Enfilade

From Ashgate:

Allyson Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine McIver, The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 572 pages, ISBN: 978-1409418177, $150.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

Allyson M. Poska is Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington, USA and co-editor of Ashgate’s ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’ book series. Jane Couchman is Professor Emerita of French Studies, Women’s Studies and Humanities at Glendon College, York University, Toronto. Katherine A. McIver is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction, Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman and Katherine A. McIver

Part I | Religion

The permeable cloister, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

Literature by women religious in early modern Catholic Europe and the New World, Alison Weber

Convent creativity, Marilynn Dunn

Convent music: an examination, Kimberlyn Montford

Lay patronage and religious art, Catherine E. King

Female religious communities beyond the convent, Susan E. Dinan

Protestant movements, Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Protestant women’s voices, Jane Couchman

Part II | Embodied Lives

Maternity, Lianne McTavish

Upending patriarchy: rethinking marriage and family in early modern Europe, Allyson M. Poska

The economics and politics of marriage, Jutta Gisela Sperling

Before the law, Lyndan Warner

Permanent impermanence: continuity and rupture in early modern sexuality studies, Katherine Crawford

Women and work, Janine M. Lanza

Old women in early modern Europe: age as an analytical category, Lynn Botelho

Women on the margins, Elizabeth S. Cohen

Women and political power in early modern Europe, Carole Levin and Alicia Meyer

Part III | Cultural Production

The Querelle des femmes, Julie D. Campbell

Intellectual women in early modern Europe, Diana Robin

Women in science and medicine, 1400-1800, Alisha Rankin

Early modern women artists, Sheila ffolliott

Beyond Isabella and beyond: secular women patrons of art in early modern Europe, Sheryl E. Reiss

Material culture: consumption, collecting and domestic goods, Katherine A. McIver

Images of women, Andrea Pearson

Women, gender, and music, Linda Phyllis Austern

From Oxford UP:

Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0199696994, £17 / $30.

Tracing its distant origins to the villa of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the second century AD, the eccentric phenomenon of the ornamental hermit enjoyed its heyday in the England of the eighteenth century. It was at this time that it became highly fashionable for owners of country estates to commission architectural follies for their landscape gardens. These follies often included hermitages, many of which still survive, often in a ruined state.

Landowners peopled their hermitages either with imaginary hermits or with real hermits – in some cases the landowner even became his own hermit. Those who took employment as garden hermits were typically required to refrain from cutting their hair or washing, and some were dressed as druids. Unlike the hermits of the Middle Ages, these were wholly secular hermits, products of the eighteenth-century fondness for ‘pleasing melancholy’.

Although the fashion for them had fizzled out by the end of the eighteenth century, they had left their indelible mark on both the literature as well as the gardens of the period. And, as Gordon Campbell shows, they live on in the art, literature, and drama of our own day – as well as in the figure of the modern-day garden gnome.

This engaging and generously illustrated book takes the reader on a journey that is at once illuminating and whimsical, both through the history of the ornamental hermit and also around the sites of many of the surviving hermitages themselves, which remain scattered throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. And for the real enthusiast, there is even a comprehensive checklist, enabling avid hermitage-hunters to locate their prey.

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of the best-selling Bible: The Story of the King James Bible and of many other books on literature, art, history, and biography. A fellow of the British Academy and a former chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies, in 2012 he was awarded the Longman – History Today Trustees Award for a lifetime contribution to History. In this book his interests in cultural history, architectural history, and designed landscapes converge in a pioneering study of the phenomenon of the English ornamental hermit and his hermitage.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1: Origins and Antecedents
2: The Idea of the Hermit
3: The Hermits
4: The Hermitage in Georgian England
5: The Celtic lands and the Continent
6: The Afterlife of the Hermit: from gnomes to Arcadia
Appendix: a Catalogue of Hermitages
Works Consulted
Index

From Cambridge UP:

Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0199950980, $74.

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England’s obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.

Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway’s Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century’s end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

Eugenia Jenkins is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: ‘China’ and The Prehistory of Orientalism
1. The Cosmopolitan Nation, ‘Where Order in Variety We See’
2. The Chinese Touchstone of the Tasteful Imagination
3. Defoe’s Trinkets: Fiction’s Spectral Traffic
4. ‘Nature to Advantage Drest’: The Poetry of Subjectivity
5. How Chinese Things Became Oriental
6. Disenchanting China: Orientalism and the English Novel
Afterword: Rethinking Modern Taste

Due out in June from Ashgate:

Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 260 pages, ISBN: 978-0754664925, $105.

In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw’s timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw’s particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs.

Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw’s story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons’ notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw’s study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of ‘liberal’ sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.

Contents: Introduction; Seeing through tears I; Seeing through tears II; ‘Complicated woe’: British military art of the 1790s; All the news that’s fit to paint; Disgusting objects; images of wounding in the aftermath of war; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies in the School of English at the University of Leicester, UK. His publications include Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793-1822 (2000).

Schedule for June release from Yale UP:

Richard Wrigley, Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 330 pages, ISBN: 978-0300190212, $75.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, artists and travellers were lured to Rome, the home of civilized values and artistic beauty. But the history of visiting Rome had a pathological side—not only crisis and disorientation but repulsion at its filth and stink. Rome’s air was considered to contain a chronic source of disease. This book argues that “bad air” (mal’aria) is a neglected aspect of thinking about the city’s history and as a destination for artists, visitors, and Romans both ancient and modern. These problems interfered with exploring Rome, its art and architecture, and representing its landscape. Atmospheric contamination made plein air painting and investigating antique ruins challenging activities.

Roman Fever invites an original and alternative perspective on the city and its countryside, revisiting the history of Rome in terms of ideas about climate and the role of the environment. Beautifully illustrated with unfamiliar images, it focuses on the interplay between enthusiasm and inspiration, and debilitation and mortality, all an integral part of discovering and engaging with the Eternal City’s landscape.

Richard Wrigley is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham.