Enfilade

From Leuven University Press, with distribution by Cornell UP:

Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein, eds., Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2025), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-9462704589, €60 / $69.

Animal Modernities challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance of thinking about animal–human relations for addressing today’s ecological challenges.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more here.

Daniel Harkett is associate professor in the Department of Art at Colby College.
Katie Hornstein is professor in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction — Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein
1  Rethinking the Animal in Art History: Charles Darwin, Karl Woermann, and the Bowerbird — Nina Amstutz
2  Photography Needs Animals: Materials, Processes, and the Colonial Supply Chains of Gelatine Dry Plates — Rosalind Hayes
3  Shooting Elephants and the Performance of Imperial Power — Niharika Dinkar
4  A Tale of Two Serpents — Laura Nüffer
5  Mourning across Species: Ivory Miniatures and Elephant Death — Katherine Fein
6  War Horses, Commemoration, and Mutilation: Copenhagen (1808–1836) and Marengo (ca. 1793–1831) — Katie Hornstein
7  To Fool a Fish: Exploring Interspecies Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Fly-Fishing — Emily Gephart
8  Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity — Amy Freund and Michael Yonan
9  The Bird that Cuts the Airy Way: William Blake’s Avian Modernity — Alysia Garrison
10 Bovine Ubiquity — Maura Coughlin
11  Against the Visual: Seals, Indigenous-Settler Relations, and the Material Culture of Sealing since 1697 — Catherine Girard
12  Mr. Crowley’s Signature: Race, Resistance, and the Queerness of American Animal Portraiture — Annie Ronan
13  Memory and Materiality: Commemorating Canine Companions in Eighteenth-Century Britain — Sean Weiss
14  Herd Mentality: Animal Relationality and QueerKinships in the Life and Work of Anton Braith — Stephanie Triplett

Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index

From Routledge:

Roslyn Lee Hammers, Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China (New York: Routledge, 2025), 170 pages, ISBN: 978-1032888019, $160. Also available as an ebook.

Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China narrates cotton’s journey from a little understand material to a cherished commodity ennobled by associations with the classical heritage of China. In the 12th century, cotton, an imported crop, was plucked from the fields and entered the margins of agricultural treatises. The material was eventually ‘acknowledged’ as cotton, an object distinct from silk, worthy of representation. By the late 16th century, representations of the plant and of the labor used to process it were incorporated into agricultural publications. During the 18th century, cotton imagery and discussions were situated in imperial encyclopaedias, further consolidating its classical legacy. Governor-general Fang Guancheng (1696/8–1768) deemed cotton a worthy subject for ambitious painting. In 1765, he designed the Pictures of Cotton, a series of sixteen paintings complete with commentary that delineated the processes of growing cotton and manufacturing fabric. He presented the Pictures of Cotton to the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) who inscribed his imperial verse on each scene. Knowledge about the fiber became a means to collaborate at the highest level of the court and bureaucracy. Fang replicated the series, complete with imperial verses into carved stone to enable replication. The Jiaqing emperor (r.1796–1821) likewise published the series as woodblock prints. Upon domestication, cotton advanced political legitimacy, becoming a commodity that attained canonical status. Cotton was represented in a scopic regime formulated by the Qing imperium, and in the process, the Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton became the authoritative vision of cotton.

Roslyn Lee Hammers is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
Acknowledgements 

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Cotton in Chinese Visual Culture and Literature
1  Bringing Cotton into the Fold of Ming-dynasty Visual Culture
2  The Qing Imperium and the Classified Production of Knowledge
3  Presenting the Pictures of Cotton
4  Recasting the Qing Reign: Imagining Cotton in a Scopic Regime
Coda to the Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton: Speculations on Visualizing Cotton

Appendix: Texts and Poems of the Yu Ti Mian Hua Tu (Imperially Inscribed Pictures of Cotton) and of the Qin Ding Shou Yi Guang Xun (Imperially Approved Magisterial Guidance on the Bestowing of Clothes) 

Selected Bibliography
Index

From Penn Press:

Nicholas Wood, Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828320, $45.

Tenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals made antislavery central to the American Revolution.

In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.

Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.

Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by ‘secular’ arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform.

Nicholas P. Wood is Associate Professor of History at Spring Hill College.

From Penn Press:

John Craig Hammond, The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828429, $45. Early American Studies Series.

How French and American colonizers created systems of enslavement in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

The Centrality of Slavery examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with the origins of Native American and African American enslavement in the region. It then traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800s. The book concludes with an analysis of the Missouri Crisis and the compromise of 1820, along with the Middle Mississippi Valley’s significance in the road towards disunion and civil war in the late 1850s. More broadly, The Centrality of Slavery argues that the Middle Mississippi Valley sat astride the crossroads of imperial North America. The practices of empire and enslavement forged and fought over there exerted an outsized influence on the history of slavery in North America and the United States. Rather than treating the region’s eighteenth-century past as a prologue to the rise of the United States, John Craig Hammond analyzes the colonial history of the region on its own terms, through the European colonizers, American settlers, and enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent who shaped the development of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, New Kensington.

From Penn Press:

John Blanton, The Household War: Property, Personhood, and the Domestication of Anglo-American Slavery, 1547–1729 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1512828306, $55.

A bold reinterpretation of perennial debates over the origins and development of slavery in colonial English North America.

The Household War offers a bold reinterpretation of perennial debates over the origins and development of slavery in colonial English North America. John N. Blanton argues that the law and practice of slavery in the empire’s earliest American colonies were shaped by a tension between two competing definitions of the institution. One strand of thought, war-slavery ideology, claimed that the power of life and death transformed war captives into chattel slaves. The power to kill defined both war and slavery. But bringing war captives into enslavers’ private households was a dangerous proposition, and so a parallel ‘domestication’ ideology emerged calling for limitations on the power of enslavers and the recognition of the enslaved as persons held to labor in a variant of English servitude.

The Household War examines how the tensions between war-slavery and domestication ideologies, along with crucial political, economic, and cultural differences, shaped the development of slavery in Virginia and Massachusetts from their founding through 1729, creating distinct systems of bondage in England’s flagship mainland colonies. In Massachusetts, where a diversified and dynamic commercial economy afforded opportunities for mobility and access to material resources, the dominance of domestication ideology enabled enslaved people to negotiate their bondage, attain free status, and build free Black households and communities. Virginia, however, committed itself to war-slavery early in its development, with enslaved people defined as articles of property subject to enslavers’ power of life and death while the extreme inequality of plantation society made free Black household formation nearly impossible. Long before American independence highlighted their differences, then, Massachusetts and Virginia were already on distinct trajectories, laying the foundation for a future house divided on the question of slavery.

John N. Blanton is Assistant Professor of History at City College of New York.

From Routledge:

Michael Hill and Jennifer Milam, eds., Death, Disease. and Mystical Experience in Early Modern Art (New York: Roultedge, 2025), 452 pages, ISBN: 978-9463729185 (hardback), $180 / ISBN: 978-1003693741 (ebook), $57.

Fear of death and disease preoccupied the European consciousness throughout the early modern era, becoming most acute at times of plague and epidemics. In these times of heightened anxieties, images of saints and protectors served to reassure the faithful of their religious protection against infection. Modes of visual engagement and devotional subject matter were coupled in new ways to reinforce the emotive impact of art works and to reaffirm the perceived reality of the afterlife. In this context, a visual language of mystical devotion, which overcame the limits of the body and even eroticised its suffering, could serve the needs of the desolate and the pained. In this series of essays focused on spiritual sensibilities in Renaissance art and its legacies, authors present original ideas about the themes of death, disease, and mystical experience, based primarily on the study of objects and their documented historical contexts. Methodologically wide-ranging in approach, the resulting volume provides novel insights into the interplay between suffering and art making in the Western world.

Michael Hill is Head of Art History and Theory at the National Art School in Sydney. His research focuses on the art and architecture of the Italian Baroque, Australian sculpture, and art historiography. Michael has also written with Peter Kohane a number of articles of the idea of decorum in architectural theory. Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Newcastle in Waikato. Her research focuses on art, architecture, and garden design during the eighteenth century. Her publications include A Cultural History of Plants in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2022), Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2022), Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2018), Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Scarecrow Press, 2011), Fragonard’s Playful Paintings. Visual Games in Rococo Art (University of Manchester Press, 2007), and Women, Art and The Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate Press, 2003).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Manipulating the Sacred — Jennifer Milam and Michael Hill
1  Mary as Model for Trecento Mourning — Judith Steinhoff
2  Pacem meam do vobis: Earthly Suffering and Celestial Redemption in the Trecento Fresco Program by Vitale da Bologna at Pomposa Abbey — Catherine Blake
3  Dying to be Born Again: Death in the Florentine Sacre Rappresentazioni — Nerida Newbigin
4  The Visual Transformations of St Anthony the Abbot: From Protector of the Sick to Victor over Sexual Desire — Charles Zika
5  Giovanni Cariani’s Woman Reclining in a Landscape: The Erotic Subverted — Carolyn Smyth
6  Touching Visions: Female Mystics Interacting with the Christ Child and with Mary — Patricia Simons
7  Queering Mysticism and the Lactating Virgin: The Madonna delle Grazie with Souls in Purgatory and its Audience of Nuns — Christina Neilson
8  Securing Heavenly Protection in Apocalyptic Times: A Series of Fresco Votives in the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista in Urbino — Di Haskell
9  The Long Goodbye: Resurrecting Rome’s Apostolic Past in The Final Embrace of Saints Peter and Paul — Barbara Wisch
10  The Beautiful Death of the Count of Orgaz: Andrés Núñez, El Greco, and the Making of a Counter Reformation Saint — Karen McCluskey
11  A Vessel to be Filled: Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo — Michael Hill
12  Lo Strascino’s Lamento and the Visual Culture of the French Pox around 1500 — John Gagne
13  Whiz King: Urination as Divination in Prints for Louis XIV — Mark de Vitis
14  David’s Saint Roch: Plague Painting in the Age of Enlightenment — Jennifer Milam
15  Blake’s Petworth House Last Judgment and Female Anatomy — Anthony Apesos
16  Cocteau’s London Elegy: Re-purposed Renaissance Imagery in a Twentieth-Century Crucifixion — Stephen Holford
Index

From Yale UP:

Alexandra Loske, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0300266665, $50.

The first in-depth study since the 1980s of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, a building that is often considered the most impressive architectural expression of the Romantic imagination and that has become a hallmark of Regency style

Created between 1787 and 1823 by George IV, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton is perhaps the most daring and enchanting example of a building that expresses the European fascination with what in the early nineteenth century was considered the ‘Orient’, in particular China and India. The building, with its Indian-inspired exterior, was the work of the renowned architect John Nash, who with the contributions of several other gifted and inventive architects, artists, and designers, created a building that draws you in, takes you on a journey, and plays with your senses. Featuring new photography, this lavishly illustrated book will provide a fresh look at the sumptuous Chinoiserie interiors of the Royal Pavilion and their enduring appeal. Drawing on recent research, conservation projects, and the unprecedented loan exhibition A Prince’s Treasure: From Buckingham Palace to the Royal Pavilion (2019–22), this book celebrates the colours and sensual beauty of these interiors while situating the Royal Pavilion in the context of the time of its creation and development under royal ownership, from its beginning in the wake of the French Revolution, through its transformation and extension during and just after the Napoleonic Wars, to its fate and legacy in the early Victorian era.

Alexandra Loske is a British-German art historian, writer, and curator with a particular interest in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European art and architecture, specialising in the history of colour. She has been working at the University of Sussex since 1999, where she also studied art history and completed an AHRC-funded DPhil in 2014. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the use of colour and the application of colour theory in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Since 2014 Alexandra has been a curator at the Royal Pavilion. Since 2022, she has been the curator of the Royal Pavilion and Historic Properties at Brighton & Hove Museums.

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Note added (21 January 2026) — Alexandra Loske gave an online talk related to the book on 22 October 2025. The event was hosted by Cooper Hewitt and moderated by Jamie Kwan, the museum’s Assistant Curator of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design. A recording of the talk is available here.