Astral Codex Ten

Victorian

3 min read

Victorian

Article

Victorian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 10, 2022 and August 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order”; “The book is the literary equivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities”. It most often appears alongside Europe, 38 Onslow Gardens, 50,000 BC.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 10, 2022
  • Last seen: August 30, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim just six months ago, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS.
to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age. . . this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman. . . Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.
Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
August 30, 2024 · Original source
Fascinating facts: The book is the literary equivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities. The details of the persecution of witches and heretics are not exactly fun to contemplate, but the book also discusses, e.g., the extremely odd beliefs of the early theologians, the gruesomeness of Spanish art, the regulation of French prostitutes, the consequences of coffee coming to Europe, why sadists make the best surgeons, the origin of the xenodochium, the physical location of hell, and so much else. Look at the old-fashioned super comprehensive chapter headings and you’ll see what I mean.
Inline links: xenodochium