‘A perticuler sort of Christaline Glasse’: A taste of politeness and politics in the early eighteenth century, Sangeeta Bedi

This paper examines and compares two artefacts of the early eighteenth century; a heavy baluster wine glass c.1700 - 1710 and the poem Glass by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720) first published as a separate verse in her Miscellany of Poems on Several Occasions in 1713. From her unique position as a female aristocrat, once at the centre of court as maid of honour to Mary of Modena, and then for many years an internal political exile, Finch’s poem explores how the humble wine glass and its contents can embody an external and internal form of politeness and the division between the temporal and spiritual condition.