*a = article ; bib = bibliographie ; nl = notes de lecture

This article retraces the evolution of the perception of Amerindian populations by the founders of Plymouth, in New England, before and shortly after crossing the Atlantic in 1620, through a reading of their narratives, namely William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, mainly, but also Mourt's Relation (1622), attributed to Bradford and Edward Winslow, which contains a long letter by Robert Cushman, and Winslow's Good Newes from New England (1624). The providential prism inherent in Calvinist authors, the diplomatic dimensions as well as the discourse legitimizing the settlement of the English on already occupied lands are taken into account to reveal the indissociability of the various population groups and of a region on which the English managed to integrate.

Seventeenth century English devotional poetry with its Christocentric perspective is imbued with references to the Passion of Christ, Christianity's pivotal event. Christ's solitary prayer at Gethsemane, which begins the narrative of his Passion and foreshadows his death on the Cross, inspired many devotional poets of the time. The aim of this paper is to explain why poets of such seemingly conflicting religious persuasions as the Catholic Southwell and his Anglican counterparts Herbert and Vaughan draw upon the Gethsemane scene in the Gospel of Luke as their source material, and to assess how close to Biblical sources their poems are. Their writing, which runs the gamut of the borrowing process from copying to rephrasing, proves to be conditioned not only by Scripture but also by other sources, thus raising questions about the poets' creativeness.

Milton practised the time-honoured exercise of adapting or translating the Psalms. His first two adaptations (1624 : Psalms 114 and 136) may be viewed as the school exercises of a gifted youth, starting from the Greek of Septuagint. It is not so with his translations of Psalms 80-88 (1648) and 1-8 (1653), in which the themes, rhetoric and images testify to the presence of two correlated perspectives: the preservation of the theological and political thinking of the Psalter, and, simultaneously, the development of a " Hebrew " style which will reach its maturity in Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained. So complete is the poet's involvement in these re-written psalms that they offer some kind of mythic image of him - that of the " blind bard ", a word used by Mary Ann Radzinowicz for the speaker in Paradise Lost. This would correspond to the role in which Milton wishes to cast himself in the eyes of the Reformed English nation. Interesting as it may be, this view should be qualified if one does not wish to fall into a simplifying interpretation of Milton's Psalms.

Charles Wesley (1707-88) was the great hymn writer of the Methodist revival, following his "conversion" experience of 1738. Throughout his writing career, which lasted for almost forty years and produced over 6,000 hymns, he used the Bible as the principal source book for his poetry. He used the Old Testament typologically, with episodes from Jewish history prefiguring events in the life and work of Jesus Christ. The books of the Old Testament were used as a starting-point for the imaginative treatment of ideas such as pilgrimage and the encounter with God. A notable example is his use of the story of Jacob and the angel (Gen. 32), which is the subject of Wesley's "Wrestling Jacob." An examination of this poem demonstrates Wesley's ability to transform the Biblical episode into an exploration of a profound Christian experience, the discovery of God through struggle.

Given what Blake himself says about the Bible, and given his interpretations of it, the poet-prophet clearly aims through his writings at the faculty of "spiritual sensation", both as a source of inspiration and as the ground for reading his poetry. Beyond the structures of words and images of a language that belongs to a fallen world, it is Christ's Comforter that is invoked. A Jungian interpretation may account for this phenomenon in terms of meetings with the Other by underlining, as does the Gnostic tradition, the individual experience of symbolical efficiency. Thus does William Blake's poetry reach for the universal through subjectivity, that is, Jacob Boehme's ground of affectivity.

The Puritan Revolution being closely linked to the Bible, theological thought draws its inspiration from the Scriptures and shapes political attitudes accordingly. English Protestants are particularly fascinated by the book of Daniel, since they identify with the Saints and are eager to share their triumph in the kingdom of God, a promise taken up in John's Revelation in its description of the Millennium. The Hebrew prophet displays a vast eschatological panorama extending from Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the vision of the four monstrous beasts and the final announcement of the messianic era due to take place at a mysterious date. Daniel was to become a source of profound hope and gave birth to countless interpretations whose authors, in search of keys to decipher current events, provided a literal - that is a historical and political - reading of the book of Daniel. Such is the case of the Millenarians who studied it thoroughly, elaborating various apocalyptical systems, the most remarkable of which begot the Fifth Monarchy movement.

The development of Henry Purcell's sacred music in the second half of the seventeenth century originates in a fruitful compromise between the political and religious constraints of Restoration England and the contribution of the continental baroque. The stylistic evolution of his religious compositions reflects the political and religious developments which took place during the successive reigns of Charles II, James II and William of Orange. As a baroque musician and a native of an anti-papist country, Purcell showed considerable skill in the art of setting words to music and managed to blend in the reformers' emphasis on the intelligibility of the text with Counter-Reformation aesthetics.

Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna (1612) mostly teaches the great lessons of Christian thought (temperance, virtue, compassion). The moral tuition relies upon an intense biblical intertext and quotations from the Fathers, in both poems and paratext, as in " Temperantia ". The emblems also resort to the christianization of classical myths: " Divina misericordia " offers a reading of the myth of Prometheus already propounded by Valeriano's Hieroglyphica (1556) and Bacon's De Sapientia veterum. The pictures redevelop the message of the texts. In " Divina misericordia ", the victim's tortured body conveys a sense of compassion and then of Love in the reader's heart. The pictures operate as figurations of concepts remaining out of reach without their mediation. They are founded on a hierarchy between the visible and the intelligible and borrow from St Paul's theology (one can see only as through a looking glass, darkly). The reading of emblems is an art of meditation understood as intellectual operation and spiritual awakening.

Prescriptive literature on the art of preaching emphasized the necessary connection between any sermon and the Biblical text on which it elaborates. However, eighteenth-century preachers commonly used the epigraph only as an excuse, as the small case study in this article shows. The corpus comprises the manuscripts of John Sharp III, compared with the printed homilies of Laurence Sterne, as well as a small sample of sermons published in the 1710s. Scriptural allusions permeated not only the exordium, but also the whole body of the discourse. They mainly referred to the Authorised Version of 1611, though the Psalms were equally cited in the translation of the Psalter annexed to the Book of Common Prayer, and some Biblical books were quoted more frequently than others. Although the preachers' exegesis was based on a wide range of secondary sources, it was not always unbiased.

In Origines Judaicae, Toland turns his back on the biblical account of the Exodus to consider it afresh in the light of Strabo's narrative. According to this interpretation - which is deliberately pitted against Pierre-Daniel Huet's theses in Demonstratio Evangelica -, Moses is above all a legislator and founder of the Hebrew state, and his religion could be defined as a form of pantheism. However, Toland's claim to write as a true historian rings hollow. The elevation of Strabo's Geography to the status of single reliable source is a methodological coup that is backed up by no substantial argument ; furthermore, neither Toland nor Huet can legitimately claim to make use of sound critical methods : both grant unjustified precedence to one single set of sources.

In his pamphlet The Age of Reason (1794-95), the republican deist Thomas Paine launched a merciless assault on the Bible that grew out of a freethinking tradition that was already well established on both sides of the Atlantic. His goal, however, was multifaceted. In the wake of the publication of Rights of Man, in which he had challenged the institution of hereditary monarchy and the alliance of Church and State, Paine endeavored to contest the legitimacy of Christian authorities while advocating deism, which he portrayed as the only religion that conveyed a true idea of God. By encouraging his readership to think for themselves and by fostering public debate, Paine sought to contribute to the achievement of the revolution which had begun in 1776 in Britain's North American colonies.

Bentham outlined in the Chrestomathia a utilitarian programme of education, working out the details of the pupils' curriculum. He was aware, however, that this school, the management of which he had described, would never materialize. Nor is this the only contradiction of the Chrestomathia. It may be doubted that Bentham's day school would have secured the pupils' Greatest Happiness in view of the emphasis on "place-capturing" (emulation), rote-learning and mutual surveillance. Bentham's school was tailored to the needs of the industrial revolution. Its aim was not to produce responsible citizens. However distant Bentham may have been from Condorcet, both were concerned about providing an education rooted in the highest and most efficient principles of arts and sciences. The Chrestomathia is an example of the degree of organization of science and techniques in early nineteenth-century England.

This article introduces the idea of the silent eye and relates it to the poetry of William Collins (1721-1759). The traditional contextualisation of mid-eighteenth-century poetry as descriptive is reconsidered in order to define the allusive anti-pictorialism and its creation of mood - a sensation to be apprehended in more complex ways than visual perception - that characterise the poet's spiritual landscapes as much as the deities that he invokes through the hymnal context of his odes. Mood is interpreted as the situational spirituality that the speaker experiences while anticipating the encounter with the deity. Collins's desire to be non-visual in his depiction of the speaker's apprehension of the divine is explained with the limitations of pictorial representations in which sublime obscurity is destroyed in favour of definite images. A mimetic representation of the divine and the speaker's experience of it according to Collins must not be pictorial as it then loses its mystery and charm.

In this essay I concentrate on the discourse of sensibility in fiction and the discourse of the nerves in medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century, focusing on the persistence of holistic models and concepts in fictional and theoretical discourses despite medical advances and socio-political change that tended to differentiate them. Such an interaction could happen at a period when medicine and, more generally, science, was not cut off from broader philosophical discussion about human nature, about the relationship between the mental, the spiritual and the physical. I also discuss the implications of the picture of the mind in fiction for an understanding of the relationship between sex and gender. Throughout I focus on three novels, Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, Waverley (1814) by Walter Scott and Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley

Though it was the main source of one of his last works, Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834), the journal Beckford kept during his first stay in Portugal remained unknown until the twentieth century. This text gives the reader a better grasp of the way Beckford came to entertain a special and intimate relationship with Portugal, a relationship at first not devoid of hostility and resentment towards this foreign country and its inhabitants. These violent feelings reveal Beckford's complex identity: a stranger in a strange land, he moved from painful longing for his estate in England, to a new appreciation of Portugal as the country where he could best express his eccentric personality, in short - as the country of his dreams.

In the late 1760s small "square pianos" began to appear in significant numbers in Great Britain. They soon enjoyed an enormous success and were produced in great quantities. They were widely exported all over Europe. The role of German immigrants, notably Johannes Zumpe and Johann Christian Bach, is especially significant in the early technical and artistic history of the new instrument. Square pianos were comparatively cheap, which made them accessible to music-loving amateurs from the middle as well as the upper class. The aim of this paper is to seek the aesthetic as well as social causes of this spectacular success, while focusing on the role of the small community of German musicians and craftsmen living in London.

The transmission of knowledge, in the field of sciences in particular, reached a climax during the Enlightenment, through academies, the exchange of scientific journals, the creation of libraries and contacts within the European scientific community. Examples are Peter the Great's Grand Embassy to Europe, which made it possible for Russia to expand its scientific community and set up the Saint Petersburg Academy of Science, Lavoisier's invention of modern chemistry, and Jenner's discovery of the vaccination against smallpox, which ultimately eradicated the disease, saving tens of millions of lives in Europe and the United States.

Si la séduction suppose une mise en œuvre délibérée, certaines jeunes filles semblent séduire malgré elles. Le cas d'Isabella dans Measure for Measure (1604) est ambigu : séduit-elle involontairement ou use-t-elle de sa virginité comme instrument de séduction pour parvenir à ses fins ? Dans The Changeling (1622), la virginité est non seulement érotisée mais diabolisée : Beatrice-Joanna joue délibérément de l'ardeur qu'elle suscite chez De Flores. On est loin ici de la vierge séductrice malgré elle.

Although seduction implies calculated staging, young women in some cases seem to be unwittingly seductive. I shall examine the extent to which Isabella seduces Angelo despite herself in Measure for Measure, and whether she may be suspected of deliberately using her virginity as a device to achieve her aim. Beatrice-Joanna, who takes advantage of the ardour she arouses in the misshapen De Flores in The Changeling (1622), is both eroticized and diabolized, shedding new light on the issue of erotic virginity. She is apparently a far cry from the pure maiden innocently arousing male desire.

The Northern Lass (1629) accorde une place considérable à la musique de scène, caractéristique des comédies de Richard Brome. La pièce comprend cinq chansons, un masque, une danse et des fragments de ballades, abondance qui correspond au goût du public caroléen, mais permet aussi de caractériser le personnage principal, Constance. Sa caractérisation musicale, comme celle de Fitchow, la mégère, et de Constance Holden, la fille facile, correspond à un archétype théâtral et musical. L'ensemble de la musique de la pièce est concentrée sur les personnages féminins, soulignant leur opposition et les lignes principales de la construction dramatique, mais aussi leur appartenance à une typologie dramatico-musicale bien établie de la séduction.

Richard Brome's The Northern Lass (1629) includes extensive stage music, a characteristic of Brome's comedies. The play features five songs, a court masque, a dance and snatches of popular ballads. Lavish music indulges Carolean taste ; it also delineates the character of the melancholy Constance, the " Northern lass ". Like Ophelia or the Gaoler's Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, two characters to which she stands close in terms of dramatic typology, Constance suffers from love melancholy. She is characterized through her specific music and contrasted with two other dramatic and musical stereotypes : the shrew, Fitchow, and the lady of pleasure, Constance Holden.