Chris Schüler on the Wood that Built London
An evening lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Chris Schüler, The Wood That Built London
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 12 October 2023, 5pm
Drawing on historic documents, maps and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the Great North Wood that once covered much of what is now South London [‘north’ relative to Croydon]. It records its botany, ecology, ownership and management, the gradual encroachment of the metropolis, and the battles fought by locals and the London Wildlife Trust to save what remained.
The lecture will discuss the documentary research into historic land ownership and management in the medieval and early modern periods that informed the book, which draws on a wide range of primary sources, some never previously cited. These include 16th-century Court of Exchequer depositions in a dispute over land ownership in the National Archives at Kew; Archbishop Morton’s 1492 survey of the Manor of Croydon and a 1678 plan of the Archbishop’s woods in Croydon Museum; Archbishop Cranmer’s 1552 survey of the Manor of Croydon in the Bodleian Library; estate maps in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives; parish accounts; and records of woodland management in Dulwich College Archive and Lambeth Palace Library. Considered together, these scattered records combine to create a picture of the former extent of the wood, which stretched from Deptford to Croydon, its ownership by religious bodies such as Bermondsey Abbey and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and its management by rotational coppicing, which generated income for its owners over several centuries. Tudor Acts of Parliament and the publications of 16th– and 17th-century agronomists such as Thomas Tusser and Barnaby Googe are examined to provide insight into the theory and practice of woodland management at this period.
The book also records how that income dwindled as the Industrial Revolution rendered many woodland products obsolete, leading landowners to grub up coppices, at first for farmland and then, as the railways brought the area within commuting distance of London, for housing development, to the fury of commentators such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.
Presented both in-person at Burlington House and online, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
New Book | The Jesuits: A History
From Princeton UP:
Markus Friedrich, The Jesuits: A History, translated by John Noël Dillon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 872 pages, ISBN: 978-0691180120 (hardback), $40 / ISBN: 978-0691226200 (paperback), $28.
The most comprehensive and up-to-date exploration of one of the most important religious orders in the modern world.
Since its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus—more commonly known as the Jesuits—has played a critical role in the events of modern history. From the Counter-Reformation to the ascent of Francis I as the first Jesuit pope, The Jesuits presents an intimate look at one of the most important religious orders not only in the Catholic Church, but also the world. Markus Friedrich describes an organization that has deftly walked a tightrope between sacred and secular involvement and experienced difficulties during changing times, all while shaping cultural developments from pastoral care and spirituality to art, education, and science.
Examining the Jesuits in the context of social, cultural, and world history, Friedrich sheds light on how the order shaped the culture of the Counter-Reformation and participated in the establishment of European empires, including missionary activity throughout Asia and in many parts of Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He also explores the place of Jesuits in the New World and addresses the issue of Jesuit slaveholders. The Jesuits often tangled with the Roman Curia and the pope, resulting in their suppression in 1773, but the order returned in 1814 to rise again to a powerful position of influence. Friedrich demonstrates that the Jesuit fathers were not a monolithic group and he considers the distinctive spiritual legacy inherited by Pope Francis. With its global scope and meticulous attention to archival sources and previous scholarship, The Jesuits illustrates the heterogeneous, varied, and contradictory perspectives of this famed religious organization.
Markus Friedrich is professor of early modern history at the University of Hamburg. His books include The Birth of the Archive. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Prologue: Ignatius Loyola Founds an Order
1 The Inner Life and Structure of the Society
2 The Society, the Churches, and the Faithful
3 Saeculum and the Kingdom of God: The The Jesuits ‘in the World’
4 The Global Society
5 A World without the Society of Jesus: Hostility, Suppression, Revival
Epilogue: The Modern Society
Acknowledgments
Afterword to the English Edition
Translator’s Note
Notes
Works Cited
Names Index
Subject Index
New Book | The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art
From Harvard University Press:
David Bindman, Alejandro de la Fuente, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art, Book 1: From Colony to Nation (Cambridge, MA: Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, 2024), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0674248861, £87 / €91 / $100.
The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This first volume spans four centuries, from the first Spanish occupation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the fifteenth century; through the establishment of slave colonies on the mainland and islands by the British, French, and Danish; to the revolutionary emergence of independence, first in Haiti in 1804, and then across Latin America. Essays by leading scholars and superb illustrations bring to light a remarkable range of imagery that provides vivid insights into the complex racial history of the period.
The two volumes complement the vision of Dominique and Jean de Menil, art patrons who, during the 1960s, founded an archive to collect images depicting the myriad ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art continues the de Menil family’s original mission and brings to the fore a renewed focus on a rich and understudied area.
David Bindman is Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at University College London.
Alejandro de la Fuente is Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, and Professor of African and African American Studies and History, at Harvard University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Exhibition | Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance

Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), 2021 / © Barbara Walker, 2023.
More information on the Vanishing Point series is available here»
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Opening soon at The Fitzwilliam:
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 — 7 January 2024
Curated by Jake Subryan Richards
A landmark exhibition exploring the impact of the Black Atlantic staged in the Museum’s historic Founder’s Galleries, which were built using the profits from enslavement and exploitation.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with collections from across the University of Cambridge’s museums, libraries, and colleges to tell both a Cambridge story and a global one. Using as its starting point the story of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam, whose family wealth came in part from the South Sea Company and East India Company, the exhibition charts a history from pre-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, the rise and racialisation of Atlantic enslavement, and histories of resistance by enslaved people and their allies. Artworks and other objects illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
Black Atlantic is curated by Dr Jake Subryan Richards, acclaimed early career historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world at the London School of Economics. It is the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned for 2023–2026.
The catalogue is published by Bloomsbury:
Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards, eds., Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (London: Philip Wilson Publishing, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301234, £30 / $40.
Published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in autumn 2023, the catalogue contains contributions by curators, historians, and artists.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with exhibits from the Fitzwilliam’s collection and from other University museums, colleges, and libraries. Objects and artworks illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
c o n t e n t s
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Luke Syson
Introduction
Section 1 | Before Atlantic Enslavement
• Africa: Akan Region
• Indigenous Islands in the Caribbean Sea
• Europe: Slavery before Racism, Blackness before Slavery
Section 2 | Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement
• Royal Patronage
• Making Money: Dutch Connections
• Technology for the Transatlantic Trade
• Warfare between the British, Dutch, and Spanish Empires
Section 3 | Fashion, Consumption, and Racism
• Blackness in European Art
• Enslavement and Fashion
Section 4 | Plantations: Production and Resistance
• Production, Knowledge Generation, and Exploitation
• Plantation Violence
• Remembering
Further Reading
Image Credits
Index
New Book | Transpacific Engagements
From The Getty:
Florina Capistrano-Baker and Meha Priyadarshini, eds., Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565–1898 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-6218028258 (hardback), $55 / ISBN: 978-6218028227 (paperback), $45.
This wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays explores the hybrid cultures, intellectual clashes, and dynamic exchanges of the transpacific region in the age of imperialism.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing European empires vied for commercial and political control of oceanic routes between Asia and the Americas. Transpacific Engagements addresses the resulting cultural and artistic exchanges with an emphasis on the Spanish and American enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. This volume explores artistic expressions of imperial aspirations and imaginaries in the Philippines, Spain, Japan, and Hawaii; the transformations of texts, images, and culinary practices as they moved from one cultural context to another; and the movement of objects and people across the transpacific, with particular attention to the Manila Galleon trade that flourished from 1565 to 1815. Featuring contributions by art historians, anthropologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, Transpacific Engagements gathers groundbreaking investigations of objects and histories to illustrate the role of East, South, and Southeast Asian polities and dynasties in these multilateral exchanges.
Published by the Ayala Foundation, Inc. in association with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut).
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker is the former director of the Ayala Museum and its current consulting curator and project consultant for international operations. Meha Priyadarshini is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh.
New Book | Pet Revolution
From Reaktion Books and The University of Chicago Press:
Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1789146868, £20 / $35.
Pet Revolution tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives. For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions—industrial, agricultural, political—to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life.
Jane Hamlett is professor of modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850–1910.
Julie-Marie Strange is professor of modern British History at Durham University. Her books include The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain.
Exhibition | Portraits of Dogs

Jean-Jacques Bachelier, Dog of the Havana Breed, detail, 1768, oil on canvas, 70 × 91 cm
(The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, BM 913)
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For anyone celebrating, a very happy National Dog Day to you and yours! Now on at The Wallace Collection:
Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney
The Wallace Collection, London, 29 March — 15 October 2023
The exhibition Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney explores our devotion to four-legged friends across the centuries. Through carefully selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, works of art and even taxidermy, the exhibition highlights the unique bond between humans and their canine companions. Dog portraiture developed as an artistic genre contemporaneously with its human counterpart—dogs are represented in the earliest cave paintings alongside humans—and it flourished, particularly in Britain, from the 17th century onwards. More than any other nationality perhaps, the British have both commissioned and collected portraits of dogs. Bringing over 50 works of art to Hertford House, Portraits of Dogs presents a broad range of portraiture showing dogs in all their different shapes and sizes, with each painter or sculptor challenging themselves how best to represent mankind’s most faithful and fearless friend.
From Giles:
Xavier Bray and Bruce Fogle, Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs (London: Giles, 2021), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1913875015, £25 / $35.
Throughout history, dogs and humans have had a special relationship based on trust, loyalty, and friendship—a relationship frequently immortalised in art. Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs features 50 works of art depicting the bond between people and their beloved pet—from members of the British Royal Family, to artists themselves. Organised in a series of thematically grouped sections—the dog as hero, as a companion to royals, aristocrats and artists, or as an allegory of the human condition—the book explores the canine portrait in its many guises and features dogs belonging to many celebrated figures, including Queen Victoria’s Tilco, Lucian Freud’s Pluto, and David Hockney’s portraits of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. The pieces are all drawn from major British collections including the Royal Collection, the V&A, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and a wealth of regional museums and private collections. In “A Vet’s Point of View,” renowned clinical veterinarian Bruce Fogle examines the many reasons for the extraordinary bond between dogs and their owners. At a time of rising dog ownership, this enchanting volume is a welcome reminder of our devotion to our four-legged friends.
c o n t e n t s
Director’s Foreword
Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs by Xavier Bray
Catalogue: Introduction
• The Aristocratic Dog
• The Royal Dog
• Kylin and AhCum: Two Pekinese
• The Artist’s Dog
• The Allegorical Dog
• The Heroic Dog
• The Dog Immortal
• Until Death
A Vet’s Point of View by Bruce Fogle
Notes
Index
Photo credits
New Book | Venice: City of Pictures
Coming this fall from Thames & Hudson:
Martin Gayford, Venice: City of Pictures (London: Thames & Hudson, 2023), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0500022665, $40.
A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as, ‘La Serenissima’—a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art.
Enchanting, captivating, precious—Venice is one of the most cherished cities in the world. For centuries it was the heart of a global maritime power and a crossroads for diverse cultures. Today the city attracts millions of visitors each year, enticed by its irresistible beauty. Art lovers are drawn here by the paintings, prints, drawings, and films made by generations of artists who have captured its magical allure. It is through images—both of the city and the art created there—that Venice’s identity has been forged and spread so powerfully. Venice was a major center of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini brothers, Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese are a key part of this story. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a specialty of native artists such as Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: William Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin, and many more. Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner, and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world. In this elegant volume, Martin Gayford takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known as “La Serenissima,” the ‘Most Serene’.
Martin Gayford is art critic for The Spectator. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf; Modernists and Mavericks; Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, with David Hockney; A History of Pictures, with David Hockney; Shaping the World, with Antony Gormley; and Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954, with David Dawson.
New Book | Lauritz de Thurah: Architecture and Worldviews
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).
New Book | The Architecture of Empire
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



















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