Enfilade

Forthcoming from Yale UP:

Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300224412, $65.

A look at the origins of British abolitionism as a problem of eighteenth-century science, as well as one of economics and humanitarian sensibilities

How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a ‘dread perversion’ of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers’ accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement. Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.

Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.

From the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, published by Liverpool UP:

Suzanne Desan, Bryant Ragan, and Victoria Thompson, eds., Everyday Politics and Culture in Revolutionary France: Essays in Honor of Lynn Hunt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1802073812, $99. Also available as a PDF and epublication.

The French revolutionary era produced surprises. Why did the French revolutionaries decriminalize sodomy? How did the Revolution alter fundamental attitudes toward time and progress? How did it change people’s interactions with outdoor spaces and with material objects, from playing cards to holy cards? How did it leave a lasting footprint on personal identity, family relationships, and religious belief? Addressing diverse topics like these, the essays in this volume showcase exciting new research about the revolutionary era. Written to honor the historian Lynn Hunt, the essays rethink our understanding of the French Revolution by exploring three central themes: the multifaceted nature of grassroots politics; the pervasive and personal impact of the Revolution on daily life; and its long-term influence on memory, identity, and sense of self. From the October Days to dechristianization and beyond, the authors probe the precarious invention of democracy, analyze how intimately and intently the French Revolution influenced people’s lives, and examine how it shaped nineteenth-century memory, female religiosity, and political culture. Embracing contingency, diversity of experience and perspective, and the multifarious nature of change, the essays document the power and complexity of the revolutionary era as a lived experience.

Suzanne Desan is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France and co-editor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective. She is currently writing a book on the October Days in the early French Revolution.
Bryant T. Ragan teaches early modern European history and the history of sexuality at The Colorado College. He presently participates on a research team that is developing an interactive website and relational database that focuses on the policing of male sodomy in eighteenth-century Paris.
Victoria E. Thompson is Chair of the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is completing a book entitled King and Public in the Parisian Royal Square, 1748–89 that examines the relationship between the design, representation, and use of urban space and socio-political transformation.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Suzanne Desan and Victoria Thompson
1  Victoria Thompson — A Perpetually Agitated Place: Politics in the Tuileries Garden, 1789–1792
2  Suzanne Desan — Military Men, Violence, and Gender in the October Days of 1789
3  Jeff Horn — Dechristianization and Terror in Champagne
4  Bryant Ragan — Same-sex Sexual Relations and the French Revolution: The Decriminalization of Sodomy in 1789
5  William Max Nelson — Leaping into the Future: Enlightenment Ideas of Progress and French Revolutionary Time
6  Jeff Ravel — ’Plus de rois, de dames, de valets’: Playing Cards during the French Revolution
7  Denise Z. Davidson — ‘Notes et souvenirs … sur la vie politique de mon père’: Memory, Mourning, and Politics in the Revolutionary Era
8  Jennifer Popiel — Martyred Virgins, Embattled Women, and Mass Culture: Sentiment and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Religious Images, 1830–60
Epilogue: Lynn Hunt — Why the French Revolution Continues to Matter

Bibliography

From Silvana Editoriale:

François Marandet, Louis Galloche (1670–1761): Un peintre de poesie au XVIIIe siècle (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2023), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-8836656165, €28.

Oublié par l’histoire de l’art, Louis Galloche (Paris, 1670–1761) fut pourtant l’une des figures majeures de la peinture française au cours de la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Il décora des résidences aussi importantes que les châteaux royaux de Versailles, de Fontainebleau et du Trianon. Couronné par le titre de chancelier de l’Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, Louis Galloche eut des élèves voués à devenir célèbres tels François Lemoyne et Charles-Joseph Natoire. Ayant conçu des poesie semblables à celles du Titien, Louis Galloche avait surtout un sens de la beauté particulièrement prononcé. Les tableaux, dessins, et multiples documents d’archives qui ont été retrouvés par François Marandet font ainsi redécouvrir, à travers cette toute première monographie consacrée à Louis Galloche, l’œuvre et l’itinéraire d’un des meilleurs artistes français de sa génération.

c o n t e n t s

Préface
Introduction
Chronologie

Un Élève de Louis de Boullogne, 1690–1711
• Premières études
• Grandes peintures à petits prix
• Un retour du pays des morts

Le Temps des Poesie, 1712–1731
• À la manière du Titien
• Nouvelles études
• Un concours truqué

Le Doyen de l’Académie Royale, 1732–1761
• Des tableaux pour la reine
• Les Salons de la concurrence royale
• Un concours sans vainqueur
• Louis Galloche: stéréotypes et réalité

Bibliographie

From Michael Imhof Verlag:

Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Berlin und Brandenburg: Werke, Technik, Kontext (Berlin: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2024), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-3731913788, €40.

Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) war eine der bedeutendsten Künstlerinnen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Schon als junge Frau arbeitete sie für Adlige im Umfeld des preußischen Königshauses. Später reüssierte sie in Paris, wo ihr als einer der wenigen Frauen überhaupt im Jahr 1767 die Aufnahme in die wichtigste europäische Kunstakademie der Zeit, die Pariser Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, gelang. Zurück in ihrer Heimatstadt wurde sie eine gefragte Porträtmalerin der Berliner Gesellschaft und fertigte auch mythologische Historien für die Schlösser Friedrichs II. an. Das Buch macht erstmals die in Berlin und Brandenburg aufbewahrten Gemälde der außergewöhnlichen Preußin systematisch in einem Buch greifbar. Darüber hinaus vermittelt es neue Erkenntnisse zu Therbuschs Arbeitsweise und den von ihr verwendeten Materialien. Die thematischen Essays verfolgen übergreifende Fragen zum Leben und künstlerischen Schaffen der Malerin und dienen so zugleich als aktuelle Einführung in ihr Gesamtwerk.

From Bloomsbury:

Anne Nellis Richter, The Gallery at Cleveland House: Displaying Art and Society in Late Georgian London (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350372757, $120.

In 1806, the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford opened a gallery at Cleveland House, London, to display their internationally-renowned collection of Old Master paintings to the public. A ticket to the gallery’s Wednesday afternoon openings was a sought-after prize, granting access to the collection and the house’s dazzling interior in the company of artists, celebrities, and Britain’s elite. This book explores the gallery’s interior through the lens of its abundant material culture, including paintings in gilded frames, furniture, silver oil lamps, flower arrangements, and the numerous printed catalogues and guidebooks that made the gallery visible to those who might never cross its threshold.

Through detailed analysis of these objects and a wide range of other visual, material, textual, and archival sources, the book presents the gallery at Cleveland House as a methodological case study on how the display of art in the 19th century was shaped by notions about public and private space, domesticity, and the role art galleries played in the formation of national culture. In doing so, the book also explains how and why magnificent private galleries and the artworks and objects they contained gripped the public imagination during a critical period of political and cultural transformation during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Combining historical, cultural, and material analysis, the book will make essential reading for researchers in British art in the Regency period, museum studies, collecting studies, social history, and the histories of interior decoration and design in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Anne Nellis Richter is an independent scholar and adjunct faculty, Smithsonian Internship Semester program, at Smith College.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations

Introduction: ‘The Finest in England’
1  ‘A Very Complete Business’: Designing and Building the Gallery
2  ‘The High Attraction of the Spectacle’: Displaying Sociability
3  ‘The Superb Furniture within’: Materiality and the Domestic Interior
4  ‘We Have Lately Been Much Attacked’: Exhibiting Morality
5  ‘To Private Collections Alone’: The Apotheosis of the Private Gallery
Conclusion: The ‘Home’ of Art

Forthcoming from Penn Press:

Gloria McCahon Whiting, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1512824490, $40.

Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery

As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household.

New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.

Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.