Cultural Intermediaries: Seminar Participants
The ISECS site includes a PDF file with the following list of participants for this year’s Seminar for Junior Scholars, to be held at Queen’s University in Belfast, 16-20 August. The theme is Cultural Intermediaries.
- Danna Agmon (University of Michigan), “Professional intermediaries in eighteenth-century French India”
- Vanessa Alayric (Université de Lille), “Cultural transfers of exotica: material exchanges between China and Europe through trade, mission and art”
- Angela Byrne (Royal Irish Academy), “Irish-born British diplomats in Russia, 1733-1767”
- Florence Catherine (Université de Nancy), “Albert von Haller (1708-1777), intermédiaires culturels dans les espaces français et germaniques au XVIIIe siècle”
- Mariana D’Ezio (University of Rome), “Cultural intermediaries across Europe: cultural and literary intersections between British and Italian Women writers and salonnières in the age of the Grand Tour (1700-1799)”
- Sébastien Drouin (École pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne Paris-IV), “Journalistes, érudits et informateurs au Refuge : les réseaux intellectuels de l’Histoire critique de la République des Lettres (1712-1718)”
- Olivera Jokic (City University of New York), “The Death of a Beautiful Moor Woman: Obstinate Clerks and the Form of Evidence in the British Colonial Archive”
- Eszter Kovács (Université de Szeged, Hongrie), “Une catégorie à part du “voyageur par état” : la réflexion de Diderot sur les missionnaires”
- Diego Lucci (American University in Bulgaria), “American Political and Social Life in Luigi Castiglioni’s Travels in the United States of North America”
- Katrina O’Loughlin (University of Western Australia), “‘A smaller compass’: body and text as cultural intermediaries in eighteenth-century women’s travel”
- Maria Petrova (State University for Humanities, Moscow), ‘The diplomats of Catherine II as cultural intermediaries: the case of the Princes Golitsyn”
- Natalie Rothman (University of Toronto), “Dragomans in the Republic of letters: cultural mediation and the making of the Levant”
- Frederik Thomasson (European Institute, Florence), “Cultural intermediaries: another way of addressing or circumventing the centre-periphery dichotomy?”
- Ellen R. Welch (University of North Carolina), “Intermediaries and the Media: Ambassadors and Emissaries in the French Periodical Press, 1672-1763”
- Laurence Williams (Magdalen College Oxford), “Mediating the Oriental City through the Arabian Nights: British Tours of Constantinople, 1719-1797”
The Netherlands, Part II
Tulip Prints and Drawings from the Rijksmuseum Collection
Rijksmuseum in partnership with Keukenhof, March 2010
Starting on 2 March, the Rijksmuseum will exhibit its most beautiful prints and drawings of tulips from the 17th and 18th centuries. Individual tulips, tulips in bouquets, in the garden, as the design for a silver ornament, and featured in allegorical scenes. The highlight of the presentation will be the tulip book created by Jacob Marrel between 1637 and 1639. Complete tulip books are extremely rare, and the Marrel is seldom exhibited in public.
Jacob Marrel’s tulip book was probably a kind of catalogue used by customers for ordering their tulip bulbs. The book, still in its original binding, contains around 80 pages depicting scores of tulips, predominantly in red and purple. In the 17th century, ‘variegated tulips’ were the most popular. These ‘flaming’ tulips were not one single colour, but had white or yellow as the base colour, with red or purple as a second colour. They were given
names such as Spinnekoop, Condé de Flandez, Bruit van Leide
and La Bella Sultana.
Keukenhof (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Tulip bulbs were a valuable commodity throughout the 17th century, and the bulb speculation business sometimes reached incredible heights, only to fully collapse again afterwards. Agneta Block’s flower book from around 1690 shows just how much this rich Baptist widow was prepared to pay for a single tulip bulb. She purchased a large country house in the region along the river Vecht, where she was an enthusiastic gardener and had a book made containing pictures of all of the plants in her garden. The tulip called Root en geel van Leyden (‘Red and yellow from Leiden’) alone cost 100 guilders, but an Anvers bulb beat the lot at 510 guilders. By way of comparison: the annual salary of a 17th-century schoolteacher was around 200
guilders. (more…)
Enfilade 
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