Enfilade

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury:

Daniel Orrells, Antiquity in Print: Visualizing Greece in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1350407763 (hardback), $95 / ISBN: 978-1350407770 (paperback), $31.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians, and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture—theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics at King’s College London. He is author of Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2015) and Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (2011), and is co-editor of The Mudimbe Reader (2016) and African Athena: New Agendas (2011).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Historicity, Disciplinarity, and Materiality
1  Achilles’ Shield and Vico’s Frontispiece
2  Visualising Philhellenism
3  Putting Ancient Greece into the Picture
Epilogue: From Lessing to Kauffmann: Awaiting the Return of Ancient Greece

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Pan Macmillan:

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (London: Picador, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1529066678, £20 / $28.

“A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .”

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk.

From Boydell & Brewer:

Susan Haynes, Charles Bridgeman (c.1685–1738): A Landscape Architect of the Eighteenth Century (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2023), 270 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1837651177, £75 / $115.

An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.

Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown’s vision of a more ‘natural’ landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work. This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the ‘genius of the place’, and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings Bridgeman from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale, and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.

Susan Haynes is a retired teacher with a PhD in landscape history from the University of East Anglia. Her principal interest is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century garden history.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction
1  Who Was Charles Bridgeman?
2  Towards A Reliable Corpus
3  A Revised Catalogue
4  Reading The Plans
5  The Art-Historical Context Revisited
6  The ‘Ingenious Mr Bridgeman’
7  Building a Landscape
8  A Commercial Enterprise
Conclusion

Appendices
I  A Summary of Willis’s Catalogue from Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden
II  A Revised Catalogue
III  Bridgeman’s Projects by Year
IV  Bridgeman’s Income

Gazetteer of Bridgeman Sites
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

From Penguin Books:

Alan Titchmarsh, with photography by Jonathan Buckley, Chatsworth: The Gardens and the People Who Made Them (London: Ebury Spotlight, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1529148213, £35 / $65.

Follow Alan Titchmarsh into Chatsworth’s irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains, and English eccentrics and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks. Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again.

Alan Titchmarsh MBE is an English gardener, broadcaster, and author of over 40 books, many of which have been bestsellers. He has twice been named Gardening Writer of the Year and for four successive years was voted Television Personality of the Year by the Garden Writers’ Guild.

From Thames & Hudson:

Sau Fong Chan, with photographs by Sarah Duncan, Chinese Dress in Detail (London: Thames & Hudson, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0500480939, £30 / $40.

A head-to-toe exploration of Chinese dress through sumptuous, detailed photography of some of the most fascinating historic and contemporary pieces in the V&A’s outstanding collection (part of the V&A Fashion in Detail series)

Chinese Dress in Detail reveals the beauty and variety of Chinese dress for women, men, and children, both historically and geographically, showcasing the intricacy of decorative embroidery and rich use of materials and weaving and dyeing techniques. The reader is granted a unique opportunity to examine historical clothing that is often too fragile to display, from quivering hair ornaments, stunning silk jackets and coats, festive robes, and pleated skirts, to pieces embellished with rare materials such as peacock-feather threads or created through unique craft skills, as well as handpicked contemporary designs. A general introduction provides an essential overview of the history of Chinese dress, plotting key developments in style, design, and mode of dress, and the traditional importance of clothing as social signifier, followed by eight thematic chapters that examine Chinese dress in exquisite detail from head to toe. Each garment is accompanied by a short text and detail photography; front-and-back line drawings are provided for key items.

Sau Fong Chan is a curator in the V&A’s Asian department and looks after the textiles and dress collections from China and Southeast Asia.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Headwear
2  Necklines and Shoulders
3  Sleeves
4  Pleats
5  Edgings
6  Buttons
7  Embroidery
8  Footwear

Glossary
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Picture Credits
Index