Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper): Band IV,1: Commentaries I

The commentaries (English throughout) offer in-depth introductions and detailed annotations to each of the works presented in the Standard Edition, not only analysing these within their philosophical, literary, cultural, political-historical, and biographical contexts, but also discussing their textual history, Shaftesbury’s autotextuality in ›Characteristicks‹, and the immediate and later impact and influence of his writings. One additional focus: the emblematic engravings conceived and designed, with meticulous attention to detail, by the Earl himself for use in the second edition of his ›Characteristicks‹ and reproduced in many of the later eighteenth-century texts. These plates – laden with meaning, but often neglected in scholarship – are shown and elucidated, their significance for the treatises to which they respectively belong thus now fully revealed.