A sincere and teachable heart : : self-denying virtue in British intellectual life, 1736-1859 / / by Richard Bellon.

• Superior document: Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, Volume 14
• VerfasserIn: Bellon, Richard (Historian),
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, 2015.; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: History of science and medicine library. Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions ; Volume 14.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (285 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

In A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859 , Richard Bellon demonstrates that respectability and authority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain were not grounded foremost in ideas or specialist skills but in the self-denying virtues of patience and humility. Three case studies clarify this relationship between intellectual standards and practical moral duty. The first shows that the Victorians adapted a universal conception of sainthood to the responsibilities specific to class, gender, social rank, and vocation. The second illustrates how these ideals of self-discipline achieved their form and cultural vigor by analyzing the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of Joseph Butler, John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and William Paley. The final reinterprets conflict between the liberal Anglican Noetics and the conservative Oxford Movement as a clash over the means of developing habits of self-denial.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Common Things to Speak of: The Meaning of Patience and Humility in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination -- From Virtue to Duty: The Victorian Application of Patience and Humility to Social and Intellectual Life -- Character and Morality in Eighteenth-Century British Thought -- The Utility of Virtue -- Patience, Utility and Revolution -- Oxford and the Age of Reform -- The Oxford Movement: Faith and Obedience in a Tumultuous and Shifting World -- Faith and Reason in Newman’s University Sermons -- The Hampden Affair: Divergent Paths out of a Spiritual Wilderness -- Thomas Arnold Confronts the “Oxford Malignants” -- The Tamworth Letters: Virtue and Science -- Tract 90 and the Trial of Patience in the Church of England -- Bibliography -- Index.