Enfilade

From Boydell & Brewer:

Barbara Gribling, The Image of Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England: Negotiating the Late Medieval Past (London: Royal Historical Society, 2017), 189 pages, ISBN: 9780861933426, $90.

During the Georgian and Victorian periods, the fourteenth-century hero Edward the Black Prince became an object of cultural fascination and celebration: he and his battles played an important part in a wider reimagining of the British as a martial people, reinforced by an interest in chivalric character and a burgeoning nationalism. Drawing on a wealth of literature, histories, drama, art, and material culture, this book explores the uses of Edward’s image in debates about politics, character, war, and empire, assessing the contradictory meanings ascribed to the late Middle Ages by groups ranging from royals to radicals. It makes a special claim for the importance of the fourteenth century as a time of heroic virtues, chivalric escapades, royal power, and parliamentary development, adding to a growing literature on Georgian uses of the past by exposing an active royal and popular investment in the medieval. Disputing current assumptions that the Middle Ages represented a romanticized and unproblematic past, it shows how this investment was increasingly contested in the Victorian era.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Royal Associations: Heroic Character and Chivalric Ceremony at the Court of George III
Prince George Reclaims the Heroic? Transition, Ambition, and Domesticity
Chivalry and Politics in Victoria’s Early Reign: Art, Exhibitions and Palace Renditions
Politics, Parliament, and the People’s Prince
Emulating Edward? Redefining Chivalry and Character
Warrior for Nation and Empire
Conclusion

From Brill:

Clare Lois Carroll, Exiles in a Global City: The Irish and Early Modern Rome, 1609–1783 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 342 pages, ISBN: 978 900433 5165, €149 / $172.

In Exiles in a Global City, Clare Carroll explores Irish migrants’ experiences in early modern Rome and interprets representations of their cultural identities in relation to their interaction with world-wide Spanish and Roman institutions. This study focuses on some sources in Roman archives not previously considered by Irish historians. The book examines a wide array of cultural productions—Ó Cianáin’s account of O’Neill’s progress from Ireland to Rome, Luke Wadding’s history of the Franciscan order, the portraits at S. Isidoro, the first printed Irish grammar, the letters of Oliver Plunkett, the records of a hospice for converts, Charles Wogan’s memoir, and reports on the national college—for how they transformed emerging senses of an Irish nation.

Clare Carroll (Professor of Comparative Literature, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) is the author of Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork UP, 2001) and editor of Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Cork, 2003).

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations

Introduction
1  The ‘Nation’ in Rome: Ó Cianáin’s “Pilgrimage of the Earls” (1609)
2  The Exile as Historian: Luke Wadding’s Annales Minorum (1625–54) between Global and Local Affiliations
3  The Transculturation of Exile: Visual Style and Identity in the Frescoes of the Aula Maxima at St. Isidore’s (1672)
4  A Poetic Anthology for Exiles: Irish Cultural Memory in the First Printed Gaelic Grammar (1677)
5  The Return of the Exile: Oliver Plunkett between Rome and Ireland
6  Irish Protestants in the Theater of the World: The Apostolic Hospice for the Converting, Rome, 1677–1745
7  The Romance and Disillusionment of Exile: Charles Wogan and his Memoir of Clementina Sobieska
8 ‘The Spiritual Government of the Entire World’: A Memorial for the Irish College Rome, January 1783
Conclusion

Appendix 1: Comparison of GLH with manuscript Grammars
Appendix 2: Index of first lines in Grammatica Latino-Hibernica
Appendix 3: List of Irish Guests at the Ospizio Apostolico dei Convertendi
Bibliography
Index

From Artbooks.com:

Christoph Vogtherr and Leda Cosentino, eds., François Boucher: Sociability, Mondanité, and the Academy in the Age of Louis XV (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2017) 360 pages, ISBN: 9780993658839, $50.

This volume assembles a group of interrelated thought-provoking essays from leading international scholars originally presented at the conference Boucher and the Enlightenment, held at the Wallace Collection in London in 2005. The conference was one of a series of extraordinary events celebrating the tercentenary of the artist’s birth: exhibitions were held in Paris, Dijon, London, and New York, a conference was dedicated to the artist’s work at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a number of associated ground-breaking publications were published. All were agreed on the significance of Boucher’s achievement, his contemporary success, and the startlingly rapid critical decline. Yet, although much valuable new research was presented elsewhere regarding the connoisseurship, interpretation, and critical reception of Boucher’s work, the Wallace Collection conference was outstanding in its emphasis on the essentially social nature of Boucher’s artistic enterprise, the seriousness of his artistic ambition, and how the artistic relationships he forged both influenced his artistic practice and affected his critical reputation for both good and bad.

Subsequent research in eighteenth-century studies has confirmed many of the ideas first posited at the conference, but no other major publication on the artist has appeared in the intervening ten-year period that has been able to present or benefit from the advances made at the Wallace Collection. It has thus become increasingly obvious that the original conference papers, unpublished at the time, should be issued. The papers have been revised and enriched with further original research, incorporating important recent discoveries and trends in Boucher scholarship. Taken as a whole, the essays present a wealth of new material concerning Boucher’s social and professional relationships to his patrons, dealers, and fellow artists, which in turn illuminate, as no subsequent publication has done, his extraordinary position at the crossroads of the fine, decorative, literary and musical arts of his time. The book includes a variety of inter-disciplinary topics including new biographical information regarding Boucher’s life, artistic practices, and relationships, while new research is also published regarding the detailed connoisseurship and dating of his work alongside new interpretations of its iconography and critical and commercial reception. The diverse subject matter and variety of art-historical approach of the essays open up new perspectives in our understanding not only of François Boucher but also of the wider cultural and social context of his time. Together they shed new light on Boucher’s significance as one of the most original and controversial artists of the eighteenth century.

From UCL Press:

Margot Finn and Kate Smith, eds., The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: University College London Press, 2018) 500 pages, ISBN: 978 178735 0281 (hardback), £50 / ISBN: 978 178735 0298 (paperback), £30 / ISBN: 978 178735 0274 (open access PDF), free.

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors, and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians, and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain.

The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Margot Finn is Professor of Modern British History at UCL. The author of After Chartism (1993) and The Character of Credit (2003), she has published extensively on the families and material culture of the East India Company. A former editor of the Journal of British Studies, she is President of the Royal Historical Society.

Kate Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Birmingham. Kate specialises in material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She published Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830 in 2014.

From Cambridge UP:

Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 252 pages, ISBN: 978  131641  1339, $99.

Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to botanical history, although their relatively humble status means that their contributions have received little sustained attention to date. Exploring how the expert nurseryman emerged as a new social figure in Britain and France, and examining what happened to the elitist, masculine culture of amateur botany when confronted by expanding public participation, Easterby-Smith sheds fresh light on the evolution of transnational Enlightenment networks during the Age of Revolutions.

From UNC Press:

Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 384 pages, ISBN: 978 14696 32605, $50.

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A ‘carto-coded’ America—a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful—had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography’s spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors, and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner’s comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Martin Brückner is professor of English and material culture studies at the University of Delaware.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations

Preface: Introducing the Social Life of American Maps

Part One: American Mapworks
1  The Artisanal Map, 1750–1815: Workshops and Shopkeepers from Lewis Evans to Samuel Lewis
2  The Manufactured Map, 1790–1830: Centralization and Integration from Mathew Carey to John Melish
3  The Industrial Map, 1820–1860: Innovation and Diversification from Henry S. Tanner to S. Augustus Mitchell

Part Two: The Spectacle of Maps
4  Public Giants: Re-Staging Power and the Theatricality of Maps
5  Private Properties: Ornamental Maps and the Decorum of Interiority
6  Self-Made Spectacles: The Look of Maps and Cartographic Visualcy

Part Three: The Mobilization of Maps
7  Looking Small and Made To Go: The Atlas and the Rise of the Cartographic Vade Mecum
8  Cartographic Transfers: Education and the Art of Mappery

Epilogue: Cartoral Arts and Material Metaphors

Appendix 1: Price Table—Maps and Their Sales Prices, 1755–1860
Appendix 2: Inventory of “John Melish Geographer and Map Publisher”
Graphs
Index