Enfilade

Forthcoming from the U of C Press (though its distribution center is temporarily shut down, e-books are now 30% off, and some titles will ship from other locations). I’ll also put in a plug for Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of the world’s great academic bookstores; its Front Table makes for fine online browsing. Like all independent bookstores, the Seminary Co-op faces daunting challenges in the weeks ahead. So keep reading, and all the better if some of those books are coming from independent booksellers you care about. –CH

Philip Mansel, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 608 pages, ISBN: 978-0226690896, $35.

Louis XIV was a man in pursuit of glory. Not content to be the ruler of a world power, he wanted the power to rule the world. And, for a time, he came tantalizingly close. Philip Mansel’s King of the World is the most comprehensive and up-to-date biography in English of this hypnotic, flawed figure who continues to captivate our attention. This lively work takes Louis outside Versailles and shows the true extent of his global ambitions, with stops in London, Madrid, Constantinople, Bangkok, and beyond. We witness the importance of his alliance with the Spanish crown and his success in securing Spain for his descendants, his enmity with England, and his relations with the rest of Europe, as well as Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We also see the king’s effect on the two great global diasporas of Huguenots and Jacobites, and their influence on him as he failed in his brutal attempts to stop Protestants from leaving France. Along the way, we are enveloped in the splendor of Louis’s court and the fascinating cast of characters who prostrated and plotted within it.

King of the World is exceptionally researched, drawing on international archives and incorporating sources who knew the king intimately, including the newly released correspondence of Louis’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. Mansel’s narrative flair is a perfect match for this grand figure, and he brings the Sun King’s world to vivid life. This is a global biography of a global king, whose power was extensive but also limited by laws and circumstances, and whose interests and ambitions stretched far beyond his homeland. Through it all, we watch Louis XIV progressively turn from a dazzling, attractive young king to a belligerent reactionary who sets France on the path to 1789. It is a convincing and compelling portrait of a man who, three hundred years after his death, still epitomizes the idea of le grand monarque.

Philip Mansel is one of Britain’s leading historians of France and the Middle East. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Great Merchant City; The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon; and Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Maps
Family Trees

Introduction: A Thousand Years of France
1  The Gift of God
2  Our Good City of Paris
3  The Struggle for France
4  M. le Cardinal
5  The Power of Queens
6  Fouquet’s Fall
7  Making France Work
8  The Pursuit of Immortality: The Louvre and Versailles
9  Conquering Flanders
10  Fighting the Netherlands
11  To the Rhine
12  The King Outdoors
13  Inside Versailles
14  Inside Louis XIV
15  The Global King: From the Mississippi to the Mekong
16  The Huguenot Cataclysm
17  England Changes Sides: The Flights of King James
18  France against Europe
19  Spain Changes Sides: The Accession of King Philip
20  The Triumph of Europe
21  Towards the Precipice
22  Nemesis Averted
23  Funeral Games
24  The Shadow of Versailles

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Boydell & Brewer:

John Davies, The Changing Fortunes of a British Aristocratic Family, 1689–1976: The Campbells of Cawdor and their Welsh Estates (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2019), 353 pages, £85.

Traces the development of a typical British aristocratic family, its estates and its activities over the period when the landed aristocracy was at its height and over the period when the aristocracy had to cope with increasing democratisation.

For over two hundred years, the Campbells of Cawdor were major landowners, industrialists and politicians. Originating in Nairnshire, Scotland, they moved in the late seventeenth century to south Wales, where they became the second largest landowner in Wales and owners of significant coal and lead mines. They participated politically in the British state as MPs, peers, lords of the admiralty including one first lord, treasury lords, admirals, and army officers. They supported local good causes, were involved in London ‘society’, and were major art collectors. As such their story is fairly typical of many other aristocratic families in the period. This book traces the development of the family, its estates, and activities from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century. It shows how they established their wealth and power during the eighteenth century—the period when the landed aristocracy was at its height—how they responded in the nineteenth century to the moves towards more democratic forms of local and national government, and how—despite the difficulties aristocratic families and estates faced in the twentieth century—they survived, selling off their Welsh lands and returning to their Scottish base, which remains a flourishing agricultural estate and tourist destination.

John E. Davies was the County Archivist for Carmarthenshire and is now an independent historical researcher. He completed his doctorate at Swansea University.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Cawdor and Campbell
Estate Administration
The Agricultural Estate: The Cawdors as Farmers and Landlords
The Cawdors as Industrial Landowners
The Cawdors in the Community: Church and Education
The Melee of Local Governance
The Cawdors in Politics: Interest Building, Consolidation, and Decline
Private and Exclusive Lives
The End of the Welsh Estates
Conclusion

Bibliography

From Boydell & Brewer:

Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2020), 239 pages, ISBN: 978-1783275014, $99.

Long before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the Anglo-Saxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century—closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals—also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English. This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain’s burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to Anglo-Saxon remains. Patriotism, imagination, and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties, and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors—as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry, and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenth-century Britain.

Dustin M. Frazier Wood is a Lecturer in English at the University of Roehampton.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism, Medievalism, and the Eighteenth Century
1  Anglo-Saxonisms of the Early Eighteenth Century
2  Antiquaries and Anglo-Saxons
3  Anglo-Saxon History and the English Landscape
4  Imaging and Imagining Anglo-Saxonness
5  Anglo-Saxonist Politics and Posterity
Conclusion: Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons

Bibliography

From Boydell & Brewer:

Gábor Gelléri, Lessons of Travel in Eighteenth-Century France: From Grand Tour to School Trips (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2020), 245 pages, ISBN: 978-1783274369, $130.

A study of the literature of the ‘art of travel’ in eighteenth-century France, showing how consideration of who should travel and for what purpose provided an occasion for wider debate about the social status quo.

Early modern educational travel is usually associated with the Grand Tour: a young nobleman’s journey through the established highlights of Europe. Lessons of Travel presents how, in eighteenth-century France, this practice was heavily contested, and the idea of educational travel had far wider implications. Through the study of a huge range of both canonical and little-known sources discussing ‘the art of travel’, from abbé Pluche’s educational best seller, The Spectacle of Nature, through Rousseau’s Émile to practical prospectuses for collective educational travel in the revolutionary period, Gabor Gelleri investigates what it meant to ‘think about travels’ in eighteenth-century France. Consideration of who should travel and for what purpose, he argues, contributed to an international intellectual tradition but also provided a pretext for debate on the social status quo, including such issues as the place of the merchant class, the necessity for professional training, the uses of travel for young women and the education of a new generation of citizens of the Revolution.

Gábor Gelléri is Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: On Reading Arts of Travel
Defining the Grand Tour
From Touring to Training: The Case of Diplomacy, 1680–1830
Trading with Men, Dealing with God: Abbé Pluche’s Ideas on Travel
Travelling on a Moebius Strip: Émile’s Travels
The End of an Era? The Prize Contest of the Academy of Lyon, 1785–87
Inventing School Trips? Revolutionary Programmes of Collective Educational Travel
Conclusion

Bibliography

For any of you mindful today of the Calendar Act of 1750, which finally brought Britain into alignment with the Continent through its acceptance of the Gregorian calendar, thus beginning the New Year on January 1 rather than March 25 (the change, including a loss of eleven days, actually went into effect in September 1752). From Little Toller Books:

Alexandra Harris, Time and Place: Notes on the Art of Calendars (Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2019), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1908213808, £12 / $18.

Dates are invented things. Nothing in nature decrees that today is today. But for millennia humans have divided time into portions, and given those portions names which are shared widely across cultures, creating a common agreement on the date. This convention is useful in practical ways: we can make arrangements and can communicate time elapsed or time ahead. But the calendar also makes a certain kind of truth and establishes that today is today. As calendars and almanacs developed, art from their specific time and place was naturally incorporated. In this small book showcasing the finest and most interesting art that has gone into almanacs, from the eight century onwards, Alexandra Harris brings in everything from Benedictine calendars to Old Moore’s Almanack.

Alexandra Harris is a renowned, prize-winning writer, critic, and cultural historian. Her books include Romantic Moderns, Weatherland, Modernism on Sea, and Virginia Woolf.