Editor’s Introduction

SECC is moving to a new format. Eventually, it will look like this:

--Presidential Lecture
--Clifford Lecture
--Panel
--Forum
--Individual Essays

The ASECS Executive Board has kindly agreed to restore the practice, which fell into desuetude, of publishing the Presidential Lecture in SECC. It decided that the Clifford Lecture should be published here as well. These changes, which will be fully in place by volume 48, will enable SECC to disseminate the plenary talks to members unable to attend ASECS, and considerably enrich the journal.

The introduction of Panels and Forums is designed to re-present some of the excitement of our conferences, and to enable us to explore cutting-edge topics which may be of wide interest at greater depth and breadth than is possible in a single essay. Panel presentations are revised into 5000 word essays and prefaced by the panel chair’s introduction—there are two in this volume. At the suggestion of some of our readers, we will also in future invite round-tables to submit their presentations, revised into 1,500 word discourses and prefaced by the chair’s introduction, and call these “Forums.”

We continue to welcome individual essays, revised from conference papers into 7000-9000 word essays. SECC publishes essays based on conference papers given not only at ASECS and at ASECS regional meetings, but also at conferences run by all ASECS affiliates. A list of ASECS affiliates is to be found at the bottom of this page. This is a multi-disciplinary, as well as a multi-national, journal, which is interested in publishing new work and new thinking in all eighteenth-century fields.

This volume (46) contains essays in history, art history, history of science, history of philosophy, Theory and literary history, on British, French, Spanish, and Austrio-Hungarian material and verbal texts, bearing both on the Old World and the New. These essays co-operate to explore the interplay of violence and humanity, and of chaos and order, in different linguistic and formal registers and different realms of cultures.

We would be grateful for your feed-back, and for any suggestions you may have about how this journal may better serve you. Please address these, as well as your submissions, to etbannet@ou.edu. Thanks!

Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler

ASECS Affiliate Societies:

American Antiquarian Society
Aphra Behn Society,
Bibliographical Society of America
Burney Society
Daniel Defoe Society
Early Caribbean Society
East-Central ASECS
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society
Goethe Society of North America
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
Ibero-American SECS
The International Herder Society
Johnson Society of the Central Region
Lessing Society
Midwestern ASECS
Mozart Society
North American British Music Studies Association
Northeast ASECS
North American Kant Society
Northwest SECS
Samuel Johnson Society of the West
Samuel Richardson Society
Rousseau Association
International Adam Smith Society
Society of Early Americanists
Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies
Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
South Central SECS
Southeastern ASECS
Germaine de Staël Society for Revolutionary and Romantic Studies
Voltaire Society of America,
Western SECS
Atlantic SECS
Canadian SECS