Enfilade

From Strandberg Publishing:

Peter Thule Kristensen, ed., with contributions by Thomas Lyngby, Else Marie Bukdahl, Martin Søberg, Sanne Maekelberg, Natalie Körner, and Nina Ventzel Riis, Lauritz de Thurah: Architecture and Worldviews in 18th-Century Denmark (Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2023), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-8794102704, £70.

Lauritz de Thurah (1706–1759) was one of Denmark’s most significant architects of the Baroque period. He created several important buildings—including the Hermitage Hunting Lodge, the Royal Palace in Roskilde, Gammel Holtegaard, and the famous spire of the Church of Our Saviour in Copenhagen—and masterminded conversions and extensions of properties such as Ledreborg, Frederiksberg Castle, Børglum Kloster, and the now demolished summer residence Hirschholm Palace (widely known as the ‘Versailles of the North’). The mainstay of this monograph is Peter Thule Kristensen’s presentation of Thurah’s rich and complex architecture. The other chapters—written by experts Else Marie Bukdahl, Martin Søberg, Thomas Lyngby, Natalie Patricia Körner, Sanne Maekelberg, and Nina Ventzel Riis—describe Thurah’s roles as a leading architectural historian, topographer, grand tour traveller, civil servant, military man, and trailblazer within the new social structure in Denmark under absolute rule. The book also sheds light on the Baroque period in a broader sense, delving into the era’s court culture, garden design, and church architecture. Finally, the afterlife of Thurah’s works is addressed: how do his buildings function in our present day, having been adapted to the needs and users of a new era?

Peter Thule Kristensen is Professor, Head of the Master Programme Spatial Design at the Royal Danish Academy – Institute of Architecture and Design and a Core Scholar at the Centre for Privacy Studies at University of Copenhagen. He is M.Arch. from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture (1994), Ph.D. in architectural history from the same institution (2014), and dr.phil. in art history from Aarhus University (2014).

From McGill-Queen’s University Press:

Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Architecture of Empire: France in India and Southeast Asia, 1664–1962 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 488 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0228011422, $74.

Most monumental buildings of France’s global empire—such as the famous Saigon and Hanoi Opera Houses—were built in South and Southeast Asia. Much of this architecture, and the history of who built it and how, has been overlooked. The Architecture of Empire considers the large-scale public architecture associated with French imperialism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India, Siam, and Vietnam, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indochina, the largest colony France ever administered in Asia. Offering a sweeping panorama of the buildings of France’s colonial project, this is the first study to encompass the architecture of both the ancien régime and modern empires, from the founding of the French trading company in the seventeenth century to the independence and nationalist movements of the mid-twentieth century.

Gauvin Bailey places particular emphasis on the human factor: the people who commissioned, built, and lived in these buildings. Almost all of these architects, both Europeans and non-Europeans, have remained unknown beyond—at best—their surnames. Through extensive archival research, this book reconstructs their lives, providing vital background for the buildings themselves. Much more than in the French empire of the Western Hemisphere, the buildings in this book adapt to indigenous styles, regardless of whether they were designed and built by European or non-European architects. The Architecture of Empire provides a unique, comprehensive study of structures that rank among the most fascinating examples of intercultural exchange in the history of global empires.

Gauvin Alexander Bailey is professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University and the author of Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

1  Introduction: Architecture, Empire, and Hubris
2  Origins: Fort Dauphin, Surat, Pondicherry, ca 1672
3  DipLomacy: Ayutthaya, ca 1688
4  Grandeur: Pondicherry, ca 1752
5  Interregnum: Diên Khánh, ca 1793
6  Semblance: Saigon and Hanoi, ca 1900
7  Appropriation: Phnom Penh, ca 1917
8  Association: Saigon and Hanoi, ca 1925
9  Hybridity: India and Southeast Asia, 1738–1962

Notes
Bibliography
Index

This collection of essays from Oxford University Press was first published in 2019; it’s just out in paperback.

Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, eds., Book Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0198885443 (paperback), $25.

What would an anatomy of the book look like? There is the main text, of course, the file that the author proudly submits to their publisher. But around this, hemming it in on the page or enclosing it at the front and back of the book, there are dozens of other texts—page numbers and running heads, copyright statements and errata lists—each possessed of particular conventions, each with their own lively histories. To consider these paratexts—recalling them from the margins, letting them take centre stage—is to be reminded that no book is the sole work of the author whose name appears on the cover; rather, every book is the sum of a series of collaborations. It is to be reminded, also, that not everything is intended for us, the readers. There are sections that are solely directed at others—binders, librarians, lawyers parts of the book that, if they are working well, are working discreetly, like a theatrical prompt, whispering out of the audience’s ear-shot

Book Parts is a bold and imaginative intervention in the fast growing field of book history: it pulls the book apart. Over twenty-two chapters, Book Parts tells the story of the components of the book: from title pages to endleaves; from dust jackets to indexes—and just about everything in between. Book Parts covers a broad historical range that runs from the pre-print era to the digital, bringing together the expertise of some of the most exciting scholars working on book history today in order to shine a new light on these elements hiding in plain sight in the books we all read.

Dennis Duncan is writer, translator, and lecturer in English at University College, London, and was formerly a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, then Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. His research interests include book history, translation, and avant-garde literature, particularly French groups like the Oulipo and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. His most recent books include Index, A History of the (Penguin, 2021) and The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. His most recent books include Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010), A History of English Autobiography (edited, Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (edited with Gill Partington, Palgrave, 2014). He is the co-editor of Routledge’s book series Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. He also enjoys discussing his work beyond the academy: he writes regularly for the London Review of Books and has appeared on TV and radio in the UK and abroad. Smyth is the co-host of the literary discussion podcast and radio show, Litbits.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
List of Plates
Contributors
A Note on the Type

1  Introductions — Adam Smyth and Dennis Duncan
2  Dust-jackets — Gill Partington
3  Frontispieces — Luisa Calè
4  Title Pages — Whitney Trettien
5  Imprints, Imprimaturs, and Copyright Pages — Shef Rogers
6  Tables of Contents — Joseph Howley
7  Addresses to the Reader — Meaghan J. Brown
8  Acknowledgements and Dedications — Helen Smith
9  Printer’s Ornaments and Flowers — Hazel Wilkinson
10  Character Lists — Tamara Atkin
11  Page Numbers, Signatures, and Catchwords — Daniel Sawyer
12  Chapter Heads — Nicholas Dames
13  Epigraphs — Rachel Sagner Buurma
14  Stage Directions — Tiffany Stern
15  Running Titles — Claire M. L. Bourne
16  Woodcuts — Alexandra Franklin
17  Engravings — Sean Roberts
18  Footnotes — Jenny Davidson
19  Errata Lists — Adam Smyth
20  Indexes — Dennis Duncan
21  Endleaves — Sidney Berger
22  Blurbs — Abigail Williams

Select Bibliography
Index

Coming this fall from Lund Humphries:

Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art, and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (London: Lund Humphries, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226241, £50 / $90.

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous environmental history of the period; how their depictions of nature differ from those made by men; and what women’s choices of motifs can tell us about their lives and their relationships to nature. Embroidering the Landscape situates these pastoral and georgic needleworks (c. 1740–1775) at the intersection of environmental and social histories, interpreting them through ecocritical and social lenses. Pappas’ investigation draws out connections between women’s depicted landscapes and environmental and cultural history at a time when nature itself was a charged arena for changes in agriculture, husbandry, gardening, and the emerging discourses of botany and natural history. Her insights change our understanding of the relationship between culture and the environment in this period and raise new questions about the unrecognized extent of women’s engagement with nature and natural science.

Andrea Pappas is Associate Professor at Santa Clara University. She has published on topics ranging from the Renaissance to the present and is particularly interested in the work of people on the margins or in overlooked artifacts.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Surveying the Field
1  The Eye of the Needle
2  Roots and Terroir
3  Greener Pastures
4  Flock, Fish, and Fowl
5  Women’s Estate
6  Women and ‘Experiential Botany’
Conclusion: Women’s Harvest

Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Distributed by Yale UP:

Finola O’Kane, Landscape Design & Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688–1815 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2023), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107383, £45 / $65.

Explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism.

Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property structures and landscape design across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and evolving concepts of plantation and improvement within imperial ideology. Revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Washington, Arthur Young, Lord Edward FitzGerald, and Pierce Butler constructed houses, farms, and landscape gardens—many of which have since been forgotten or selectively overlooked. How did the new republics and revolutionaries, having overthrown social hierarchies, translate their principles into spatial form? As the eighteenth-century ideology of improvement was applied to a variety of transatlantic and enslaved environments, new landscape designs were created—stretching from the suburbs of Dublin to the sea islands of the state of Georgia. Yet these revolutionary ideas of equality and freedom often contradicted reality, particularly where the traditional design of the great landed estate—the building block of aristocratic power throughout Europe—intersected with that of the farm and the plantation.

Finola O’Kane is a landscape historian, architect, and professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin.

From Abbeville Press (Lauren Moya Ford’s review of the book can be found at HyperAllergic). . . .

Marta McDowell and Janet Stiles Tyson, eds., A Curious Herbal: Elizabeth Blackwell’s Pioneering Masterpiece of Botanical Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 2023), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-0789214539, £60 / $75.

A complete edition of the first herbal published by a woman artist—which has a remarkable backstory.

In the 1730s, Elizabeth Blackwell (1699–c. 1758) found herself penniless, with her ne’er-do-well husband confined to a London debtor’s prison. A talented artist, she came up with a unique and ambitious moneymaking scheme: the publication of a new illustrated guide to medicinal plants, including many New World species not depicted in earlier books. Blackwell’s Curious Herbal, published between 1737 and 1739, was hailed for its usefulness to doctors and apothecaries and met with considerable financial success. This magnificent volume—the first modern edition of Blackwell’s herbal—reproduces all five hundred of her exquisite plates. Blackwell not only made the drawings, but prepared the copper plates and personally hand-colored the prints. Her handwritten descriptions of the plants, which she creatively adapted (with permission) from Joseph Miller’s Botanicum Officinale, retain considerable interest. This book features a previously unknown preface by Blackwell, in which she reveals her passion for art and nature, and her vision for the herbal. Two introductory texts contextualize Blackwell’s achievement: the noted garden writer Marta McDowell explores the history of herbals as a genre and the state of botanical knowledge in Blackwell’s time, and the historian Janet Stiles Tyson relates the artist’s rather extraordinary biography.

Marta McDowell is a gardener, lecturer, and horticultural writer. Her books include All the Presidents’ Gardens (2016) and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (2013), winner of the Gold Award from the Garden Writers Association.
Janet Stiles Tyson, an independent scholar, wrote her doctoral dissertation on Elizabeth Blackwell’s Curious Herbal.

From Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot:

Vincent Cochet and Alexia Lebeurre, The Turkish Boudoir of Marie-Antoinette and Joséphine at Fontainebleau / Le Boudoir Turc de Marie-Antoinette et Joséphine à Fontainebleau (Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau: Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot, 2023), 208 pages, ISBN: 979-1096561384 (English) / ISBN: 979-1096561407 (French), €43.

Within ten years, Marie-Antoinette ordered the achievement of two exquisite rooms in Fontainebleau: the Turkish Boudoir (1777) and the Silver Boudoir (1786). Two peaceful refuges allowing her to escape the laws of «Étiquette». When Joséphine became Empress, the craze for turqueries and chinoiseries, had not faded. Both a lover of Marie-Antoinette and of her style, she made hers the Turkish Boudoir emptied at the Revolution. She enhanced the luxury of the oriental atmosphere adding sumptuous and highly creative pieces of furniture by the finest artists of her time. Mahogany and gilt bronzes accompanied masterpieces of upholstery and curtains made of brocade, silk and gold. After a painstaking seven-year restoration completed in 2015, the graceful carved, painted, and gilded panelings of Marie Antoinette’s boudoir are once again the setting for Joséphine’s luxurious furniture in an environment of rewoven textiles.

Heritage curator Vincent Cochet devoted seven years to the restoration of the Turkish Boudoir. Alexia Lebeurre is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne.

From Yale UP:

Hilary Davidson, Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 240 Pages, ISBN: 978-0300263602, $35.

What did Jane Austen wear? Acclaimed dress historian and Austen expert Hilary Davidson reveals, for the first time, the wardrobe of one of the world’s most celebrated authors. Despite her acknowledged brilliance on the page, Jane Austen has all too often been accused of dowdiness in her appearance. Drawing on Austen’s 161 known letters, as well as her own surviving garments and accessories, this book assembles examples of the variety of clothes she would have possessed—from gowns and coats to shoes and undergarments—to tell a very different story. The Jane Austen Hilary Davidson discovers is alert to fashion trends but thrifty and eager to reuse and repurpose clothing. Her renowned irony and wit peppers her letters, describing clothes, shopping, and taste. Jane Austen’s Wardrobe offers the rare pleasure of a glimpse inside the closet of a stylish dresser and perpetually fascinating writer.

Hilary Davidson is associate professor and chair of MA Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. She has curated, lectured, broadcast, and published extensively in her field and is author of Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion.