Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Skillful Hands: Apprentices and Networks of Learning, 1650–1950
Rienzi’s Biennial Symposium
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 9 November 2024

Proposals due by 15 August 2024

Rienzi, the house museum for European decorative arts of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents the symposium Skillful Hands: Apprentices and Networks of Learning 1650–1950.

William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness, Plate I: The Fellow ‘Prentices at Their Looms, October 1747, etching and engraving (Houston: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, BF.1983.5.45).

Until the late 19th century, apprenticeship was the primary way people were trained in craft trades in Europe and the Americas. Formal education was mainly out of reach for many children from middle-class and low-income families. Apprenticeship training, a legal contract between a student and a master craftsperson, became an advantageous alternative to traditional education. Apprenticeships were regulated and monitored by European craft guilds established during the medieval period to control craft production. Their influence extended beyond the training period, and apprentices were generally closely linked to master craftspeople through cultural and social ties, including intermarriage. Within the traditional guild system, females, immigrants, Indigenous and enslaved peoples, and children from low-income families were often excluded.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, informal apprenticeships were introduced to adapt to innovations and technologies. Colonial expansion provided a range of new raw materials and new demands for skilled labor. Outside traditional European apprenticeship models, skills were acquired through forced migration, local environments, and informal training in various colonial regions. These varied experiences resulted in a diverse network of skilled craftspeople, both anonymous and renowned. The symposium critically considers the networks of learning available—and unavailable—to diverse groups of people and how access to training and materials through apprenticeships helped to shape craft traditions. Who had access, and who did not? How did skills and ideas travel? How did apprenticeship systems affect the material, form, and quality of crafted objects? How did political, social, and cultural conditions in colonies such as British and French North America, New Spain, and the Caribbean influence trade training modes?

Graduate students and entry-level and mid-career professionals are invited to submit a 400-word abstract outlining a 20-minute presentation, along with a CV, by Thursday, 15 August 2024, to rienzisymposium@mfah.org. Selected participants will be notified by Friday, 30 August 2024, and offered a $600 honorarium for travel and lodging. All presentations are given Saturday, 9 November 2024, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Possible themes for investigation may include, but are not limited to:
• Transatlantic trade
• Workshop traditions
• Empire and colonialism
• Technology
• Gender
• Race
• Economics
• Labor
• Class
• Education
• Childhood

From the Call for Papers:

Collecting Past and Present: Women as Collectors
The Wallace Collection, London, 1 November 2024

Proposals due by 2 August 2024

In 2024, the Wallace Collection launched Collecting Past and Present. This new research series takes the format of biannual, themed study days, which include fascinating talks from specialists, exploring collecting through the ages to the modern day. Exclusive interviews with contemporary collectors also feature, revealing tantalising glimpses of extraordinary objects and how they are brought together. These are followed by drinks receptions that act as unique forums for discussion. For those further afield or unable to make it to the museum, the talks can be watched online.

We are now inviting abstracts for our November study day that explore women as collectors and patrons of all art forms. Talks should be 45-minutes long and illustrated by a presentation. They will be held in the Wallace Collection Theatre on Friday, 1 November 2024, between 10.15 and 17.30 GMT. We would like to encourage all those with a specialist interest to share a short text (500 words) and CV with Collecting.PastandPresent@wallacecollection.org by Friday, 2 August 2024. If your submission is accepted, we will require your talk’s title (maximum seven words), an abstract (60 words), and a bio (60 words). We can contribute up to the following amounts towards speakers’ travel expenses on submission of receipts:
• Speakers within the UK – £100
• Speakers from Continental Europe – £180
• Speakers from outside Europe – £300

From the Call for Papers:

Book of Nature, Nature of Books: Practices of Female Botanists
Livre de la nature, nature du livre: Pratiques des femmes botanistes
Dijon, 19–20 June 2025

Proposals due by 31 October 2024

The research centres TIL (Université de Bourgogne) and EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) are organizing a bilingual (French-English) international interdisciplinary conference on the role of women in the development of botany as part of visual, manuscript and print cultures, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. We propose to foster discussions at the intersections of the history of natural sciences, print culture, book history, illustration studies, gender studies, plant studies, and ecocriticism. Papers may focus on a wide variety of case studies pertaining to any geographical area, from herbals to non-fiction writing, from publishers’ and libraries’ archives to museum collections, or from the garden to the diary and to the printed book. They will address the role of women as amateur or professional botanists, gardeners, members of clubs, illustrators, diarists, writers, publishers, and in any other capacity where their individual practices bear on forms of manuscript and print artefacts.

Historically, a putative association between women and plants shaped the views on both (Greene; Taiz and Taiz). Even after the discovery of sexuality in plants in the late seventeenth century, the idea remained so prevalent that Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right (1821) that men were “like animals, active and combative,” and women “like plants, essentially placid” (Schiebinger 2). It was probably for this reason that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among many others, recommended botany to ladies. By the early nineteenth century, botany was viewed as a feminine science, and a distinction was emerging between scientific botany, for men, and popular, literary botany, for women (Shteir). The conference aims to explore the way the spaces and boundaries of women’s contributions to botany were redefined in the face of institutional and societal conventions and restrictions. Along with histories of suppression, we will also examine the way women gained prominence in certain fields, such as illustration and shaped aspects of manuscript and print cultures. Specific case studies as well as papers looking at long-term processes will shed light on past and contemporary trends so as to assess legacies and propose revaluations.

We invite academics and young scholars, librarians, visual artists, and publishers to contribute papers exploring the following themes:

• The Book of Nature and its legacy — We would welcome papers on the legacy of the medieval trope of nature legible as a book, materialized from the 12th century by such productions as herbals. This theme could include issues around the vexed notion of ‘nature’ when it collides with ‘the feminine’ and if/how practices can be seen as gendered in the domain of botany.

• Itineraries of women and plants — Papers may include biographical accounts that trace the itineraries of female botanists in relation to the type of plants that they study. It may be fruitful to underline the implicit or explicit hierarchies that underscore gender divisions: is there a link between unobtrusive species such as moss, fungus and ferns, and their being studied by women? We will also examine the usual association between women and care, as for instance in relation to medicinal plants.

• Records, archives, and exchanges — We would like to hear about the way researchers can gain access to the role of female botanists. How much of their work has been recorded, compared to their male counterparts, and how are such records organized and archived? We also welcome contributions that explore institutional funding of research and travel, as well as traces of transnational networks and discussions with domestic and foreign correspondents. Can we imagine unknown treasures still waiting to be discovered?

• Circulation of manuscript and print artefacts — Papers may examine the specific ways women circulated their findings. This may bear on the history of publishing: how have publishers approached the female botanist? What is the role of women working as publishers themselves, or as popularizers of botany and educationalists in print? The connection between print and manuscripts may also lead us to address the interplay between restriction, emancipation and creativity, in such instances as the diary, the private circulation of manuscripts and private archives.

• Spaces of practice and display — Attention will also be paid to the spatial and medial dimension of the circulation of manuscript and print artefacts, from the page of the book, periodical and diary to museums, drawing rooms, gardens, lecture theatres, gendered spaces, all the way to the internet today. This provides an opportunity to assess the alternative function of certain spaces such asthe garden and domestic spaces when they are redefined as botanical laboratories. Space may also provide clues to how women have been confined by their social backgrounds or have moved across social boundaries.

• Botany, illustration, and nature writing — Working as illustrators often allowed women artists to engage in scientific pursuits whilst being deprived of institutional support.This limitation may have nevertheless been a way of consolidating iconic and textual models and modes of inquiry that found their way in the illustrated book, in nature writing, and in theoretical and popular views of plants’ lives. Therefore, we also invite papers that explore how the material conditions of textual and visual practices, as well as attitudes to plants have been tropedinto a “botanical poetics” (Rosenberg 10–14). We would also like to know how contemporary illustrators, botanists, and nature writers come to terms with such legacies.

• Amateur and professional science — The papers may focus on the way fully recognized or overlooked women negotiated the boundary between private and public spheres, how they construed the porosity between certain fields, and which educational spaces they had access to. This could lead to investigations of women’s contribution to the development of botany as an individual and/or institutional pursuit, as an intimate source of personal development as opposed to a professional career, and of course to assessments of overlooked contributions to the history of science.

• Female crafting and the intermedial circulation of models — We welcome contributions that highlight the material, technical, and intermedial aspects of women’s practices. Are there specific experimental productions such as Mary Delany’s paper mosaics and Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes that lend themselves to a critical analysis of their marginal status and alternative visualizations of nature? Certain types of material objects have been associated to botanical practices and the intermedial dissemination of models, as, for instance, the models of flowers made by the Brendel firm in Germany, still preserved in European universities such as Dijon. What was the role of women in the manufacturing of these models? What was their impact on the careers and aesthetics of female botanists?

Please send a 300-word abstract and a biobibliography (in English or French) before 31 October 2024 to bookofnature2025@gmail.com. Notification will be given by 15 December 2024, and the program will be finalized in January 2025. After the conference, the deadline for the submission of papers for publication will be 30 September 2025.

Keynote Speakers
Anne Hodge (curator of drawings and prints, National Gallery of Ireland)
Valérie Chansigaud (historian of science, independent scholar and author)

Scientific Committee
Marie-Charlotte Anstett (CNRS, Université de Bourgogne), Anna Cabanel (KU Leuven), Kathleen Davidson (University of Sydney), Rodolphe Leroy (Université de Bourgogne), Katherine Manthorne (City University of New York), Clélia Nau (University Paris-Cité), and Ann Shteir (York University, Canada)

Organizing Committee
Sophie Aymes, Marie-Odile Bernez, Ali Hatapçı, Candice Lemaire (Université de Bourgogne), Valérie Morisson (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)

b i b l i o g r a p h i e  i n d i c a t i v e

Bending, Stephen. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
Chansigaud, Valérie. Histoire de l’illustration naturaliste. Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 2009.
Chansigaud, Valérie. Une histoire des fleurs: entre nature et culture. Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 2014.
Davis, Rebecca. “The Book of Nature.” Nature and Literary Studies. Ed. Peter Remien and Scott Slovic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. 31–48.
George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.
Greene, Edward Lee. Landmarks of Botanical History. Part 2. Ed. Frank Egerton. Stanford UP, 1983.
Johnson, Nuala. Empire, Gender, and Bio-Geography: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe and Colonial Burma. New York: Routledge, 2023.
LaBouff, Nicole. “Public Science in the Private Garden: Noblewomen Horticulturalists and the Making of British Botany c. 1785–1810.” History of Science 59.3 (2021): 223–55.
Laroche, Rebecca. Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650. London: Routledge, 2016.
Libster, Martha. Herbal Diplomats: The Contribution of Early American Nurses (1830–1860) to Nineteenth-Century Health Care Reform and the Botanical Medical Movement. Golden Apple Publications, 2004.
Lightman, Bernard, ed. A Companion to the History of Science. Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Manthorne, Katherine. Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art. Lund Humphries, 2023.
Page, Judith and Elise Lawton Smith. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
Rosenberg, Jessica. Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2022.
Rudolph, Emanuel. “Women in Nineteenth-Century American Botany: A Generally Unrecognized Constituency.” American Journal of Botany 69.8 (1982): 1346–55.
Sagal, Anna. Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2022.
Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Rutgers: Rutgers UP, 2004.
Shteir, Ann. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Strocchia, Sharon. Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019.
Taiz, Lincoln and Lee Taiz. Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017.