discusses the various cultural forms and literary works by which information, myth and misinformation on medical practices and personages were spread during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some of the reasons for this, from authorial self-interest to scientific ignorance.
Agents of European overseas empires
Agents of European overseas empires examines networks of trade and communication on a global scale whose activities enabled early modern European overseas empires.
Fully revised and updated, The history of emotions is the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the theories, methods and problems in this field of historical inquiry and its intersections with other disciplines. It emphasises the importance of this kind of historical work for general understandings of the meaning of human experience.
This book offers a new study of Hobbes's reception among seventeenth- and eighteenth- century deists and freethinkers, showing how influential Hobbes was for anticlerical thinking through a close analysis of the works of a large number of writers, including Charles Blount, John Toland, Antony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and many others.
Explores how the publication of women's life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century
This book reveals the eighteenth-century home as a site of emergence for science. By rejecting the limiting associations of 'domestic life', this book re-imagines a culture of enquiry populated by apprentices and housewives as much as Fellows of the Royal Society.
This invaluable study reveals how practices for treating the loss of limbs in early modern Germany transformed western medicine. From amputations to mechanical arms, surgical and artisanal interventions forged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body-that it was malleable.
Researching urban space and the built environment
Researching urban space and the built environment is a unique and accessible guide to the planning, researching and writing of spatial histories.
Skin-tones mattered in early modern England. Indexing health, social status, religious affiliation and national allegiance, they helped explain (away) poverty, colonialism, war and slavery. Drawing physical distinctions as a means to power has a complex history - one belying racism's assumption that such distinctions are natural or timeless.
This book provides a new cultural history of the travel souvenir. It uncovers how eighteenth-century British women enlisted the objects they collected during their European travels to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, science and friendship, and to stake their claims to agency and authority as travelling subjects.
This edited collection, with contributions from literary scholars and art historians, maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in the early modern period. It features material on several European countries and demonstrates the range and diversity of satire in the period 1600 to 1830.
Manliness in Britain, 1760-1900
This book focuses on men's bodies, emotions and material culture to offer a new understanding of masculinities in Britain in the long nineteenth century. Using objects as well as texts and images, it shows how idealised and ugly bodies, and the feelings they stimulated, helped convey ideas about manliness and unmanliness across society.
Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture
This book explores early modern British responses to nose reconstruction, and the concerns and possibilities raised by rumoured nose transplants.
Duellists, drunks and remorseful murderers populate Trials of the self, which highlights the criminal court as a space for publicising and negotiating models of the self. Using criminal trial records, the book argues that inner depth became increasingly important around 1800, not only for elites, but also for common people.
This book is a ground-breaking study of women in Britain and British America through two centuries of pivotal changes in the law, economy and empire. It shows how the expansion of women's legal status gave them increased financial independence and undermined patriarchal relationships within the household.
Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century
This collection of essays addresses the belly and the bowels as key elements in our understanding of eighteenth-century mentalities, emotions, and perceptions of the self.
Writing and constructing the self in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century
This volume explores the notion of the 'self' as it was elaborated and expressed by philosophers, novelists, churchmen, poets and diarists in the Enlightenment. The questions raised by the twelve essays and the introduction, explore the unity, diversity and fragility of a recognisably modern self.
History through material culture
Material culture is central to human experience and represents a vital but under-used source for historians. Written in a lively and accessible style, this guide provides clear and practical guidance on how to incorporate the study of objects into historical practice.