Kirjahaku

As an educated gentleman and naval officer, Richard Brothers dramatically altered eighteenth-century expectations and perceptions of what prophets were and the nature of prophecy itself. The messianic messages delivered to Londoners by the self-styled prophet are central to the religious politics and culture of the 1790s, mockingly referred to by one contemporary critic as the ‘age of prophecy’. The Paddington Prophet is the first book-length study which probes deep under the skin of Brothers’s apparently idiosyncratic writings and religious ‘enthusiasm’. Close textual analysis of Brothers’s writings shows the extent to which his Biblical, ‘prophetic imagination’ arose out of the same theological, political and cultural context that spurred ‘radicals’ like Tom Paine whilst inspiring poets and artists such as William Blake. Tracing the contours of his visionary experiences, this book exposes the intensity and vibrancy of Brothers’s faith, the power of his prophetic imagination and the internal logic of his theology.

Women's political emancipation was amongst the most revolutionary of the feminist reforms enacted by the II Spanish Republic (1931-1939). Matilde de la Torre (1884-1946) was one of Spain's first female politicians, winning a seat for the Socialist Party (PSOE) in Oviedo in the 1933 and 1936 elections. A vocal advocate of women's and workers' rights, De la Torre played an active role in seminal moments and debates in Republican Spain, including the struggle for women's suffrage, the 1934 Asturian revolution and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In the first comprehensive study of De la Torre's life and works, Deborah Madden interrogates the intersection of socialist and feminist discourses in De la Torre's writings, focusing on how she navigates tensions between the two, often conflicting, ideologies.Deborah Madden is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen (2022-). She was awarded the 2019-2020 AHGBI-WISPS Dorothy Sherman-Severin Fellowship to conduct research for this monograph, and was formerly a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2020-2022).

John Wesley’s Primitive Physic (1747) achieved twenty-three editions in his lifetime, ensuring its popular – and controversial – status in eighteenth-century medicine. This is the first full-length study to examine the theological, intellectual and cultural background to one of the period’s most successful medical texts. By exploring Wesley’s work in the context of his theology, ‘A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine’ extends the on-going reconfiguration of the relationship between religion and medicine.