Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry

Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry
Author: Susan Mitchell Sommers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1317320476

Thomas Dunckerley is a late eighteenth-century icon of British Freemasonry. In one of the first books to provide a scholarly study of English Freemasonry, Sommers uses Dunckerley’s case to examine the changeable nature of personal identity in the eighteenth century and the evolving methodology and expectations of biography.

The Siblys of London

The Siblys of London
Author: Susan Sommers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-04-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190687339

Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and a pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. The inventor of Dr. Sibly's Reanimating Solar Tincture, which claimed to restore the newly dead to life, Ebenezer himself died before he turned fifty and stayed that way despite being surrounded by bottles of the stuff. Asked to execute his will, which urged the continued manufacture of Solar Tincture, and left legacies for multiple and concurrent wives as well as an illegitimate son whose name the deceased could not recall, Manoah found his brother's record of financial and moral indiscretions so upsetting that he immediately resigned his executorship. Ebenezer's death brought a premature conclusion to a colorfully chaotic life, lived on the fringes of various interwoven esoteric subcultures. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Mitchell Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to scholarly accounts of Ebenezer and Manoah, while placing the entire Sibly family firmly in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Siblys of London provides fascinating insight into the lives of a family who lived just outside our usual historical range of vision.

1650-1850

1650-1850
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2003
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN:

Parliamentary Politics of a County and Its Town

Parliamentary Politics of a County and Its Town
Author: Susan M. Sommers
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2002-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN:

Based on archival sources, this study considers political activities in Suffolk's two main constituencies over the course of the 18th century. Mining the records of an unusually rich provincial press, Sommers addresses many key questions of Hanoverian political historiography: the press, popular political expressions, women in politics, deference, and elite behavior. She focuses primarily on the second half of the century, a time marked by an increasingly sophisticated electorate that left considerable documentary evidence, to determine how politics actually developed in East Anglia, as recorded in public and private documents. In addition to a description of the variety and nature of Suffolk politics, the work elaborates upon a number of important collateral themes. These include the appearance of intense political awareness and enthusiastic participation in popular activities among those not possessing the vote, coupled with a political use of the press that grows dramatically in scope over the course of the century. Other sections detail the sustained development of the independence of the electorate and the connection between religious affiliation and partisan identification locally, as well as that between local and national parties.

Raising Spirits

Raising Spirits
Author: J. Barry
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137378948

Despite supernatural scepticism, stories about spirits were regularly printed and shared throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This case-study in the transmission of a single story (of a young gunsmith near Bristol conjuring spirits, leading to his early death) reveals both how and why successive generations found meaning in such accounts.