Enfilade

The latest in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, from Liverpool UP (with more information from this blog posting by the editors) . . .

Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng, eds., Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Liverpool: Voltaire Foundation in Association with Liverpool University Press, 2021), 416 pages, ISBN 978-1800348141, £65 / $100.

A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans—some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins—translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining.

In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.

Lauren R. Cannady, Assistant Clinical Professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history. Her previous publications include analyses of early modern garden patterns and French aesthetic philosophy, and her current project is a book on northern European gardens as sites of knowledge production and transmission. Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT. Her second co-edited book Land Air Sea will address how architecture and environment(s) in the early modern era forecasted contemporary issues related to climate change and sustainability.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng, Introduction: Assembling Artisanal Identities across Geographies

I. Envisioning Artisanal Histories
• Chandra Mukerji, Sovereign Sun King
• Emine Fetvaci, Visualizing Urban Festivals in the Ottoman Empire: A Comparison of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• Richard Taws, Telling Artisanal Time

II. Collaborative Objects
• Frédéric Dassas, The Secret to Success: Urbanization and Luxury Decoration at the Place Louis-le-Grand
• Dennis Carr, The Spanish Colonial World in Microscosm: A Puebla Desk-and-Bookcase
• Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Artisanal Agency, Agnonymity, and Power

III. Religion and the Commerce of Empire
• Neil Kamil, Mark of Disgrace or Matter of Politeness? Materiality, Trust, and Expectations in Early-Eighteenth-Century Virginia
• Lauren R. Cannady, Interregna: The Société des Arts and the Scale of Time
• Thomas Crow, Confessional Complications in Maritime Trade

IV. Corporeal Ecologies
• Sugata Ray, A ‘Small’ Story of the Jasmine Flower in the Age of Global Botany
• Doroty Ko, Fire Walk with Me: Tales of Artisanal Body (Parts) and Innovation in Early Modern China
• Nany Um, Grounded Terrains and Vertical Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Asia

V. Enlightenment Technologies
• Valérie Nègre, Craft Knowledge in the Age of Enyclopedism
• Jennifer Ferng, Miniature Domination: Mining the Worlds of Goldfields Jewelry and Emu Eggs
• Kaijun Chen, Artisans as Thinkers in the Early Modern World

Summaries
Bibliography
Index

From Penn Press:

Miranda Eva Stanyon, Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0812253085, $75.

What does the sublime sound like? Harmonious, discordant, noisy, rustling, silent? Miranda Eva Stanyon rereads and resounds this crucial aesthetic category in English and German literatures of the long eighteenth century from a musical perspective and shows how sonorous sublimes lay at the heart of a central and transformative discourse. For Enlightenment and Romantic era listeners, the musical sublime represented a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, one that tested what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and therefore becoming.

The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, from the sublime’s rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century, and their reverberations in the nineteenth. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures.

An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.

Miranda Eva Stanyon is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Melbourne.

C O N T E N T S

List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations and References

Introduction

Part I. He Rais’d a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down: English Literature, ca. 1670–1760
1  Music as a ‘Bastard Imitation of Persuasion’? Power and Legitimacy in Dryden and Dennis
2  ‘What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell!’ Passionate and Dispassionate Sublimity with the Hillarians and Handelians

Part II. Hissing Snakes and Angelic Hosts: German Literature, ca. 1720–1770
3  Reforming Aesthetics: Bodmer and Breitinger’s Anti-Musical Sublime
4  Klopstock, Rustling, and the Antiphonal Sublime

Part III. Sublime Beauty and the Wrath of the Organ: English and German Literature, ca. 1770–1850
5  The Beauty of the Infinite: Herder’s Sublimely-Beautiful, Beautifully-Sublime Music
6  The Terror of the Infinite: Thomas De Quincy’s Reverberations

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Ryan McCormack, The Sculpted Ear: Aurality and Statuary in the West (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0271086927 (hardcover), $90 / ISBN: 978-0271086934 (paperback), $33.

Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue—a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine sounds the statue might make—The Sculpted Ear rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on aurality emerging within the field of sound studies. Ryan McCormack argues that the sounding statue is best thought of not as an aesthetic object but as an event heard by people and subsequently conceptualized into being through acts of writing and performance.

Constructing a history in which hearing plays an integral role in ideas about anthropocentric statuary, McCormack begins with the ancient sculpture of Laocoön before moving to a discussion of the early modern automaton known as Tipu’s Tiger and the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Finally, he examines statues of people from the present and the past, including the singer Josephine Baker, the violinist Aleksandar Nikolov, and the actor Bob Newhart—with each case touching on some of the issues that have historically plagued the aesthetic viability of the sounding statue. McCormack convincingly demonstrates how sounding statues have served as important precursors and continuing contributors to modern ideas about the ontology of sound, technologies of sound reproduction, and performance practices blurring traditional divides between music, sculpture, and the other arts.

A compelling narrative that illuminates the stories of individual sculptural objects and the audiences that hear them, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the connections between aurality and statues in the Western world, in particular scholars and students of sound studies and sensory history.

Ryan McCormack is a writer and independent scholar based in Knoxville, Tennessee.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Elvis Leaves the Building
1  Animation Introduces Animation
2  Breathing Voice into Laocoön’s Mouth
3  Imperial Possessions
4  Hearing a Stone Man
5  Aural Skins
6  Now You Have to Go, Comrade
7  Museums of Resonance
Conclusion: I Now Present Sergei Rachmaninoff

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Mark Smith, A Sensory History Manifesto (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-0271090177 (hardcover), $70 / ISBN: 978-0271090184 (paperback), $22.

A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses.

Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a historical formation, Mark Smith traces the origins of historical work on the senses long before the emergence of the field now called ‘sensory history’, interrogating, exploring, and in some cases recovering pioneering work on the topic. Smith argues that we are at an important moment in the writing of the history of the senses, and he explains the potential that this field holds for the study of history generally. In addition to highlighting the strengths of current work in sensory history, Smith also identifies some of its shortcomings. If sensory history provides historians of all persuasions, times, and places a useful and incisive way to write about the past, it also challenges current practitioners to think more carefully about the historicity of the senses and the desirability—even the urgency—of engaged and sustained debate among themselves. In this way, A Sensory History Manifesto invites scholars to think about how their field needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of sensory history are to be realized.

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. An award-winning author of more than a dozen books, his work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Danish, and Spanish.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Past
2  Present
3  Future

Notes
Bibliography
Index