Things Seminar: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Dr Jane Partner (Cambridge) Dr Irene Galandra Cooper (CRASSH, Cambridge)
Abstracts
Dr Jane Partner Reading the Early Modern Body: The Case Study of Textual Jewellery
This paper presents part of the initial research for the book Reading the Early Modern Body, which seeks to bring together the many ways – both concrete and abstract – in which the body was presented and interpreted as a text during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the central concerns of this research is to examine the ways in which the body could be made into a material text through the actual bodily wearing of language, something that might be achieved through script tattoos, embroidered clothing, inscribed busks, girdle books and textual jewellery. My aim in bringing together these diverse practices is to place them within the broader context of the other less literal but even more widespread practices of interpreting the body that were also framed as acts of reading. Gestures, physiognomic features and transient expressions could all be treated as languages of the body, and interpreting them was a social skill that was particularly necessary in a courtly environment. My paper approaches some of these larger issues by taking the case study of textual jewellery, exploring the ways in which inscribed or letter-shaped jewels could act as markers of identity. The texts that they carry commonly commemorate gifts of love or patronage, advertise familial connections, or assert the piety of the wearer. Alongside examining some particular textual jewels and their depictions in contemporary portraiture, I will also consider literary references to this type of item – for example the motto that is ‘graven in diamonds’ around the neck of the deer in Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘Whoso List to Hunt’. My discussion will suggest that the accomplishments of knowing how to present one’s own body so that is said the right things, and of how to accurately read the texts presented by other bodies, were crucial skills in the court environment, where corporeal reading operated within a complex, multi-layered network of symbolic reading and interpretation.
Jane Partner is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she carries out research on a range of literary and art-historical topics, often concerning the intersection between the two fields. Her first book is Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2018). Arising from her current research for Reading the Early Modern Body, Jane is also planning another project about gems and jewellery in early modern literature. Both these enquiries relate to her own practice as a sculptor with a particular interest in the body and wearable art.
Dr Irene Galandra Cooper Potent and Pious: Re-thinking Religious Materiality in Sixteenth-Century Kingdom of Naples
Combing through the inventories of early modern Neapolitans, I have been repeatedly struck by the ubiquity of objects made in rock crystal, hyacinth stones, emeralds, as well as other precious and semi-precious stones. Shaped as beads and threaded as rosaries, or formed as pendants carved with Christian images, these objects were highly prized for their outward aesthetics, their iconographies, but also for their curative powers. In them, the distinction between 'religion', 'art', and 'science' is elided: were they treasured for their beauty, their Christian association, or their inner virtues? Combining archival and material sources, I will examine in what ways portable devotional objects were perceived to be so powerful to be able to cure someone's body and soul, and who, across the social spectrum, could afford to tap into their potency. I will also ask how could one recognise its ingenious nature and if particular senses were more useful than others to inform these experiences.
Irene Galandra completed her doctorate as a member of the ERC-funded project Domestic Devotions: the Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600 at the University of Cambridge, where she explored the materiality of devotion in sixteenth-century Naples. Irene was also one of the curators of the successful exhibition Madonnas and Miracles: the Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum between March and June 2017. Irene is now Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Italian Renaissance art and material culture at the Department of Modern and Medieval Languages, History of Art and the Faculty of History. She is currently also a researcher at CRASSH's Genius Before Romanticism project. Previous to her PhD, Irene worked for the Wallace Collection, Christie’s, the National Gallery in London, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She has published on practices relating to small devotional jewellery such as rosaries and agnus dei.
Professor Neil Kenny (University of Oxford) Edwin Rose ( University of Cambridge)
Abstracts
Professor Neil Kenny The mineral-hunters: Martine de Bertereau and her husband Jean du Chastelet
One kind of object dominated not just the life of Martine de Bertereau (1590–1643), but also her family’s past and so to an extent her social identity: minerals. Little wonder, then, that she married a fellow mineralogist, Jean du Chastelet. They spent their years and their resources prospecting throughout Europe, on a vast scale, before dying in Richelieu’s dungeons. What economic, social, epistemic, and also cultural and narrative frames did their object of choice impose upon them? And what does their singular pursuit of minerals tell us about the relation between knowledge, family, gender, and social hierarchy in early seventeenth-century France?
Neil Kenny is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004) and an earlier book on the word history of the ‘curiosity’ family of terms. His last monograph was Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015). He is currently completing a book called Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France. The example he is discussing today grows out of that project, but is not included in it.
Edwin Rose Collecting natural history in late eighteenth-century Britain
The late eighteenth century witnessed a distinct rise in natural history collecting, both on a commercial and a scholarly level, alongside a growth in travel by naturalists, the main object of which was for them to acquire natural history specimens for their collections and record their observations of the natural world. One of the most prolific naturalist-travellers was Thomas Pennant (1726–98), whose collection remains intact and is primarily held by the Natural History Museum, London. In this paper, I give a general overview of Pennant’s collecting activities, examining his working practices in the field along with how he synthesised the information and objects he collected to compile his seminal work, British Zoology. This lavishly illustrated publication reached multiple editions from 1766 to 1812. Pennant’s collection was compiled from taxidermy, primarily birds and quadrupeds, from around the globe; shells, fossils, minerals, a small herbarium of dried plants, and a library which amounted to over 10,000 volumes, all of which he kept at his home at Downing Hall, Flintshire, North Wales. Pennant’s natural history collection was rigorously organised according to a variety of different systems of classification, such as that devised by John Ray (1627–1705) and that developed by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) from the 1730s. The understanding of the connections between this large collection of physical objects, Pennant’s travels and his publications gives a direct insight into how these physical objects were used to create natural knowledge during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Edwin Rose is currently a PhD candidate in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His interests are primarily concerned with the history of natural history, collecting and bibliography from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, although the main concentration of his current research rests in the period between 1750 and 1830. Edwin has published widely on the history of natural history, in particular on the collections of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and the British Museum, and his most recent article entitled ‘Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world’s first public museum 1753–1768’ was published in the British Journal for the History of Science in April, 2018. As well as his PhD research, Edwin has two forthcoming publications, one for a special issue in Notes and Records of the Royal Society entitled ‘From the South Seas to Soho Square: The Library of Joseph Banks and the Practice of natural history’ and another which he has co-authored with Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln) entitled ‘Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils’, to be published in Nuncius in January 2019.
Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk (University of Leeds)
Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk The Secret Life of a Colour Card
Who decides the colours of the seasons, and why? This presentation explores the hidden history of colour prediction for the creative industries by exploring how a shade card is designed. It pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of the transatlantic fashion system through a case study of the world's pioneering colour forecasting organization, its leading lady Margaret Hayden Rorke, and her Paris colour scouts. The colour forecasting methods that Mrs. Rorke set up in 1920s New York are still used today.
Mervyn Millar (Independent Artist/Puppetry Director & Designer) Perception and Performing Things
How is it possible that we can feel empathy for a thing? Since the beginning of civilisation, humans have been compelled and transfixed by performing objects and puppets. From our earliest play, to some of our most sophisticated entertainments, performing things draw on sculpture, movement, texture and context to stimulate emotional responses in an audience. Please "bring a thing" - any object from 1400-2000 that is big enough to hold in two hands and light enough to hold in one hand and is not too fragile to be handled enthusiastically. Theatre director and puppeteer Mervyn Millar was Artist in Residence at QMUL University in London in 2017, exploring the neurology and psychology of our responses to animated objects. His work in theatre has included War Horse, Circus 1903 and work at several leading theatre and opera companies in the UK and Europe. www.significantobject.com
Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge) Emily Fitzell (Independent Artist, University of Cambridge)
Dr Stefan Hanß (University of Cambridge) Dr Jose Ramon Marcaida (University of Cambridge)
Thomas Rusbridge (University of Birmingham) Philip Warner (National Leather Collection)
Professor Jo Ann Oravec (University of Wisconsin at Whitewater) Sleight of Hands: Cheating and Deception Detection by Human Observers and Artificial Intelligence Systems
Professor David Gentilcore (University of Leicester) Richard Fitch (Historic Royal Palaces)
Associate Professor Sean Silver (University of Michigan) Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)
Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling) Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE (UCL)
Dr Daniel Jütte (Associate Professor, Department of History, New York University: Eurias Fellow, CRASSH 2016-17) Jacqueline Nicholls (Independent Artist)
Abstracts
Jacqueline Nicholls Doors, Gates & Curtains Traditional Jewish texts utilises imagery of different types of entrances, each evoking particular ideas with regard to the relationship between physical reality and the world of the divine. This visual art presentation will focus on drawings that interpret relevant Talmudic texts about doors, gates and curtains as barriers and entrances.
Daniel Jütte Living Stones: Architecture and Embodiment in Premodern Europe
Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following the call of this year’s seminar convenors—to “investigate human understanding of the world vis-à-vis objects”—the talk will probe the history of one particular idea: the house as a living being. The focus will be on the late medieval and early modern period when human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. I will also address the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.
Encounters on the Shop Floor: Embodiment and the Knowledge of the Maker
Dr Marta Ajmar (Victoria &Albert Museum) Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College, London) Fleur Oakes (Independent artist)
This talk will present research from a five-year collaborative project co-led by Marta Ajmar and Roger Kneebone, supported by the V&A Research Institute (VARI) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It will consider the models of thinking and doing that emerge from 'encounters on the shop floor', where invention and innovation result from the exchange between different kinds and communities of 'knowledge-makers'. The significance of embodiment in the processes of cognition and learning will be explored, moving beyond an unhelpful divide between 'mind' and 'hand' and between 'intellectual' and 'manual' knowledge and their disciplinary and institutional compartmentalisation.
During this seminar we will present the project in conversation with textiles artist Fleur Oakes. Our speakers aim to connect different worlds and experiences of knowledge-making around a common nucleus of embodied practice, combining academic work with the scientific expertise of the surgeon and the craft of the artistic practitioner.
Dr Victoria Avery (Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge) Andrew Lacey (Artist and Independent Scholar)
Bronze was used in Renaissance Italy for numerous types of functional objects (artillery, bells, coins, lamps, inkwells) as well as decorative ones (equestrian monuments, statues, busts, medals). Extremely expensive, meaning-laden and complex to produce, works of art cast in bronze were desirable status symbols for Humanist patrons, and proofs of incredible technical mastery by sculptors and casters. Sculpture historian, Vicky Avery, and sculptor-founder, Andrew Lacey, will discuss 'bronze in Italy c. 1500' in terms of its meanings, usage and technology, focussing on the enigmatic Rothschild Bronzes, recently attributed to Michelangelo.
Dr James Poskett (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Remembering Haiti: Phrenology, Slavery and the Material Culture of Race, 1791-1861
Dr Stefan Hanß (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Familiar with the Matter: Slavery and the Body in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Abstracts:
Dr James Poskett. Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust was deployed by both supporters and opponents of abolition. More broadly, this talk suggests that the history of race needs to be understood as part of a history of material exchange.
Dr Stefan Hanß. Traditional definitions of slavery strongly connect forced labour to the absence of a slave’s autonomy of decision over his body. Coerced labour, in that sense, is enforced, ensured and perpetuated through an owner’s power over another human’s body. Sociologists and anthropologists, however, have broadened the definition of body techniques and practices that prompt historians to rethink the relationship of labour and the body. My presentation thus discusses slavery in the early modern Mediterranean in the light of recent research on the history of the body. I examine how the bodies of slaves were a targeted yet negotiated scene of constraint and agency. Whilst Mediterranean slave-owners indeed tried to mark slavery through the bodies of enslaved men and women, their strategies in body practices enabled slaves to constantly re-negotiate their servile status. I first examine archival lists in which slave-owners described their slaves’ bodies in detail. These descriptions enabled identification and guaranteed the slaves’ status as commodities on the one hand. On the other, slaves were familiar with the significance of these lists. Consequently, they tried to influence both the processes of commodification and their servile status by making active use of their masters’ records. My presentation’s second focus lies on how former slaves described their own bodies and body practices in servility. When enslaved Germans returned to the German lands, they often wrote in incredible detail about the shaving rites they had to endure whilst living in Ottoman or North African servitude. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narratives, again, underline that slaving and body practices posed constraints as much as scopes of actions of which slaves were well aware of and keen to use.
Dr Stella Panayotova (Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (Reader in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Cambridge)
Abstract
Re-Constructing Illuminated Manuscripts and Paintings
This talk will present recent research undertaken by the speakers in collaboration with Marie D'Autume (École normale supérieure, Cachan), Paola Ricciardi (MINIARE project, Fitzwilliam Museum) and Spike Bucklow (Hamilton Kerr Institute). Two case studies will illustrate the discovery and recovery of medieval and Renaissance images in illuminated manuscripts through the integration of advanced mathematical methods, historical research, art-historical and non-invasive technical analyses. The first case study focuses on a Book of Hours made in Anjou c.1430 and recycled as a second-hand wedding gift in Brittany c.1442. The second case study concerns images of nudity in the c.1505 Primer of Claude de France which were censored in the early modern period. It demonstrates the application of automated virtual image restoration by mathematicians in order to remove the overpainting and restore the images digitally, since current conservation practices do not allow for the actual restoration of illuminations. In a third case study we demonstrate the ability of mathematics to digitally restore the painting Adoration of the Shepherds by Sebastiano Del Piombo (1519). It demonstrates the ability of mathematical restoration techniques to produce a digital restored template of a painting that can potentially aid the art conservators in the physical restoration of it.
Christine Slottved Kimbriel (Assistant to the Director, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge)
Dr Joanne Sear (History,Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge) Professor Deborah Howard (Architecture & History of Art, University of Cambridge)
Prof Deborah Howard Recovering the lost soundscape of Palladio’s church of the Redentore in Venice
Dr Joanne Sear 'To the chapel of St. Andrew … a broken basin of silver'. The importance of ‘material’ in late medieval religious bequests
This presentation considers the importance of the materials used for a range of religious articles bequeathed in the late medieval period. These items were either personal religious possessions, or were personal household goods bequeathed with the purpose of becoming objects associated with a religious purpose. These goods will be placed into context to explore how the materials used for these small personal possessions reflected wider ecclesiastical usage of a similar material, such as alabaster, or were believed to have apotropaic qualities which may have been linked to folk beliefs, such as the non-precious materials used for rosaries.
Dr Antony Buxton (Tutor in Design and Domestic History, Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford) Professor Ulrich Leben (Associate Curator of Furniture, The Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor)
Dr Antony Buxton 'A Few Sorrie Stooles’: reading the social dynamic of the non-elite early modern household through its material culture
This brief paper will outline the use of probate inventories and wills as evidence of the practice, and therefore the changing social dynamic and ideology of the non-elite early modern household, in a study focused on the Oxfordshire market town of Thame in the seventeenth century.
Prof Ulrich Leben Knowledge - Awareness - Connoisseurship as a tool in the study of Material Culture
Dr Donal Cooper (History of Art, University of Cambridge) Professor François Penz (Architecture, University of Cambridge)
Dr Richard Stone (History, University of Bristol) What is Cider? What was Cider? Recovering Seventeenth Century Material Culture
Dr Deborah Toner (History, University of Leicester) Pulque and Pulquerías
Abstracts
Dr Richard Stone What is Cider? What was Cider? Recovering Seventeenth Century Material Culture
What is cider? With the rocketing of cider sales in recent years, and the development of a plethora of ‘fruit ciders’, this is a question to which the answer is not as clear as it might at first seem. Does adding fruits other than apples make it a ‘wine’, and does filtering or adding preservatives somehow make it not ‘real’ and ‘traditional’ cider? Drawing on the speaker’s experience as both a modern day cider maker and a historian, this paper seeks to uncover exactly what kind of drink(s) cider was, and how widely it was consumed in seventeenth century England. In many ways this is a period which can be seen as the ‘Golden Age’ for cider, with many of the foremost minds of the fledgling Royal Society devoting their energies to refining what they saw potentially as England’s national drink, and a rival for foreign wines. The writings of these men provide a window onto a remarkably diverse range of practices and products, and force us to reconsider our notions of what exactly is ‘traditional’, and indeed modern day legal definitions of ‘cider’.
Dr Deborah Toner Pulque and Pulquerías
The history of pulque is in many ways the history of Mexico. It is a material product—an alcoholic drink totally unlike any other—that reveals shifts in the ways that Mexico’s intangible and culturally diverse heritage has been understood and experienced by different social and ethnic groups within Mexico, and by non-Mexicans around the world. However, it is a product with which many people, especially outside of Mexico, are deeply unfamiliar and one whose future is uncertain. This paper will reflect on the distinctive materiality of pulque and pulquerías—bars in which pulque has been sold since the sixteenth century—at different moments in Mexico’s history. This will enable an exploration of the very different social functions and cultural meanings that pulque has embodied over time, as well thinking about why it has been both popular and controversial throughout Mexico’s history.
Iona McCleery (Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds) Emma Spary (History, University of Cambridge)
Abstract
Iona McCleery Getting a taste for elephant: foodstuffs in West African travel narratives
Portugal played a significant but rather neglected role in the global food exchanges of the 15th and 16th centuries. Historians have usually emphasised the reception of New World foods or Indian and Indonesian spices in European cuisine and pharmacy. This talk will focus instead on food as a material part of cultural encounters in West Africa and the Atlantic islands between c. 1450 and c.1550, as described by merchants and explorers. Foodstuffs in these narratives such as fruits, cereals, legumes and meats like elephant flesh had a number of symbolic meanings, but their significance was always bound up in their presentation as material goods. The talk will explore how they were physically encountered and morally critiqued through touch, smell and taste. Most foods were usually identified according to their marketability as commodities. Sometimes they were seen as essential for survival.
Emma Spary The taste of the pineapple: or how to know the unknowable in eighteenth-century France
Flavours present particular challenges for the historian of material culture. Even more so than foods themselves, they denote a particular kind of absence figured at once by the absent body of the past/other consumer, and by the absence of the tasted substance itself. This problem is exacerbated in the case of exotic foods as they moved, in the course of the early modern period, from being unknown and foreign to being familiar and everyday. Yet foods in a key sense represent the ultimate term of materiality, since they entered and constituted the very fabric of the body itself, the primary and definitive experience of materiality. Therefore, a history of material culture that excludes flavours is greatly impoverished. Yet how can historians address this predicament of embodiment? One route into the problem, I will argue, is by exploring the politics of tasting. Using discussions of the taste of exotic fruits over the period from the late 17th to the late 18th centuries, I will show how accounts of their taste constructed some very specific agendas, from the immediate problem of explaining ‘how something tasted’ to claims that evaluated tropical flavours in the light of contestations over French colonialism and governance.
Spike Bucklow (Senior Research Scientist and Teacher of Theory, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Ben Outhwaite (Cambridge University Library, Joint Head of Special Collections, Head of Genizah Research Unit)
Materials II
Lindsey Cox (University of Kent) How and why materials matter in relation to Tudor and Jacobean portrait miniatures
Materials I
Alice Dolan (University of Hertfordshire) 'A kind of coarse linen': Material Ambiguities in Eighteenth-Century England
Anna Reynolds (University of York) 'A Waste and Roaring Wilderness': Scriptural Wastelands and Early Modern Wastepaper
Heidi Carlson (University of Cambridge) Thatch, stone and brick: the domestic buildings of early colonial Ireland
Ephemera and the Body
Michelle Wallis (University of Cambridge) Papering Over the Past: Ephemeral Print and the History of Medicine in England before 1720
Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) European perceptions of penis bells as a method of prevention of sodomy among the peoples of South East Asia in the 17th Century
Miranda Clow (Royal College of Art) Negotiating Value: Printed Paper and the Beginning of the Fire Insurance Industry
Dr Jen Evans (History, University of Hertfordshire) Kindling Cupid’s Fire: Aphrodisiacs in early modern England
Abstract
Dr Jen Evans: Some ‘things’, like foods, are unfortunately ephemeral; they are produced and consumed leaving little of their materiality behind. Yet food can have multiple meanings and can be engaged with as a range of things – as sustenance, as medical remedies, as enhancers of sexual pleasure. It was common knowledge in early modern England that sexual desire was malleable, and could be increased or decreased by a range of foods, including artichokes, oysters and parsnips. This paper will explore the understanding of some early modern aphrodisiacs and show that they were understood not just to be titillating sexual curiosities, but were a crucial element in medical regimes designed to restore and improve fertility. Moreover, in this paper I will begin to unpick the different ways in which aphrodisiacs might have been approached as material objects by considering not just the foods that were eaten, but those that were used as gifts, those used as dildos, and the pungent foods and substances that were used as fumes and fragrances. This paper will reveal that the world of early modern aphrodisiacs was very varied but was nearly always substantially influenced by medical ideas about the fertility of the body.
Professor Helen King (Classical Studies, Open University) The Material Womb
Professor Michelle O’Malley (Art History, University of Sussex) Botticelli and Reproduction
Abstracts:
The material womb In the western tradition of thinking about the body, wombs have not only been illustrated in a variety of shapes, but been made in a variety of materials: ancient terracotta ‘votive wombs’ meet today’s brightly coloured, perky knitted wombs, while eighteenth-century glass wombs give way to nineteenth-century rubber wombs. In this paper, as an aspect of a wider project concerning what has been thought to constitute a body ‘part’, I will consider the colours and materials used for wombs. I shall be arguing that something more than factual knowledge guides the visual representation of the womb, and that taking the long view changes the assumptions we now make, and the questions we put to the past.
Botticelli and Reproduction In the art historical tradition of thinking about Renaissance painting, we conceptualise pictures as ‘autograph’ and ‘workshop’, admiring the former as, say, a Botticelli, and often denigrating the latter as a slavish and dull copy. But these two strands of production were not divergent: both were outputs of the business of a master painter, and both involved, in varying degrees, the input of the master and his assistants. In this paper, I will consider the production of Botticelli’s ‘workshop’ works, drawing particularly on technical analysis to discuss approaches to the manufacture of these material objects created for the Renaissance home. I will argue that ‘workshop’ work—Botticelli’s re-produced things—represent decisions he made about manufacture in the business and that their construction calls into question some of our most fundamental tools for assessing attribution and understanding how Renaissance painters worked.
Dr Anne Secord (History and Philosophy of Science, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge) Containing the World: Boxes, Books, and Botany in late C18th and C19th England
Dr Lucy Razzall (English, Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge) Containing the Word: Books and Boxes in Early Modern England
Abstract
Dr Lucy Razzall. Containing the Word: Books and Boxes in Early Modern England. In this paper I want to think about the material and imaginative connections between books and boxes in early modern England. Books were often kept in boxes in this period, but there are further material connections between them – while boxes might be lined with paper, books might well be bound by the same craftsmen who make leather-covered boxes. Early modern material culture furnishes us with plenty of (often playful) objects which draw on the evocative overlap between books and boxes, such as lockets, hand warmers, and instruments, which look like books but which function as vessels for things other than words. Early modern authors were certainly alert to the visual and imaginative similarities between books and boxes, often playing on them in their choice of metaphors for their own writing. Focussing on a late Elizabethan epigram collection, this paper explores the playful capacity of print to manipulate the identity of the material text, and to remind us of the material and imaginative connections between poems, books, and other boxes of tricks.
Professor Lisa Jardine (Director of the Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, UCL) "An Important Piece of Jewellery worth 80,000 Florins": Moving Gems for Occasions around Early Modern Europe
Professor Evelyn Welch (Vice Principal of Arts and Sciences, KCL) Furs and Feathers in the Early Modern World: Moving Fashion across Global Borders
Dr Robbie Richardson (English, University of Kent) “[T]he most mysterious thing in the World”: British Interpretations of First Nations Material Culture
Abstract
This paper will look at the relationship between British people in the eighteenth century and the North American cultural objects that they privately collected or viewed in museums, cabinets of curiosities, coffeehouses, and other venues. More specifically it will look at the body of First Nations material culture that arrived in large amounts throughout the century and the ways that these objects shaped British perceptions of Native people and their own sense of identity. There has been little scholarship on the ways in which this material, imbued with First Nations skill, knowledge, and memory, was perceived by British people and interacted with other forms of representation in print and visual culture. While we must remember, as Susan Stewart suggests, that cultural objects in collections “are naturalized by the erasure of labor and the erasure of context of production,” at the same time wampum, calumets, and tomahawks were regularly written into fictional texts and came to be understood for both their physical appearance and symbolic functions; furthermore, they became metonymic for Indians, whose perceived fetishistic relationship to their own material culture both reflected on and critiqued British consumer culture.
Dr Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal College of Art) Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology)
Joint paper: I say "shard", you say "sherd": Contrasting and Complimentary Approaches to an Early Modern "Venice Glass"
Dr Sara Pennell (Independent Scholar) Roisin Inglesby (Assistant Curator, Victoria & Albert Museum)
Abstracts
Dr Sara Pennell ‘A cake of beeswax, which I knew to be mine’: materiality and identification amongst the mundane in eighteenth-century England
Beyond fine and decorative art histories, wherein the work of scholars is in part to provide the objects (the ‘art’) with contexts and provenance that make them fully legible within a culture which values the artist/maker, as well as the role of the known owner/patron, objects which lack these identifiers, or a paper trail that can supply such evidence, often recede in our accounts of material pasts. Many of these objects lack distinguishing aesthetic or formal features which tie them into discourses of art and design; or have, in the documentary sources so often utilised by socio-economic historians to populate the early modern past with ‘things’, resided in the category of ‘lumber’ and ‘small things forgotten’, or indeed evaded most such records by their ephemerality.
Very few of these things, however, were truly anonymous to their owners, users, makers. The efforts made to identify, and claim ownership of, seemingly mundane things or objects of very small value, by victims of robbery, theft and burglary at the Old Bailey and in newspaper advertisements of the period, reveal the profound attention paid to surface detail, the wear and tear evident on objects, and even the transient material states goods might pass through, as ways of identifying possessions. Such attention to materiality, in the face of high-velocity urban circuits of new and used goods, both licit and illicit, can tell us much about how chattel property, be it ever so modest and perhaps on first glance, indistinguishable from others of its type, was claimed, owned and made ‘mine’ by early moderns.
Roisin Inglesby Women’s needlework and the expectations of biography
Anonymous objects pose a problem for museums. Without knowing who made something, how can it convincingly be displayed, interpreted and explained? In a context overwhelmingly dependent on attribution to an artist, designer or maker, where do you start when there is no hope of biography?
This talk considers an anonymous 17th-century embroidery of Mary Magdalene, recently discovered in the V&A’s stores. Iconographically unique, the embroidery cannot simply be assimilated into standard interpretations of women’s domestic needlework, yet as an ‘orphan’ object, we have no way of tracing its provenance or original context. I will suggest that while anonymity can obscure meanings and demoralise researchers, it also creates new opportunities for interpretation. By forcing scholars to consider them without prior reference to their creators, anonymity can liberate things from the expectations of biography.
Dr Adam Smyth (English, Oxford) Doing things with errors
Nicholas Smith and Colin Clarkson (University Library, Cambridge) Practical printnig
Abstracts
Doing things with errors ‘God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine,’ laments Edmund Spenser’s Una in he Faerie Queene. But what can we, as readers and critics, do with errors in printed books? This paper suggests that the history of the Renaissance book is also a history of error, and proposes that we need to learn how to treat typographical slips seriously, or, at least, that we need to think more about their hermeneutical potential. The paper suggests two ways of proceeding: first, to treat errors as moments when, in breaking down, the book briefly but often vividly reveals the processes of its production; and second, to read errors and errata as literary forms that shaped the literary imagination of authors such as Spenser and Milton.
Practical printnig This paper describes the practical difficulties and potential pitfalls associated with the stages in the production of a printed work in the hand press period: composition, imposition and presswork. The speakers will bring along some type, composing sticks and other exhibits to illustrate this process, and will also demonstrate on a tabletop printer, which, while rather different from those used for book work, will give some idea of what is involved. They will show a short film made to accompany the “Private lives of print” currently being exhibited at the University Library.
Dr Chris Wingfield (Senior Curator (Archaeology), Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) Dr Leah Clark (Art History, The Open University)
Abstracts
Chris Wingfield Collecting Things, Making Objects: Missionaries, Museums and Moving Idols
The London Missionary Society (1814 - 1910) is chiefly known from a number of contemporary engravings, and its contents are recorded in two surviving catalogues (1826 and c.1860). However, these are just some of the many instances of inscription through which items from this collection have been repeatedly ‘objectified’ over the last two centuries. This talk will explore the role of inscription in processes of object-making, as well as the potential for surviving inscriptions to enable the reconstruction of processes of movement and mobility, and thus reveal the complex entanglements in which collected things can become involved, at times in spite of the efforts and intentions of those who collected them.
Leah Clark Collecting, Exchange, and the Culture of Things in the Renaissance Court
In the Archivio di Stato di Modena, where the records of the Este and the court of Ferrara are maintained, there exists a series of account and inventory books belonging to Duchess Eleonora d’Aragona (b. 1450-d. 1493). By focussing on one particular account book, this talk will examine how the objects recorded within such a book were sociable things—in their intended uses, but also in terms of the people who maintained them, recorded them in inventories or account books, and those who handled them during their movement. By concentrating on the mobility of objects in court culture, this paper will illuminate how through their circulation, objects navigated an often paradoxical status: on the one hand, they were symbolic goods reflecting magnificence and operating as repositories of knowledge, while on the other hand, they were often used as liquid capital, functioning as pawns for loans.
Dr Simon Werrett (Dept of Science and Technology Studies, UCL) Haileigh Robertson (History,Royal Armouries,York)
Abstracts
Simon Werrett Theatre and Effect in Early Modern Fireworks
Much of the literature on early modern fireworks displays tends to treat them as texts, to be deciphered and read for their symbolic and allegorical content. In this talk I focus on the performative aspects of early modern pyrotechnics and the practical, material techniques used to create fireworks spectacles in the period. Under the heading theatre I explore the way fireworks were stage-managed and related to pyrotechnic images and knowledge in printed books and manuscripts. Under the heading effects, I review the performative properties of different kinds of fireworks such as sound and colour and the logic of early modern performances – the ways materials were supposed to relate to one another in order to produce effects. I conclude by showing how these performative elements were not only critical in making fireworks effective tools of state and court spectacle, but also had an impact on natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Haileigh Robertson The Role of Gunpowder in Early Modern Science
Gunpowder was a subject of interest for many early modern experimental natural philosophers. Attracted by the massive physical power given off on ignition, the early moderns experimented frequently with gunpowder. Owing to gunpowder’s most obvious application, in warfare, some of the experiments conducted had the intention of improving gunpowder—both procurement and performance. The early modern experimentalists however, especially those following Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) projected mode of inquiry, saw gunpowder as much more than a military propellant. Natural philosophers involved with the Hartlib Circle and early Royal Society, for example, proposed new ways of harnessing gunpowder’s energy. Whilst gunpowder’s utility was undoubtedly important for the early modern experimentalists, there was much more to be gained from the close study of the incendiary substance. Bacon and Robert Boyle (1627-91), for example, used gunpowder to resolve disputes over matter theory. Gunpowder experiments were significant not only because they were practically interesting. They occasioned theorising over fundamental issues in early modern science.
This paper explores the uses of gunpowder in early modern natural philosophy. I outline how gunpowder was used, why it was used, and the implications of its employment. Drawing on the reproduction of early modern gunpowder experiments conducted in collaboration with the Royal Armouries (Leeds), I examine precisely how gunpowder affected early modern experimental science. It will be demonstrated how gunpowder served the natural philosophers who employed it, as well as the specific challenges it posed. I argue that for early modern experimental natural philosophers gunpowder was not only about what it could do, but what it could tell us. Gunpowder was a source of potential knowledge
Dr Jane Hamlett Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London) Dr Alastair Owens (School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London)
Abstracts
Dr Jane Hamlett Institutional Things: Material Culture and Patient Experience at Bethlem, 1870-1910
This paper draws on research for the ESRC At Home in the Institution Project -- a cross-institutional study of space and material culture in lunatic asylums (as they were known to contemporaries), schools and lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian England. Built en masse in the nineteenth century, institutions created new material worlds that their inmates had to try and negotiate. The paper will examine interior decoration, furnishing and provision of goods within asylums. Taking Bethlem Hospital, then based in Lambeth, as a case study, I will explore the efforts made to domesticate this establishment through home-like décor. However, the main focus will be patients' responses to and engagement with material culture. The paper will draw on a unique collection of hundreds of letters preserved in Bethlem's case books, which offer an unparalleled record of inmates' reactions to their environments and the things they thought were most important. In a highly controlled material world, small goods, the portable and peripheral, became vital to patients as they attempted to maintain identity and agency within institutional walls.
Dr Alastair Owens People and things on the move: domestic material culture, poverty and mobility in Victorian London
The development of what Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence (1999) termed ‘ethnographic’ approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. Building on critiques of such approaches, this paper examines the material culture of poor households in Victorian London. Drawing upon a study of Victorian archaeological remains excavated from a site in Limehouse in London’s East End, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, it aims to place ‘mobility’ as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place and poverty. While historians and archaeologists have tended to regard mobility as an obstacle to understanding the lives of the poor, here I want to show how by examining the temporal routines and geographical movements of people and things across a variety of time frames and spatial scales, we can perhaps better grasp the struggles and uncertainties of life in Victorian London’s most socially deprived communities. I conclude that as historians of material culture, we need to be more open to the restlessness and dynamism of people and objects.
Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge): ‘The Ascent of Man': visual priming, material culture and early photographs of Ceylon
A man climbing a coconut tree – the recurrent visual narrative of early photographs portraying, exoticising Ceylonese customs. A businesswoman climbing a coconut tree – the latest interpretation of a particular gender trope defining popular visual culture in South Asia. This paper explores the visual priming framework that unites these two representations, the first available across numerous visual records from the late nineteenth century, such as drawings, paintings and photographs, and the second a composite media made by American artist Rajkamal Kahlon in 2011. The proposed comparative analysis will review anthropological perspectives pertinent to representations of cultural power relations in colonial Ceylon, and will discuss how recently re-interpreted visual narratives of particular gender identities function within, as well as shape, new dimensions of contemporary South Asian material culture. Case studies selected from the photographic collections held by the British Library, the Centre of South Asian Studies (Cambridge), and the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections will be discussed alongside Kahlon’s artwork ‘You’ve come a long way, Baby!’.
Professor Elizabeth Edwards (Director of Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester): Folded in Time: Contemplating a Photographic Album
In this paper I use a family album - domestic images inserted in a mass- produced chromolithographed album - as a springboard for thinking about the nature of late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical imagination. I explore this object as a series of nested materialities in which the temporalities of family, local and national histories are both represented and embedded. Following a close critical reading of the object itself, I use Michel Serres' concept of folded time to consider the wider historiographical significances of the material and temporal processes which this album illuminates.
100 Hours of Things: Materiality, Expertise and Encountering Objects
Elizabeth Haines (Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Science Museum) Dr Juliette Kristensen (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London) Matthew Paskins (Department for Science and Technology Studies, UCL)
Abstract
Since October 2013, the members of the 100Hours project, founded by Kate Smith and Leonie Hannan at University College, London, have each been interrogating a specific item from the Museums Collections at UCL. We have made repeated visits to our chosen objects, punctuated by discussion sessions with a variety of researchers. As a group we have experimented in accumulating ‘one hundred hours’ of looking and thinking. This panel presents the reflections of Liz Haines, Juliette Kristensen, and Mat Paskins on participating in that process. In three short discussion pieces, we outline will our perspectives on this collective interrogation of the methods and meaning of materiality in historical work.
Liz Haines, will be considering the aesthetics of various material epistemologies and how they might structure our relationships to historical artefacts. Juliette Kristensen will explore the critical tensions between the call for a flat ontology and the viscerality of phenomenological experience, through focusing on the concepts of attention and touch. Mat Paskins will talk about a meteorite from Augusta County, Virginia, and the life-worlds which have gathered fleetingly around it.
Dr Anna Maerker (History, Kings College London) The materiality of “body things"
Dr Margaret Carlyle (HPS, University of Cambridge) Inventing birthing bodies in Enlightenment France
Abstracts
Dr Anna Maerker How do materials shape cultures of healing, and how do healing cultures influence the development and use of materials? Historically, a wide range of materials have been crucial for the development of medicine. The introduction of plants from the New World significantly increased the number of drugs available to early modern patients. At the same time, this expansion challenged traditional systems of knowledge and exchange, and prompted the development of new practices both of classification and economic regulation. The improvement of steel created the possibility of new types of prostheses as well as reshaping the relationship between patients, artisans and physicians. The fabric of the body itself, used as raw material for medical intervention and research, creates ethical problems to the present day, from the extraction of paupers’ teeth for rich clients in the eighteenth century to the experimental use of cell cultures in the twentieth century. Today I would like to explore four interrelated areas of investigation using brief preliminary case studies of four “body things”: Materials and meaning, materials in medical practice, materials and communities, materials and experience.
Dr Margaret Carlyle What do pelvis-measuring pliers, artificial arms, breastpumps, and pregnant mock-women have in common? They are all facets of technological development in an age of Enlightenment at a time when midwives and medical men turned to material culture to find solutions to age-old problems encountered in the birthing chamber. This paper focuses on the boom of birthing instruments in eighteenth-century France, which were designed as practical implements and constructed from materials including metal, crystal, textiles, wax, and wicker. While some, like the teaching manikin, mimicked the birthing body as part of classroom simulations, the “pelvimètre” functioned as a prenatal measuring device, while the breastpump stimulated the postnatal body to produce infant milk. The multiple usages of these pedagogical, quantifying, and prognosticating tools indicate the spirit of mechanical invention that pervaded the culture of birthing more broadly in this period. This was a culture in which both male and female authorities participated, and the underlying goal of this paper is to demonstrate the complementary and sometimes antagonistic roles played by men and women in regimes of medical invention. Examples of male-female conflict also provide an opportunity to explore the gendering of “bodily things” related to birthing in this period. Finally, these inventions are situated within ongoing public debates over the state’s role in promoting population growth through safer birthing practices and the increasing importance of consumerism to medical materiality.
Natalie Lawrence (History and Philosophy of Science) The 'Devil of Taiwan' and the 'Scaly Lizard' in colonies and cabinets.
Heidi Egginton (History) 'A Museum of Furniture': Collecting Antiques in the West End Department Store, c. 1900-1914
Tess Little (History) La femme tondue revisited: contextualising photography of Liberation France, 1944-45
Irene Cooper (History) Refocusing the Rosary: Devotional Things in Early Modern Italy
Eleanor Chan (History of Art) English Cognitive Style, Material and Immaterial: Embroidered and/or Geometric Traces of Post Reformation Visuality
Giulia Galastro (History) Forbidden Finery: the aims and targets of early modern Genoese sumptuary law
Dr Maya Corry (History of Art, Cambridge) Dr Victoria Mills (Research Fellow in English, Darwin College, University of Cambridge)
Abstracts
Maya Corry, Bodily beauty and the soul in Renaissance male portraiture
It was a Renaissance commonplace that a skilled artist could produce a portrait of such naturalism that the subject appeared as if he or she were really present, and alive. Yet some Italian images of young men present sitters not as they were in reality, but as stunning beauties, idealised beyond recognition. Many such works were created in Milan in the late fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci was living and working there, but this type of iconography was popular across Italy and endured into the sixteenth century.
This paper will explore the implications of these artworks for historians interested in early modern concepts of gender and identity. It will investigate the way in which young men who were often derided for their effeminacy could turn to images to reformulate these discourses. It will also explore the significance of this iconography to religious beliefs and practices. Relationships with the divine were often mediated through artworks in this period, and the spiritual value ascribed to masculine beauty could play a central role in shaping devotional, as well as gendered, identity.
Victoria Mills, Bibliomania and the Male Body in the Late Nineteenth Century
Literary depictions of nineteenth-century bibliomania are riddled with the language of disease. Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania; or, Book Madness (1809), for example, is an account of the ‘history, symptoms, and cure of the fatal disease’. While late-Victorian bibliomania is often pathologised and placed in relation to discourses about heredity, degeneration and the fitness of the male body, this paper draws attention to a range of texts in which book collecting is depicted in positive terms. It explores sensory experience and eroticism in depictions of book collecting, focusing on the bibliophilic dandy-aesthetes and shabby bachelor book-lovers in work by Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, George Gissing and Eugene Field.
The paper examines fiction’s account of how men form and reinvent themselves through the act of book collecting and of how male subjects and book-objects blend, transform and physically alter each other. By introducing a phenomenological perspective on the corporeal experience of book love, the paper highlights the interplay of the senses as instrumental in the construction of masculine identities. I use depictions of book collecting to think about how the relationship between past and present is mediated through things and bodily objects and I discuss the alternative histories and genealogies that the individual’s affective investment in books may recover.
Professor Jim Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge) Reading science in a utopian world of print
Dr Kristina Lundblad (Division of Book History, University of Lund, Sweden) Bound to be modern. Cloth bindings and literature as thing
Abstracts
Prof Jim Secord. For a brief, utopian moment in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the reading of science appeared to offer a remedy for Britain's social, political and religious malaise. Conversation about science pervaded elite society, new institutions for practising and disseminating knowledge were founded, and hundreds of thousands of men and women paid a penny a week to gain access to chemistry, geology, astronomy and other sciences. Even the most esoteric aspects of advanced calculus would, it was believed, become accessible to all. These millennial hopes were based on a perception that the physical quality, price and availability of printed word was being transformed by machine production. Changes in the material form of the book opened up the possibility of reshaping everyday life on a rational basis across the social spectrum.
Dr Kristina Lundblad. With industrialization in the 19th century, book culture went through a number of changes. Like many other goods, literature began to be sold in retail packages – readymade bookbindings that conveyed the character of the literary content of the book. Objects such as packages and bookbindings took on an increasingly important place in the public and private spaces of modern society, spreading new imagery and symbolic messages. The use and handling of books and packages coincided with a use and handling of trade marks and logotypes and of a new world of images which introduced a number of new elements in everyday life. In this paper I will concentrate on the emergence of publishers’ bookbindings, and especially decorated cloth bindings: Why did publishers take on the commissioning of bindings, what kind of interaction between technology, economics and aesthetics took place on the book market, how can we understand the changes in binding design and how did modern, decorated bookbindings influence peoples relations to books and literature?
Dr Tara Hamling (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) Decorating the parlour: ‘narrative’ imagery in the middling-level house
Dr Catherine Richardson (Department of English, University of Kent) “Conferring by the parlour fire”: story-telling and the middling-status house
Abstract
Catherine Richardson. The particular interests in the subject of ‘domestic things’ which we share at the moment – households and material culture – cluster around the book we are writing together: A Day at Home in Early Modern England: The Materiality of Domestic Life, 1500-1700, due to be submitted to Yale next year. The distinctions in approach to those things come from our different disciplinary perspectives: Tara Hamling is an art historian who researches buildings, interior decoration and crafted objects with a particular focus on iconography and the cultural impact of the English Reformation. Catherine Richardson uses literary and dramatic texts alongside historical documents to study the representation of material culture. Our argument about ‘domestic things’ focusses on the middling sort, a group whose emerging identities in this period were partly shaped by the distinctions they were able to establish between the form and function of their domestic environments and those of their neighbours. As their use of household space was central to the development of their identity, we focus on the way our different methods and kinds of evidence can begin to retrieve these patterns of use, examining the interplay between action, things and spaces. Our case study is the parlour, a room considered crucial to the construction of elite identities because of the way it articulated social differentiation, providing a dedicated space for sociability and leisure time, but rarely considered in relation to middling groups. By analysing a range of visual, material, dramatic and documentary evidence, we examine the transitional nature of the form, use and idea of this space in this period and at this social level.
Dr Sally Holloway (Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London) Romantic Things: the Material Culture of Courtship in Eighteenth-Century England
Sarah Ann Robin (MA BA, Faculty of History, Lancaster University) Understanding Love through Material Culture: England and America in the Seventeenth-Century
Abstracts
Saly Holloway. This paper will argue that creating, exchanging and physically handling ‘romantic things’ played an indispensable role on the path to matrimony. The paper reconstructs the material world of courtship in England between c. 1730 and 1830 by combining objects in museums, archives and country houses with textual and visual representations of gifts in ballads, poems, novels, letters, diaries, paintings and prints.
Love tokens will be divided into three thematic categories to examine the meanings and purposes of particular gifts: ‘Food’, ‘Textiles’ and ‘The Body’. These categories are used to explore male and female roles in the economy of courtship, how certain gifts changed over time, and over the course of a relationship. The paper draws upon a cornucopia of objects including gingerbread, oysters, ribbons, garters, rings, silhouettes, eye miniatures and hair-work tokens. These romantic objects were vital in guiding courting couples from initial intimacy to a deeper emotional connection.
Sarah Ann Robin. Material culture played a critical role for those who fell in love. Tokens signified promise and intent during courtship, betrothal and afterward. Gifts served the necessary and practical demands of living, and conveyed the wishes, aspirations and personal experiences of the givers. Personal objects brought tangibility to the fragility of life: the hair of a lover could enclose an ocean and keep distant memories alive.Objects commemorated the deceased, becoming agents of comfort for those who were left behind. Furthermore, objects of this period often had numerous owners: they were transferred, exchanged, altered and given; thus informing us of a complex and multifaceted network of relations. Finally, objects occupied both the public and private spaces of love. Some were commemorative and declarative; others were worn against the skin, and hung on the walls of the private, domestic sphere. They were the reminders, reinforcers, consolers and mediators of love.
My talk will consider the multi-pronged approach which I have taken in my doctorate, and that which has led me to these conclusions. Objects reflect the expectations and realities of ‘being in love’ but to think of them as pure reflections is not enough; their study must be a three-dimensional one, not only of mirrored images, but one with different sides, heights and depths, of fabrics, designs and functions. It is this approach which shall be discussed.
Dr Lawrence Klein (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Dr Kate Retford (History of Art, Birkbeck)
Abstracts
Dr Lawrence Klein The conversation piece and polite culture: images, things and the makers of things
The genre of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain brings to mind a complex but narrow world of ladies and gentlemen who sought to be represented as, in any number of ways, polite. In this paper, I will use conversation pieces to suggest ways in which others in this society (people who were neither landed nor especially affluent) gained access to elements of polite culture and may have incorporated these elements into the ways they saw themselves. I will do so in two principal ways. First, I will talk about visual components of conversation pieces that circulated in accessible forms: painted conversation pieces made reference to specific individuals, their appurtenances and their habits (even if this representation was highly inaccurate); these same visual components could be detached from the painted image and redeployed generically in ways that allowed them to circulate to wider audiences. Second, I will talk about the way producing polite goods for the people who appeared in conversation pieces left its mark on producers themselves: the mark of politeness.
Dr Kate Retford The material world of the conversation piece: real things, fabricated things
One of the most compelling aspects of the conversation piece - a mode of small group portraiture which emerged in England in the 1720s and 1730s - has always been its emphasis on ‘stuff’. In these modestly proportioned canvases, sitters are usually pushed back into the picture plane, and full attention is paid to the details of the exteriors and - the subject of my paper – the interiors they inhabit. Stuccowork and carved overmantels are described in intricate detail; care is taken to capture the qualities of mahogany furniture and ceramic ornaments. As Sacheverell Sitwell once put it, this can seem an art of 'live objects, and inanimate persons’.
I want to focus on the questions raised when we have evidence that these spaces are, in fact, entirely fictitious, invented by the artist. Sometimes a conversation piece will represent the patron's actual home with notable accuracy; sometimes elements of that home have evidently been 'tweaked', but, on a considerable number of occasions, these painted rooms and the things they contain are pure artifice, even replicated in different portraits. My paper will ask: How were these interiors fabricated? How were they understood at the time, and how should we understand them now? Crucially, what can they tell us about the eighteenth-century world of material goods and matters of taste and politeness?
Dr Jason Scott-Warren (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) Dr Nancy Cox (University of Wolverhampton)
Carved Things, Carved Identities: Early Modern Luso-African Ivories and the History of African Combs
Dr Sally-Ann Ashton (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge) Hair combs from Africa and the African Diaspora 1500-1900
Professor Jean Michel Massing (History of Art, University of Cambridge) The Sierra Leone ivory sculptures
Abstracts
Dr Ashton This talk will consider both the types and sources of evidence, and the lack of evidence for this single category of object between 1500 and 1900. It will also consider what hair combs can tell us about the transference of culture from Africa to the Americas and Caribbean.
Prof Massing That stone and ivory carving was practised in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is indicated by the stylistic similarities between certain nomoli and a group of ivories – the so-called Sapi-Portuguese ivories – datable to that period. This is confirmed by Valentim Fernandes (1506-1510), according to whom the Sapi carve “delicate works in ivory such as spoons, salt-cellars and bracelets.” He adds that “In Sierra Leone, the people are very skilful and very talented; all the objects we ask them to carve, they make truly marvellous works in ivory; some make spoons, others salt-cellars, others dagger hilts and other fine works.” He reiterates this point in another telling passage: “…they produce salt-cellars in ivory and spoons and whatever task one sketches for them, they carve it in ivory.” I will study this group of ivories and identify the French model used by the Sierra-Leone carvers, a Book of Hours printed by Thielman Kerver in Paris between 1509 and 1511.
Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Soane Museum and the Watts Gallery
Mr Tim Knox (Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and
Dr Nick Tromans (Curator of the Watts Gallery)
Abstracts
Tim Knox Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Soane Museum
Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, is the house and collections of the great Neoclassical architect, John Soane. Soane left it to the nation on his death in 1837, with strict instructions that nothing should be changed. However, almost as soon as he died, Soane's elaborate arrangements began to be dismantled and modified - sometimes for very necessary practical reasons, but also sometimes to answer the dictates of taste and decorum. Moreover, as the years elapsed, his decorative schemes were replaced, objects were rearranged, and the day to day needs of the Museum forced changes upon Soane's original vision. Tim Knox, former Director of Sir John Soane's Museum and current Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, discusses the gradual erosion of Soane's legacy, and its revival under a succession of post-War curators of the Museum. He concludes with an account of the Opening up the Soane project, conceived and begun under his own term as Director, which will return even more of the Museum to its exact appearance in 1837, as well as equipping it - in two neighbouring buildings - with the facilities that will enable the Soane Museum to survive into the twenty-first century and beyond.
Nick Tromans Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Watts Gallery
The Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford was found in 1904, the year of the death of George Frederic Watts, the Victorian painter of symbolic allegory and of portraits of the great figures of the age. In 2011 the Gallery reopened after a complete refurbishment, undertaken after its picturesque structures had reached a point of dangerous dilapidation. The Gallery has since been the focus of much attention on account of its success as a heritage story. This talk will examine the challenges faced by the Gallery during this period, as it sought to balance the demands of sustainability and of the health of the collection against the cherished legacy of a fragile, eccentric and unique environment
Reconstructing Things: From Colourful Clothes to Paintings and Pigments
Professor Ulinka Rublack (Professor of Early Modern European History, Faculty of History, St John's College, University of Cambridge)
Dr Spike Bucklow (Senior Research Scientist and Teacher of Theory, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
NB This session will be on Thursday at 1.30pm
Abstracts
Prof Rublack: How can historians reconstruct the symbolic as well as sensate world of colour experience? This talk introduces the audience to a unique experiment in reconstruction. It focuses on the political and emotional meanings of yellow and red in a precise moment in time: the Augsburg Imperial Diet in 1530, one of the key political summits of the German Reformation. It uses contemporary evidence to demonstrates in detail why symbolic languages were so crucial and contested at these meetings, but also uses research on the Fugger merchant company to show that their political outcomes were underpinned by very real financial strategies and economic interests. The paper then concentrates on an explanation of why the head-accountant of the company chose to commission a particular outfit to wear during the summit and shows how an actual reconstruction of historical dress can enrich our knowledge of the past and epistemological approaches.
Dr Bucklow: This paper follows Ulinka's focus on colour and reinforces her suggestion that the reconstruction of things can throw light on aspects of culture that might otherwise remain inaccessible. It recognises that things like colour are intimately linked to material substrates that carry them - dyes in cloth, or pigment in paint, for example. It suggests that, up to and including the nineteenth century, some of the cultural significance of colours was linked to the dyes and pigments that provided them. The paper explores the re-enactment of studio practice based on historic artists' recipes, acknowledging the role of tacit knowledge alongside explicit instructions. With reference to a fourteenth-century Missal in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the reconstruction of two blue pigments using contemporary methods shows that there is more to a colour than meets the eye.
Dr Matthew Hunter (McGill University) Did Joshua Reynolds Paint his Pictures?
Professor Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre) Point Counter Point: Josua Reynolds, portraiture and late eighteenth-century exhibition culture.
Abstracts
Matthew Hunter. In May 1773, an open letter to London’s Morning Chronicle lodged a peculiar complaint with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pigmented ooze—paint—had, in the view of this critic, come to bear in upon British art with undue, defacing force. The problem followed from conceptualizing artistic identity through an excessively literal translation of French Peintre as “Painter, and the materials which ingenious persons of that denomination make use of to display their talents, we have, from that word, calledpaint, which in French is named coleurs.” Closer to the liberal art actually practiced and promoted by Reynolds, this anonymous critic proposed, sculptors and architects could offer useful counter-models: “Why not like these have a peculiar name, Sir Joshua, for your very profession? Why not like these take up at once your classic name? Why not Pictor?” Situated within the rich, period discourse and extensive, modern documentation of Reynolds’s chemical experiments, this paper aims to take theMorning Chronicle’s complaint seriously. It considers the ways in which Reynolds and his contemporaries understood interfaces between paint and image, while exploring the broader stakes (then as now) of apprehending the President’s temporally-evolving chemical works as “pictures.”
Mark Hallett. This talk, which will focus on the portraits submitted by Joshua Reynolds to the annual Royal Academy displays of the 1780s, explores the workings of the painted object within the crowded, ephemeral and spectacular exhibition displays characteristic of the late eighteenth century. Particular attention will be devoted to the ways in which, within the Academy's Great Room, Reynolds's individual portraits of women were played off against each other and against portraits of male subjects, and thereby became part of an extended and highly intriguing form of visual dialogue and counterpoint.
Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck (National Maritime Museum)
Felicity Powell (Artist)
Ben Carpenter (University of Wolverhampton)
Dr Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) Paper slips, notebooks and health management.
Dr Helen Smith (University of York) Paper Technologies
Abstracts
Paper slips, notebooks and health management
Dr Elaine Leong. Upon her death in 1688, Margaret Boscawen of Tregothnan, Cornwall, left bundles of loose paper slips and six paper notebooks of different shapes and sizes all filled to the brim with useful medical and household know-how. From gardening advice to recipes for particular cures to lists of beneficial distilled waters to external indices correlating to Boscawen’s printed medical books, the notebooks and slips contain and represent the wide scope of her practical knowledge. Focusing on Boscawen’s collection of paper notebooks and paper slips, I examine how one woman created and organized her collection of practical know-how and argue that Boscawen utilized the materiality of paper, pen and ink to categorize and codify household practical knowledge.
Paper Technologies
Dr Helen Smith. This 'paper' explores the use of what we might broadly term paper technologies in early modern England, from fold-out diagrams and volvelles to do-it-yourself death masks and decoupage. By turning attention to the formation and deformation of paper (and its use as a conceptual as well as practical tool), I hope to suggest the significance of paper as a flexible technology across a range of contexts, and to argue that paper does not simply receive the imprint of meaning but participates in the construction and articulation (not least in the sense of being 'distinctly jointed or marked') of knowledge.
Dr Sean Roberts (University of Southern California)
Dr Elizabeth Upper (UL Munby Fellow)
Dr Cordula Van Wyhe (University of York) The fabric of Female Rule in Leone Leoni's statue of Mary of Hungary, c. 1555
Desmond Shawe-Taylor (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures)
Abstracts
Desmond Shawe-Taylor As part of a campaign to capture all of the information from the inventories held within the Royal Collection and Royal Archives, Royal Collection Trust is examining the comprehensive inventories of the collection made during the Regency period and at the same time considering William Henry Pyne’s The History of the Royal Residences of 1819. Together, these provide one of the most comprehensive accounts of an historic paintings collection. Accordingly, this talk provides an opportunity to stand back from what is essentially a mechanical task and examine what these inventories tell us about the display and appreciation of paintings in this period.
The purpose of the session is more to ask questions and to gather feedback from the audience than to provide theories, however, a number of key themes emerge. Firstly, the way in which, within the Royal Collection, long outdated decorative schemes survive alongside completely up-to-date ones and, secondly, how Old Master paintings seem to be valued for two, often quite separate, reasons, the aesthetic and the antiquarian. This period also allows us to contrast the collection of The Prince of Wales at Carlton House with the paintings accumulated at other royal residences.
Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) Automata and Dr Anna Maerker (Kings College London) Model Bodies and Model Experts
Abstracts
Prof Simon Schaffer: Eighteenth century automata served a very wide range of uses, as things to display or satirise, admire or unmask. Such seemingly self-moving things functioned in a culture fascinated by the workings of the theatre and of the market, especially in juxtaposition of automata with other mobile things of the period, such as spring clocks and water pumps. And what happens when these things now appear on film?
Dr Anna Maerker: The Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History 'La Specola' in late-eighteenth-century Florence was famous for its life-sized wax models of the human body, part of a public display of nature that was designed to further public happiness through education and enlightenment. In this talk, I will focus on practices of model making and model use at La Specola to ask how things mediate human relationships and shape social groups. Based on material from my book Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815, the talk will investigate how model makers articulated their identity through model production, and how model display shaped the relationship between experts and the public.
Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford) The Animated Still Life
and
Jose Ramón Marcaida Lopez (University of Cambridge) All things must pass. Playful vanity in seventeenth-century Spanish still-life painting
Dr Sam Alberti (Royal College of Surgeons) and Faramerz Dabhoiwala (Exeter College, Oxford)
Dr James Davey (National Maritime Museum), Dr John McAleer (National Maritime Museum) and Dr Quentin Colville (National Maritime Museum)
Dr Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge) and Dr Emma Spary (University of Cambridge)
Dr Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)
Dame Rosalind Savill (Wallace Collection) and Dr Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick)
Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire) and Amy Miller (National Maritime Museum)
Dr Catherine Eagleton (British Museum) and Dr Martin Allen (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Professor Simon Schaffer (HPS, Cambridge) Professor Nick Thomas (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)