Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Matthew McCormack, Shoes and the Georgian Man (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1350358676 (hardback), £85, $100 / ISBN: 978-1350358669 (paperback), £29, $40.

Shoes are everyday objects, but they are loaded with meaning. This book reveals how shoes played a powerful role in the wider story of shifts in gender relations in 18th-century Britain. It focuses on the relationship of shoes with the body and its movements, and therefore how what we wear on our feet relates closely to social, occupational, and gender roles. It also uses footwear to explore topics such as politics, war, dance, and disability. Thinking about shoes as material objects, McCormack studied historic shoes first-hand in museums, in order to ascertain their physical properties and what they would have been like to wear. Worn shoes preserve traces of the wearer’s body in their indentations, stretches and scuffs, providing a unique primary source about their wearer. This approach forges new connections between the histories or material culture, gender, and the body, and sheds new light on what it meant to be a man in the 18th century.

Matthew McCormack is Professor of History at the University of Northampton, course leader for MA History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Higher Education Academy. His previous books include The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England, and Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928. He edited the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2015–20).

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Georgian Men and Their Shoes
2  Shoes and the Body
3  Shoes and Politics
4  Boots and Masculinity
5  Gout Shoes and Disability
6  Dancing Feet
7  The Soldier’s Shoe
Conclusion: Wearing Georgian Shoes

Select Bibliography
Index

Registration for an online conversation about the book is available via Eventbrite:

Online Conversation: Shoes and the Georgian Man
Tuesday, 11 March 2025, 2pm EDT

Serena Dyer talks with Matthew McCormack about his new book, Shoes and the Georgian Man, published by Bloomsbury in January 2025. By Leicester Branch of the Historical Assn.

From Reaktion Books with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Chris Filstrup and Jane Merrill, The Turban: A History from East to West (London: Reaktion Books, 2025), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1836390749, £20 / $30.

A superbly illustrated history of the turban, from Arabian origins to global cultural icon.

A turban is a strip of cloth folded and wrapped around the head; however, this description includes multifarious forms across space and time. This book follows the turban as it moves from the Arabian Peninsula through the Ottoman Empire to Europe and the Americas. It directs the reader’s gaze from traditional and religious uses of the turban into the realms of international trade, Renaissance art and contemporary fashions. Turbans, as this book shows, have moved in and out of Western culture, at times considered archaic and forgotten, then noticed and reinstated as major accessories. Today Sikh men are recognized by their distinctive headwraps, and the turban remains an important part of Black culture. This book explores the turban’s many adaptations worldwide.

Chris Filstrup was Chief of the Oriental Division at the New York Public Library and Dean of Libraries at Stony Brook University. He is co-author with Jane Merrill of The Wedding Night (2011) among other titles. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jane Merrill has written for many national U.S. magazines and is the author of The Showgirl Costume (2018) and other cultural histories. She lives in Saint George, Maine.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  A Path into Western Iconography
2  Trade, Diplomacy and Depiction
3  Nabobs, Adventurers and Travellers
4  Masques and Turquerie
5  Riding the Magic Carpet
6  A Neoclassical Accessory
7  Individual Expressions: Africa and the Caribbean
8  Cultural Tourism and Authenticity since 1900

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

From Reaktion Books, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Nina Edwards, The Virtues of Underwear: Modesty, Flamboyance and Filth (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1789149562, £20 / $28.

Unravels the intimate narratives woven into the fabric of our most personal garments.

Stories are woven into the fabric of our most personal garments. From the first loincloths to the intricate layers of shapewear, the concealed world of underwear is capable of expressing individual desire and also aspects of society at large. An indicator of the vagaries of fashion, underwear can be simple or elaborate. It both safeguards and exposes, reflecting our hopes and experiences. Underwear can embarrass and excite, amuse and shame us. This book illuminates the sometimes profound significance of the garments we wear beneath our outer clothing. It discusses the history of both women’s and men’s underwear, and global cultures of dress.

Nina Edwards is a freelance writer based in London. Her books include Darkness: A Cultural History (2018) and Pazazz: The Impact and Resonance of White Clothing (2023), both published by Reaktion Books.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  What Is Underwear For?
2  Codpiece and Corset
3  Modesty and the Immodest Torso
4  Outer to Under and Back Again
5  Fabric and Fit
6  Medical and Other Practical Matters
7  Economic and Religious Concerns
8  The Underwear Drawer

Glossary
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Coming in March from the University of Pittsburgh Press:

Edwin Rose, Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History, 1760–1820 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), 408 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0822948513, $65.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or ‘gentlemen’, dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing, synthesizing, and appropriating information collected on a global scale. In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge—reevaluating Joseph Banks’s and Daniel Solander’s investigations during James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources.

Edwin D. Rose is currently AHRC Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Advanced Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. From May 2025 he will be a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds.

Just published by MIT Press, with plenty of 18th-century material:

Richard Taws, Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0262049184, $50.

A riveting exploration of the relationship between art and telegraphy, and its implications for understanding time and history in nineteenth-century France.

In Time Machines Richard Taws examines the relationship between art and telegraphy in the decades following the French Revolution. The optical telegraph was a novel form of visual communication developed in the 1790s that remained in use until the mid-1850s. This pre-electric telegraph, based on a semaphore code, irrevocably changed the media landscape of nineteenth-century France. Although now largely forgotten, in its day it covered vast distances and changed the way people thought about time. It also shaped, and was shaped by, a proliferating world of images. What happens, Taws asks, if we think about art telegraphically?

Placed on prominent buildings across France—for several years there was one on top of the Louvre—the telegraph’s waving limbs were a ubiquitous sight, shifting how public space was experienced and represented. The system was depicted by a wide range of artists, who were variously amused, appalled, irritated, or seduced by the telegraph’s intractable coded messages and the uncanny environmental and perceptual disruption it caused. Clouds, architecture, landscapes, and gestures: all signified differently in the era of telegraphy, and the telegraph became a powerful means to comprehend France’s technological and political past. While Paris’s famous arcades began to crisscross the city at ground level, a more enigmatic network was operating above. Shifting attention from the streets to the skies, this book shows how modern France took shape quite literally under the telegraph’s sign.

Richard Taws is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at University College London. He is the author of The Politics of the Provisional as well as coeditor, with Iris Moon, of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France and, with Genevieve Warwick, Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe.

From Stanford UP:

Geoffrey Turnovsky, Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1503637214, $70.

Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of ‘losing oneself in a book’. Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic.

How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religious practice, literacy’s benefits were presumed to lie in such random-access retrieval, facilitated by indexical tools like the numbering of Biblical chapters and verses. It was this didactic, hunt-and-peck reading that bound readers to communities.

Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to punctuation and the editorial adaptation of manuscript and oral forms in print, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy.

Geoffrey Turnovsky is Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (2011).

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Benefits of Reading
1  Typeface: Disappearing Letters from the Romain du Roi to Didot
2  Print Runs: Tender Maps in the Marketplace
3  Format: Appropriations of the Book
4  Editorial Labors: The Typography of Intimate Texts
5  Punctuation Marks: Bringing Speech to Life on the Printed Page
Conclusion: Hybridity and Text Technologies

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

From Penn Press:

Julia Wallace Bernier, Freedom’s Currency: Slavery, Capitalism, and Self-Purchase in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1512826470, $50.

The first comprehensive study of self-purchase in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War

Enslaved people lived in a world in which everything had a price. Even freedom. Freedom’s Currency follows enslaved people’s efforts to buy themselves out of slavery across the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. In the first comprehensive study of self-purchase in the nation, Julia Wallace Bernier reveals how enslaved people raised money, fostered connections, and made use of slavery’s systems of value and exchange to wrest control of their lives from those who owned them. She chronicles the stories of famous fugitives like Frederick Douglass, who, with the help of friends and supporters, purchased his freedom to protect himself against the continued legal claims of his enslavers and the possibility of recapture. She also shows how enslaved fathers like Lunsford Lane and mothers like Elizabeth Keckley tried to secure lives for their families outside of slavery. Freedom’s Currency argues that freedom played a central role in the social and economic lives of the enslaved and in the ways that these aspects of their lives overlapped. This intimate portrait of community illuminates the complexity of enslaved people’s ideas about their place at the intersection of slavery and American capitalism and their attempts to value freedom above all. Given the stakes—liberation or remaining enslaved—it is an account of both triumph and devastating failure.

Julia Wallace Bernier is Assistant Professor of History at Washington & Jefferson College.