Enfilade

From the University of Virginia Press:

Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park, eds., Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0813944937 (hardback) / ISBN 978-0813944944 (paperback) / ISBN 978-0813944951 (Ebook), $35.

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms–and things that originate from living organisms– enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.

Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England.

Julie Park is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow at the Special Collections Center of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, and author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Process and Connection

Part 1. Inscription and Incorporation
• Julie Park, Feather, Flourish, and Flow: The Organic Technology of Early Modern Handwriting
• Rebecca Laroche, The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality
• Kevin Lambert, The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss

Part II. Interface and Merger
• Jessica Wolfe, Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne
• Lynn Festa, Things with Kid Gloves
• Miriam Jacobson, Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry

Part III. Vitality and Decay
• Michael Yonan, Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints
• Diane Purkiss, Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration
• Jayne Lewis, Milton’s Hair
• Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement

Notes on Contributors
Index