Call for Papers | The Horse and the Town and Country House
George Stubbs, Lord Torrington’s Hunt Servants Setting out from Southill, Bedfordshire, ca. 1765–68
(The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart)
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From the Call for Papers:
The Horse and the Town and Country House: Art, Politics and Mobility
Institute of Continuing Education, Madingley Hall, University of Cambridge, 18–19 November 2022
Proposals due by 31 March 2022
Building on the successful 2018 Attingham Trust Study Programme The Horse and the Country House, this conference interrogates the place of the horse in the town and country house. From sporting art and memorabilia, riding dress and horse tack, carriage design and liveries, stables and stable servants, mobility and horseracing, we seek to explore the ways in which the horse was central to the social, cultural, economic, and political functions of the town and country house. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that engage with any aspect of the topic, especially papers that offer case studies of specific houses, across periods and geographical locations. We are keen for papers that open up new methodological approaches for the study of the horse and the country house, such as from fashion, curatorial, animal, postcolonial, LGBTQ+, and feminist perspectives. We welcome papers from emerging and established scholars highlighting new research, and from those working across a broad range of disciplines.
Suggested topics include the following:
• Sporting art and the domestic interior
• Sporting art and horse and human pedigree
• Horse riding, politics, and sociability
• Horse racing and global networks of trade
• Dress and the materiality of riding
• Equine connoisseurship
• The role of the horse in mobility studies
• Travel between town and country
• Horse-drawn carriage design, significance, and use
• Stable architecture, horse tack, and stable culture
• Interpretation of stables and equine spaces in the country house
Please send a 250-word abstract and 50-word speaker biog. to elizabeth.jamieson@attinghamtrust.org
by 31 March 2022. The successful papers will be selected in April by the academic conference advisory committee comprising Tabitha Barber (Tate Britain), Dr Oliver Cox (TORCH), Christopher Garibaldi (University of Cambridge), Dr Michaela Giebelhausen (Courtauld Institute), Dr Lydia Hamlett (ICE), and Elizabeth Jamieson (Attingham Trust).
New Book | The Story of the Country House
From Yale UP:
Clive Aslet, The Story of the Country House: A History of Places and People (Yale University Press, 2021), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0300255058, $25.
The Story of the Country House is an authoritative and vivid account of the British country house, exploring how they have evolved with the changing political and economic landscape. Clive Aslet reveals the captivating stories behind individual houses, their architects, and occupants, and paints a vivid picture of the wider context in which the country house in Britain flourished and subsequently fell into decline before enjoying a renaissance in the twenty-first century. The genesis, style, and purpose of architectural masterpieces such as Hardwick Hall, Hatfield House, and Chatsworth are explored, alongside the numerous country houses lost to war and economic decline. We also meet a cavalcade of characters, owners with all their dynastic obsessions and diverse sources of wealth, and architects such as Inigo Jones, Sir John Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Sir John Soane, and A.W.N. Pugin, who dazzled or in some cases outraged their contemporaries. The Story of the Country House takes a fresh look at this enduringly popular building type, exploring why it continues to hold such fascination for us today.
Clive Aslet is a writer, commentator, historian, editor, and academic. He has written around twenty books on architecture and history and was editor of Country Life magazine from 1993 to 2006.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue
1 Medieval
2 Tudor and Elizabethan
3 Early Stuart
4 Commonwealth to Queen Anne
5 Early Georgian
6 Mid-Georgian
7 Regency to William IV
8 Early and High Victorian
9 Turn of the Century
10 Between the Wars
11 Post-War: Recovery and Boom
12 Now
Further Reading
Index
Enfilade 
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