Editor’s Note

In 2013, the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies took place in Cleveland, Ohio for the first time since the organization’s inaugural convention met there in 1970. That first ASECS meeting was followed up, one year later, with the publication of the first volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, which included exceptional papers drawn from among those delivered at that gathering. For 44 years and 44 volumes, the annual publication of SECC has accompanied and celebrated the scholarly life of ASECS by providing a space in which to acknowledge and share the excellent and wide-ranging work exchanged at the most recent meetings of its sponsoring organization.

Over the four intervening decades, the journal has, of course, undergone changes as both the field of eighteenth-century studies and the ASECS organization itself have developed and grown. SECC has long since, for example, moved to a double-blind peer review process for submissions, keeping pace with the increasing number and quality of scholarly journals dedicated to eighteenth-century studies. At the same time, however, SECC has remained committed to considering for publication only articles that have been developed and revised from conference papers originally presented at the national or regional ASECS conferences, or those sponsored by its affiliate societies. Perhaps the journal’s most consistent commitment has been to representing the extraordinary interdisciplinary vibrancy that has sustained and continues to animate the organization. Year after year, the journal’s pages bring into proximity and dialogue the diversity of fields (such as art history, history, literature, musicology, dance, theater, women’s and gender studies, religious studies, and political science) as well as the transnational range of languages and cultures (including French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish studies) that converge at ASECS meetings. At the same time, the journal offers a rich record of the ways in which eighteenth-century studies has grown over the years to incorporate and intersect with emergent fields such as race and empire studies, disability studies, and material culture studies.

Volume 44 opens with the 2013 Presidential Address delivered at the Cleveland meeting by Julie Candler Hayes. Hayes examines the overlooked genre of moralist writings to find subtle treatments by French women of the unequal power relations that characterized marriage. These reflections also changed over the course of the century, as earlier writers such as Lambert and Puisieux often reflected on how female unhappiness almost unavoidably led to female infidelity in marriage, while later writers such as Verzure and d’Arconville tied their critiques of marriage and their celebration of the single life to an emergent political language of liberty and independence.

The following three articles turn to the figure of the body and the growing field of disability studies in the context of eighteenth-century visual culture, philosophical writing, and medical discourse. Teresa Michals examines the changing visual representation of amputation from its comical exposure in caricature to its concealment in the genre of the formal portrait. Her close examination of portraits of Lord Nelson, however, reveal how these images of Nelson broke with this tradition by making amputation visible—a shift that revised or challenged conventional models of masculine and military heroism that relied on images of bodily integrity and gentlemanly status. Paul Kelleher illustrates how ideas of disability deeply inform the understanding of sympathy and morality developed in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In a subtle and careful reading, Kelleher shows how disability (or what Smith refers to as deformity) is, in fact, the precondition for fellow feeling and moral subjectivity—a reading that makes Smith newly relevant for issues central to contemporary disability studies. Lucas Hardy considers the significance of the body in pain in the context of colonial New England and its 1721 smallpox epidemic. Focusing on the figure of Cotton Mather and his medical handbook, The Angel of Bethesda, Hardy argues that for Mather the bodily pain associated with inoculation and disease is a precondition not only for physical health but for spiritual conversion. Mather developed a theory of pain that challenged Lockean ideas by emphasizing the necessity of confronting rather than avoiding pain, as a...