New Book | Blinded by Curiosity
Kate Heard’s review of Zelen’s book (published online in August 2022) appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Collections 35.1 (March 2023). From Primavera Pers:
Joyce Zelen, Blinded by Curiosity: The Collector-Dealer Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716) and His Radical Approach to the Printed Image (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-9059973305, €35.
This book explores a phenomenon in the history of print collecting that has never been extensively investigated: the cutting and pasting of prints in the early modern period. The book focuses on the colourful Dutch classical scholar and libertine Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716). Beverland was banished from the Dutch Republic in 1679 for publishing blasphemous, heterodox, and provocative scholarly texts on sex and sin. Books that dealt with prostitution in ancient times, original sin as the first act of sexual intercourse, and the sexual lust of women, were considered dangerous to Dutch public morality. In 1680, Beverland fled to England, where his friend Isaac Vossius took him in. It was here that Beverland began cutting (nowadays) costly etchings and engravings and arranging the cuttings into collages. These collages, which again demonstrated his interest in sexual matters, survived in two illustrated manuscripts, now in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
This study aims: 1) to reconstruct Beverland’s life in England, primarily concentrating on his interests and dealing in art and books; 2) to map the early modern practice of cutting and pasting prints, on the basis of remaining cuttings as well as textual sources from Beverland’s day; and 3) to present a comprehensive analysis of the two illustrated Beverland-manuscripts in terms of form and function.
Joyce Zelen is a Jacoba Lugt-Klever Research Fellow at the RKD (Dutch Institute for Art History) in The Hague and the Fondation Custodia in Paris.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I | Hadriaan Beverland: A Passionate Man with a Passion for Art
1 The Life of Hadriaan Beverland: A Biographical Sketch
2 ‘Fair and Candid in all his Dealings’: Beverland as Agent and Collector of Art, Books, and Curiosities
3 The Self-Promotion of a Bad Boy: Beverland’s Portraits
Part II | Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
4 Early Modern Print Collecting: A Context for Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
5 Prints, Scissors, and Antiquarian Aspirations: Beverland’s Inscriptiones Singulares Manuscript
6 ‘Dirty’ Notes and Print Collages: Beverland’s Crepundia Lugdunensia Manuscript
Conclusion
Appendices
Abbreviations, Transcriptions, and Translations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Note (added 11 April 2023) — Also see Karen Hollewand’s recent book The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2019), reviewed by Benjamin Bernard in the latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 56 (Spring 2023), pp. 473–79.
New Book | What Pornography Knows
From Stanford UP:
Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-1503611665 (hardcover), $90 / ISBN: 978-1503633117 (paperback), $28.
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey’s readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre’s central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women’s bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre’s deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.
Kathleen Lubey is Professor of English at St. John’s University. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760 (2012).
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Preface: Pornography in the Library
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pornography without Sex
1 Genital Parts: Detachable Properties in the Eighteenth Century
2 Feminist Speculations: Penetration and Protest in Pornographic Fiction
3 The Victorian Eighteenth Century: Publishing an Erotics of Inequity
4 Uncoupling: Pornography and Feminism in the Countercultural Era
Coda: A Mindful Pornography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Enfilade 
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