Enfilade

From Penguin Random House:

Tracy Chevalier, The Glassmaker: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2024), 416 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0525558279, $32.

From the bestselling historical novelist, a rich, transporting story that follows a family of glassmakers from the height of Renaissance-era Italy to the present day

It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure. Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is spellbinding: a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city as everlasting as their glass.

Tracy Chevalier is the New York Times bestselling author of ten previous novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into forty-five languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film, a play, and an opera. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she lives in London with her husband.

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From Simon & Schuster:

Harriet Constable, The Instrumentalist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1668035825, $28.

A stunning debut novel of music, intoxication, and betrayal inspired by the true story of Anna Maria della Pietà, a Venetian orphan and violin prodigy who studied under Antonio Vivaldi and ultimately became his star musician—and his biggest muse

Anna Maria della Pietà was destined to drown in one of Venice’s canals. Instead, she became the greatest violinist of the 18th century. Anna Maria has only known life inside the Pietà, an orphanage for children born of prostitutes. But the girls of the Pietà are lucky in a sense: most babies born of their station were drowned in the city’s canals. And despite the strict rules, the girls are given singing and music lessons from an early age. The most promising musicians have the chance to escape the fate of the rest: forced marriage to anyone who will have them. Anna Maria is determined to be the best violinist there is—and whatever Anna Maria sets out to do, she achieves. After all, the stakes for Anna could not be higher. But it is 1704 and she is a girl. The pursuit of her ambition will test everything she holds dear, especially when it becomes clear that her instructor, Antonio Vivaldi, will teach Anna everything he knows—but not without taking something in return.

Harriet Constable is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker living in London. She has written for The New York Times, The Economist, and the BBC, and is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She grew up playing the flute and piano and singing with her mother, a classically trained pianist and singer. The Instrumentalist is her debut novel.

This volume of essays grew out of a June 2019 conference; from Amsterdam UP:

Ingrid Vermeulen, ed., Art and Its Geographies: Configuring Schools of Art in Europe, 1550–1815 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 470 pages, ISBN: 978-9463728140, €159. An ebook as a PDF file is available for free.

Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nation, and mediated in various forms via academies, literature, collections, markets, and galleries. Moreover, it contributed to competitive debate around the hierarchy of art and artists in Europe. The ensuing fundamental instability of the notion of a school of art helped to create a pluriform panorama of both distinct and interconnected artistic traditions within the European art world. This edited collection brings together 20 articles devoted to selected case studies from the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, France, Spain, England, the German Empire, and Russia.

Ingrid R. Vermeulen is Associate Professor of Early-Modern Art History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the early-modern history of art history grounded in art literature, collections, and museums. It generated the book Picturing Art History (2010) and the project The Artistic Taste of Nations (2015) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
• Art and Its Geographies, 1550–1815: Configuring Schools of Art in Europe — Ingrid Vermeulen

Academies of Art, Churches, and Collective Artistic Identities
• Notions of Nationhood and Artistic Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Rome — Susanne Kubersky-Piredda
• A Failed Attempt to Establish a Spanish Art Academy in Rome (1680): A New Reading of Archival Documents — Maria Onori
• Mantua: A School of History and Heritage (1752–1797) — Ludovica Cappelletti

Art Literature, Artists, and Transnational Identities
• Conceptualizing Schools of Art. Giovanni Battista Agucchi’s (1570–1632) Theory and Its Afterlife — Elisabeth Oy-Marra
• Claimed by All or Too Elusive to Include: The Appreciation of Mobile Artists by Netherlandish Artists’ Biographers — Marije Osnabrugge
• The Galeriewerk and the Self-Fashioning of Artists at the Dresden Court — Ewa Manikowska

Drawings, Connoisseurship, and Geography
• Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635–1714) and the Italian Schools of Design — Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò
• Connoisseurship Beyond Geography: Some Puzzling Genoese Drawings from Filippo Baldinucci’s (1624–1696) Personal Collection — Federica Mancini
• Arthur Pond’s (1705–1758) Prints in Imitations of Drawings (1734–1736): Old Masters, Copies, and the National School in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain — Sarah W. Mallory

Taste and Genius of Nations
• ‘Taste of Nations’: Roger de Piles’ (1635–1709) Diplomatic Take on the European Schools of Art — Ingrid Vermeulen
• How Do Great Geniuses Appear in a Nation? A Political Problem for the Enlightenment Period — Pascal Griener

Prints, Collecting, and Classification
• Dezallier d’Argenville’s (1680–1765) Concept of a Print Collection: by Topic or by School? – Gaëtane Maës
• Michael Huber’s (1727–1804) Notices (1787) and Manuel (1797–1808): A Comparative Analysis of the French School of the Eighteenth Century — Véronique Meyer
• Chronology and School: Questioning Two Competing Criteria for the Classification of Print Collections around 1800 — Stephan Brakensiek

Art Markets: Selling and Collecting
• The Eighteenth-Century Art Market and the Northern- and Southern-Netherlandish Schools of Painting: Together or Apart? — Everhard Korthals Altes
• The Print Collector Pieter Cornelis van Leyden (1717–1788): Literature of Art, Concepts of School, and the Genesis of a Connoisseur — Huigen Leeflang
• The Problem of European Painting Schools in the Context of the Russian Enlightenment: Alexander Stroganoff (1733–1811) and his Catalogue (1793, 1800, 1807) — Irina Emelianova

On Public Display in Picture Galleries
• Everyman’s Aesthetic Considerations on a Visible History of Art: Joseph Sebastian von Rittershausen’s (1748–1820) Betrachtungen (1785) on Christian von Mechel’s (1737–1817) Work at the Imperial Picture Gallery in Vienna — Cecilia Hurley
• An Organisation by Schools Considered Too Commercial for the Newly Founded Louvre Museum — Christine Godfroy-Gallardo
• Scuole Italiane or Scuola Italiana? Art Display, Historiography, and Cultural Nationalism in the Pinacoteca Vaticana after 1815 — Pier Paolo Racioppi

Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press for Reaktion Books:

G. R. Berridge, Outposts of Diplomacy: A History of the Embassy (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1789148497, £25 / $35.

A profusely illustrated history of the diplomatic embassy, from antiquity to today.

This compelling history traces the evolution of the embassy, from its ancient origins to its enduring presence in the modern world. Beginning with its precursors in antiquity, the book explores the embassy’s emergence on the cusp of the Italian Renaissance, its pinnacle during the nineteenth century, and its navigation through the challenges of twentieth-century conference diplomacy. G. R. Berridge investigates how this European institution adapted its staffing, architecture, and communication methods to changing international landscapes, including the tumultuous wars of religion and encounters in the Far East. He also describes the expansion of the embassy’s responsibilities, such as providing diplomatic cover for intelligence operations. Infused with vibrant anecdotes of remarkable individuals and the creation of influential family dynasties, and illustrated throughout, this book offers a fascinating exploration of the embassy’s rich history.

G. R. Berridge is professor emeritus of international politics at the University of Leicester and a senior fellow of the Geneva-based DiploFoundation. He was associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to which he still contributes, and his most recent book is the sixth edition of Diplomacy: Theory and Practice.

c o n t e n t s

Preface

Introduction
1  Fifteenth-Century Beginnings
2  Expanding Duties
3  Household and Buildings
4  Pre-Telegraphic Communications
5  Nineteenth-Century Highpoint
6  Enter the Americas
7  The Middle East and Africa
8  Far Eastern Compounds
9  Backseat after the First World War
10  Stubborn Institution
Epilogue

Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

From Princeton UP:

Francisco Bethencourt, Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 624 pages, ISBN: 978-0691209913, $45 / £38.

A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin—prominent traders, merchants, bankers, and men of letters—between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries

In Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in late medieval Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt estimates that there were around 260,000 New Christians by 1500—more than half of Iberia’s urban population. The majority stayed in Iberia but a significant number moved throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, coastal Asia, and the New World. They established Sephardic communities in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London. Bethencourt focuses on the elite of bankers, financiers, and merchants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the crucial role of this group in global trade and financial services. He analyses their impact on religion (for example, Teresa de Ávila), legal and political thought (Las Casas), science (Amatus Lusitanus), philosophy (Spinoza), and literature (Enríquez Gomez).

Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscript departments in six different countries, Bethencourt argues that the liminal position in which the New Christians found themselves explains their rise, economic prowess, and cultural innovation. The New Christians created the first coherent legal case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic judicial inquiry. Cumulative inquisitorial prosecution, coupled with structural changes in international trade, led to their decline and disappearance as a recognizable ethnicity by the mid-eighteenth century. Strangers Within tells an epic story of persecution, resistance, and the making of Iberia through the oppression of one of the most powerful minorities in world history. Packed with genealogical information about families, their intercontinental networks, their power, and their suffering, it is a landmark study.

Francisco Bethencourt is the Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College London. He is the author of Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton) and The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834.

From Penn Press:

Avinoam Yuval-Naeh, An Economy of Strangers: Jews and Finance in England, 1650–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1512825053, $65.

One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place—the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance’s rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice?

By projecting the modern economy and the Jewish community onto each other, the Christian majority imbued them with interrelated meanings. This braiding together of parallel developments, Yuval-Naeh argues, reveals in a meaningful way how the contemporary and wide-ranging association of Jews with the modern economy could be created.

Avinoam Yuval-Naeh is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Haifa. He is the author of articles in The Journal of Early Modern History and Historia. This is his first book.

From Royal Museums Greenwich:

Katherine Gazzard, The Art of Naval Portraiture (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1739154202, £30 / $45.

From elite officers to ordinary sailors, the portrayal of naval personnel has been a significant branch of British art for over 500 years. The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich holds the largest collection of naval portraits in the world, including over 600 paintings and many more prints and drawings, spanning from the sixteenth century to the present day. These portraits reveal how the Royal Navy was viewed at different moments in history and grant us access to individual stories, revealing the concerns and aspirations of people and families caught up in naval affairs. Many are also innovative and important works of art. For centuries, naval portraits have forged, reinforced, and challenged ideas of gender, heroism, and loyalty. They have functioned as icons of empire, demonstrations of professionalism, and personal mementos for loved ones. While charting the historical evolution of the Royal Navy’s image and explaining the meaning of common naval symbols—from anchors, cannons, and swords to uniforms, medals, and badges—this book also tells the stories of specific artists, sitters, and collectors, and of the places where portraits were made and displayed, from private homes to public exhibitions, and ultimately the museum itself.

Katherine Gazzard is the Curator of Art (post-1800) at Royal Museums Greenwich. She has taught courses on art history and museum studies for the University of East Anglia and Yale University. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art, especially portraiture and the cultural history of the Royal Navy.

Coming this fall, from The University of Chicago Press:

Sara Caputo, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0226837925, $38.

An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.

Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.

Sara Caputo is a senior research fellow and director of studies in history at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Having first appeared from Princeton UP in 2022, the book was released in paperback this spring (the hardcover edition is included in the press’s 50% off sale, which ends May 31).

Jeremy Schipper, Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-0691192864 (hardcover), $27 / ISBN: 978-0691259314 (paperback), $19.

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man, was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina. He was convicted of plotting what might have been the largest insurrection against slaveholders in US history. Witnesses claimed that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote and justify the revolt. While sentencing Vesey to death, Lionel Henry Kennedy, a magistrate at the trial, accused Vesey not only of treason but also of “attempting to pervert the sacred words of God into a sanction for crimes of the blackest hue.” Denmark Vesey’s Bible tells the story of this momentous trial, examining the role of scriptural interpretation in the deadly struggle against American white supremacy and its brutal enforcement.

Jeremy Schipper brings the trial and its aftermath vividly to life, drawing on court documents, personal letters, sermons, speeches, and editorials. He shows how Vesey compared people of African descent with enslaved Israelites in the Bible, while his accusers portrayed plantation owners as benevolent biblical patriarchs responsible for providing religious instruction to the enslaved. What emerges is an explosive portrait of an antebellum city in the grips of racial terror, violence, and contending visions of biblical truth. Shedding light on the uses of scripture in America’s troubled racial history, Denmark Vesey’s Bible draws vital lessons from a terrible moment in the nation’s past, enabling us to confront racism and religious discord today with renewed urgency and understanding.

Jeremy Schipper is professor in the Departments for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the coauthor, with Nyasha Junior, of Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon and the author of Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible. He lives in Toronto.