Enfilade

From Peepal Tree Press:

Corinne Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2021), 324 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1845234829, £20 / $30.

Green Unpleasant Land explores the countryside’s repressed colonial past and demonstrates its importance as a source of ideas about Englishness. The book presents historical evidence to show that rural England was a place of conflict and global expansion. It also examines four centuries of literary response to explore how race, class, and gender have both created and deconstructed England’s pastoral mythologies. In particular, the book argues that Black and British Asian writers have challenged narrow, nostalgic views of rural England but also expressed attachment to English landscapes and the natural world.

The book questions the countryside’s reputation as a retreat from urban life. It interrogates the idea that country houses are models for civilised living or that moorlands are places of freedom. It presents new perspectives on the ‘English’ flora and fauna that feature in literature, parks, allotments, and suburban gardens. The book reconsiders a range of rural locations through the lens of British colonial involvement, including East India Company activity and the slavery business. The book connects England’s outward-reaching histories to what was happening in the countryside: the enclosure of common land, the beginnings of industrial mass farming, and the reshaping of landownership through imperial profits. In bringing together histories usually separated by the Atlantic, Green Unpleasant Land makes connections, for instance, between the rebellion of enslaved people for their freedom in Jamaica in 1831, and the struggles of English agricultural workers in the Captain Swing uprising of the same year.

But Green Unpleasant Land is more than an academic study—accessibly written as it is—because it contains a section of Corinne Fowler’s own stories and poems written in response to the research she has undertaken and the material objects she has encountered. It is a personal story, too, of her own family relationship to transatlantic enslavement.

Green Unpleasant Land should make uncomfortable reading for anyone who wants to uphold nostalgic views of rural England. The heatedness of the recent media response to such work shows just what is at stake: a selective vision of nation that underplays the impact of four colonial centuries, or a vision that embraces, as Paul Gilroy expresses it, a post-imperial “convivial culture.”

Corinne Fowler is a research expert at the University of Leicester, and is Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. Professor Fowler is an expert in the legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism to literature, heritage, and representations of British history. She co-founded and led the Centre for New Writing for six years, where she bought together writers and researchers to commission over 100 creative works.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part I.  Empire, Literature, and Rural England
1  Nation at the Crossroads
2  Green Unpleasant Land
3  Pastoral
4  Country Houses
5  Moorlands
6  Plants, Gardens, and Empire

Part II.  Creative Responses: The Colonial Countryside
Fields  Strawberries
Gardens  Azaleas
Graveyards  Myrtilla
Hills  Cotswolds
Maypoles  Green and Pleasant Land
Moorlands  Heathcliff
Parks Kings  Heath Park
Pastoral  A New Chronology
Pubs  Public Houses of Britain
Seeds  William Blathwayt of Dyrham Park
Woodlands  An Escaped Slave from Yorkshire, 1789

Epilogue

Further Reading
Index

From Princeton UP:

Nicola Suthor, Bravura: Virtuosity and Ambition in Early Modern European Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0691204581, $65 / £50.

The painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements presented a polished image of the artist by downplaying the creative process, bravura celebrated a painter’s distinct materials, virtuosic execution, and theatrical showmanship. This resulted in the further development of innovative techniques and a popular understanding of the artist as a weapon-wielding acrobat, impetuous wunderkind, and daring rebel. In Bravura, Nicola Suthor offers the first in-depth consideration of bravura as an artistic and cultural phenomenon. Through history, etymology, and in-depth analysis of works by such important painters as Franҫois Boucher, Caravaggio, Francisco Goya, Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, and Diego Velázquez, Suthor explores the key elements defining bravura’s richness and power.

Suthor delves into how bravura’s unique and groundbreaking methods—visible brushstrokes, sharp chiaroscuro, severe foreshortening of the body, and other forms of visual emphasis—cause viewers to feel intensely the artist’s touch. Examining bravura’s etymological history, she traces the term’s associations with courage, boldness, spontaneity, imperiousness, and arrogance, as well as its links to fencing, swordsmanship, henchmen, mercenaries, and street thugs. Suthor discusses the personality cult of the transgressive, self-taught, antisocial genius, and the ways in which bravura artists, through their stunning displays of skill, sought applause and admiration. Filled with captivating images by painters testing the traditional boundaries of aesthetic excellence, Bravura raises important questions about artistic performance and what it means to create art.

Nicola Suthor is professor of art history at Yale University. She is the author of Rembrandt’s Roughness (Princeton University Press).

C O N T E N T S *

Introduction
1  Celebrations of Violence
2  The Figural Tour de Force
3  The Spatial Tour de Force
4  Bravura as Painterly Style
5  Communicating Artifice
6  Economies of Practice
7  Arte-Factum: The Feminizing Bravura
8  Endangering the Youth
9  The Academic Response
10  Reenactments and Echoes

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photo Credits

* A more detailed table of contents is available via Amazon; Alexander Marr recently reviewed the book for Apollo Magazine (17 August 2021).
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Published by Thames & Hudson and The University of Chicago Press:

Edited by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, with an introduction by Douglas Palmer and a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0226754888, $65.

Lavishly illustrated with full-color geological maps, tables of strata, geological cross-sections, photographs, and fossil illustrations from the archives of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Geological Society, the London Natural History Museum, and others, Strata provides the first complete presentation of the revolutionary work of nineteenth-century geologist William Smith, the so-called father of English geology. It illustrates the story of his career, from apprentice to surveyor for hire and fossil collector, from his 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata to his groundbreaking 1815 geological strata map, and from his imprisonment for debt to his detailed stratigraphical county maps.

This sumptuous volume begins with an introduction by Douglas Palmer that places Smith’s work in the context of earlier, concurrent, and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth, geographical mapping, and biostratigraphical theories. The book is then organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith’s hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross-sections and county maps, and followed by fossil illustrations by Smith contemporary James Sowerby, all organized by strata. Essays between each section explore the aims of Smith’s work and its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography and hydrology. Strata concludes with reflections on Smith’s later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences—all of which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword — Robert Macfarlane
Introduction — Douglas Palmer

1  Borders and the North
Fossils: London Clay to Greensand
i  Apprentice — Peter Wigley

2  Wales and Central England
Fossils: Brickearth to Clunch Clay and Shale
ii  Mineral Prospector — Peter Wigley
iii  Field Work — Dave Williams

3  East Anglia and the South East
Fossils: Kelloways Stone to Fuller’s Earth Rock
iv  Cartographer — Tom Sharpe
v  Fossil Collector — Jill Darrell and Diana Clements

4  The West
Fossils: Blue Marl to Redland Limestone
vi  Well Sinker — John Mather
vii  Mentor — John Henry

Table Detailing William Smith’s Fossils Featured as Photographic Plates in This Book

Bibliography and Sources of Illustrations
Index and Acknowledgments

From Penn Press:

Keith Pluymers, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0812253078, $50 / £40.

In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern. Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England’s earliest colonies.

Popular accounts have often suggested that deforestation served as a ‘push’ for English colonial expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England, rather than a problem of absolute supply and demand, resulted from social conflict over the right to define and regulate resources, difficulties obtaining accurate information, and competing visions for trade, forestry, and the English landscape. Domestic scarcity claims did encourage schemes to develop wood-dependent enterprises in the colonies, but in practice colonies competed with domestic enterprises rather than supplanting them. Moreover, close studies of colonial governments and the actions of individual landholders in Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados demonstrate that colonists experimented with different, often competing approaches to colonial woods and trees, including efforts to manage them as long-term resources, albeit ones that nonetheless brought significant transformations to the land.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the efforts to knot together woods around the Atlantic basin as resources for an English empire and the deep underlying conflicts and confusion that largely frustrated those plans. It speaks to historians of early modern Europe, early America, and the Atlantic World but also offers key insights on early modern resource politics, forest management, and political ecology of interest to readers in the environmental humanities and social sciences as well as those interested in colonialism or economic history.

Keith Pluymers is Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University.

C O N T E N T S

Note on Spelling and Dates

Introduction: A Wooden World
1  Scarcity, Conflict, and Regulation in England’s Royal Forests
2  Creating Scarcity in Ireland’s Woods
3  The Political Ecology of Woods in Virginia
4  Conservation and Commercialization in Bermuda
5  Deforestation and Preservation in Early Barbados
6  Toward an Atlantic or Imperial Political Ecology?

Archives Consulted
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

From Simon & Schuster:

Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (New York: Scribner, 2020), 336 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1982114732, $28.

As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood.

Brilliantly synthesizing recent research with existing knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering, and carpentry, Ennos reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from Southeast Asia and West Africa where great apes swing among the trees, build nests, and fashion tools; to East Africa where hunter gatherers collected their food; to the structural design of wooden temples in China and Japan; and to Northern England, where archaeologists trace how coal enabled humans to build an industrial world. Addressing the effects of industrialization—including the use of fossil fuels and other energy-intensive materials to replace timber—The Age of Wood not only shows the essential role that trees play in the history and evolution of human existence, but also argues that for the benefit of our planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing, using, and understanding trees.

A winning blend of history and science, this is a fascinating and authoritative work for anyone interested in nature, the environment, and the making of the world as we know it.

Roland Ennos is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. He is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics, and statistics, and his popular book Trees, published by the Natural History Museum, is now in its second edition. He lives in England.

From Rizzoli:

Olivier Gabet and Axelle Corty, with a foreword by Michael S. Smith and photographs by Robert Polidori, Féau & Cie: The Art of Wood Paneling, Boiseries from the 17th Century to Today (New York: Rizzoli, 2020), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0847868506, $65.

The French woodwork purveyor Féau & Cie has supplied architects, designers, and museums with period paneling since 1875. Featuring documents, drawings, plaster models, panels, and antique boiserie rooms, its archive of 25,000 pieces—many from the eighteenth century and Art Deco era—is an unrivaled source of inspiration for re-creating heirloom spaces as well as for constructing spectacular contemporary pieces. Though the house remains best known for its magical historic rooms, it has collaborated with architects and decorators on original projects since its beginnings, and today’s design greats—including Michael S. Smith, Brian J. McCarthy, and Robert Couturier, among others—regularly call upon the firm for elaborate projects.

In this first book of the firm’s work, Feau & Cie reveals a selection of its most exceptional projects, from magnificent historical abodes to daring modern creations, including a palace in Tuscany and residences in Paris, London, New York, Malibu, and Atlanta. Dazzling images of finished interiors are accompanied by details of panels, doors, and decor, while exclusive photographs by Robert Polidori explore the house’s Parisian atelier. The unique savoir faire of joiners, sculptors, gilders, and painter-decorators shines through in this visual celebration of decorative masterpieces, which is bound to delight design masters and art lovers alike.

Founded in 1875, Féau & Cie is a Paris-based firm specializing in antique wood paneling and reproductions. Olivier Gabet is the director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Robert Polidori is one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers of architecture and interiors.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Charles Dellheim, Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021), 672 pages, ISBN: 978-1684580569, $40.

The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder.

Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place—and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art. Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story takes place on both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews.

Charles Dellheim is professor of history at Boston University. He is the author of The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England and The Disenchanted Isle: Mrs. Thatcher’s Capitalist Revolution.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Reframing the Picture

Part I. The Old Masters’ New Masters
1  Horse Dealer to Art Dealer
2  Treasure Island
3  Assimilating Art
4  Acquiring Eyes
5  Metropolitan Man

Part II. Was Modernism Jewish?
6  Madman and Sons
7  Was Modernism Jewish?
8  First Impressionists
9  Berlin Calling
10  Between Bohemian and Bourgeois
11  The Right Banker

Part III. In The Middle
12  The Wheel of War
13  Brothers-in-Arms
14  Custody Battles
15  In the Market of Love
16  Brothers-in-Law
17  Gentlemen and Players

Part IV. To Have and Have Not
18  Artful Jews
19  Artless Jews
20  Next Year in Paris?
21  After the Fall
22  The Dispossessed
23  The Exiles and the Kingdom

Epilogue: A Crack in Everything