Bath and Beyond

This book re-examines spa and assembly culture as key venues for sociability in the eighteenth century.

Autorentext

Dr Hillary Burlock is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool, working on a project on British assembly rooms, and a historian of eighteenth-century dance and sociability, with interests in politics, embodiment, and performance. She previously worked on the Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture project and publications include 'Party Politics: Dancing in London's West End, 1780-9' (2021).

Dr Robin Eagles is the Editor of the House of Lords 1660-1832 section at the History of Parliament, whose research interests include the history of Parliament from the late seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth century; the old Palace of Westminster; Frederick, Prince of Wales and the development of opposition politics at Leicester House; John Wilkes. Publications include Champion of English Freedom: the life of John Wilkes, MP and Lord Mayor of London, 1725-1797 (2024).

Tatjana LeBoff is a Project Curator at Bath Assembly Rooms for the National Trust and is working on a new visitor experience at the Bath Assembly Rooms which will bring to life the Georgian heyday of the Rooms. Research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history, as well as considering how curatorial practice can weave together heritage, social history and contemporary arts and programming.

Inhalt

1. Introduction

Hillary Burlock and Robin Eagles

2. Bath Assembly Rooms and its Subscribers

Timothy Moore and Rupert Goulding

3. 'Solemn yet sumptuous': Robert Adam's designs for an alternative assembly room in Bath

Amy Frost

4. 'I am a sort of Prisoner here': elite performance and Bath society in the eighteenth century **

Jemima Hubberstey

5. Not Just Suitors, Balls, and Proposals: the late eighteenth-century Bath marriage mart reassessed

Rachel Bynoth

6. Rauzzini and the Upper Assembly Rooms Subscription Concert Series: the First Five Years

Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland

7. Two Kingdoms: Masters of Ceremonies at Bath and Tunbridge Wells, 1735-c.1801

Rachael Johnson

8. Electing the Arbiter Elegantiarum in Bath and Beyond: power, politics, and the 1769 Bath Contest

Hillary Burlock

9. The Undertakers of Eighteenth-Century Bath

Dan O'Brien

10. British Female Hospitality and Fashionable Society in Eighteenth-Century Nice, 1769-92

Isabelle-Eve Carlotti-Davier

11. The 'Bath Revolution'? Musical distractions in French spas, cercles, and salons

Phil Bonjour

12. Bath, Abroad: how British American colonists imagined and encountered the famed spa city

Vaughn Scribner

13. Bath Assembly Rooms: Then, Now, and Next

Tatjana LeBoff