Enfilade

From Brepols:

Anna Marie Roos, Vera Keller, eds., Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy (Brepols, 2022), 325 pages, ISBN: 978-2503588063, €85.

Collective Wisdom analyses the connections between early modern scholarly societies and to what extent these networks shaped the formation of early museums and the categorisation of knowledge.

This volume analyses how and why members of scholarly societies such as the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Leopoldina collected specimens of the natural world, art, and archaeology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These scholarly societies, founded before knowledge became subspecialised, had many common members. We focus upon how their exploration of natural philosophy, antiquarianism, and medicine were reflected in collecting practice, the organisation of specimens and how knowledge was classified and disseminated. The overall shift from curiosity cabinets with objects playfully crossing the domains of art and nature, to their well-ordered Enlightenment museums is well known. Collective Wisdom analyses the process through which this transformation occurred, and the role of members of these academies in developing new techniques of classifying and organising objects and new uses of these objects for experimental and pedagogical purposes.

Anna Marie Roos, FLS FSA is the Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Lincoln (UK). Vera Keller is Professor of History at the University of Oregon.

C O N T E N T S

Vera Keller and Anna Marie Roos — Introduction
Kelly J. Whitmer — Putting Play to Work: Collections of Realia and Useful Play in Early Modern Educational Reform Efforts
Chantal Grell — Tito Livio Burattini, a Seventeenth-Century Engineer and Egyptologist
Georgiana Hedesan — University Reform and Medical Alchemy in Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum (1655)
Fabien Krämer — The Curiosi as Collectores: The Publications of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, c. 1652–1706
Vera Keller — Vernacular Knowledge, Learned Medicine, and Social Technologies in the Leopoldina, 1670–1700, or, How to Publish on Sirens, Dragons, and Basilisks
Philip Beeley — ‘The Antiquity, Excellence, and use of Musick’: Wallis, Wanley, and the Reception of Ancient Greek Music in Late Seventeenth-Century Oxford
Julia A. Schmidt-Funke — Urban Fabric and Knowledge of Nature: Physicians as Naturalists in Early Modern Commercial Towns
Kim Sloan — Sloane’s Antiquities: Providing a ‘Body of History’ through Beads, Bottles, Brasses and Busts
Dustin Frazier Wood — Antiquarian Science and Scientific Antiquarianism at the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society
Anna Marie Roos — The First Egyptian Society
Louisiane Ferlier — Collective Wisdom in the Digital Age: Digitizing Early Modern Collections at the Royal Society

Published by Hirmer and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Jorge Rivas Pérez, ed., Appropriation and Invention: Three Centuries of Art in Spanish America (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-3777439686, $50. With contributions by O. I. Acosta Luna, Luisa E. Alcalá, E. Arroyo Lemus, Carla Aymes, Michael A. Brown, James M. Cordova, Gustavo Curiel, C. Fernández Salvador, Raphael Fonseca, Philippe Halbert, Ricardo Kusunoki, Natalia Majluf, F. M. Neff, J. Rodríguez Nóbrega, Sofia Sanabrais, and L. E. Wuffarden Revilla.

A bilingual guide to the Denver Art Museum’s permanent collection of Latin American art, covering masterpieces from three centuries of art in Spanish America.

Drawing from the renowned collection of Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum, this bilingual catalog examines the processes of appropriation and invention in the arts of Spanish America from the 1520s to the 1820s. The book highlights Latin American masterpieces, including paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, made shortly after the conquest and before the independence movements. Arranged regionally, the book’s essays explore how artists found artistic freedom under colonial authority. The book shows that while still pleasing clients, many artists of Indigenous and African descent also reclaimed and reshaped the arts for themselves and their new colonial realities. Essays that consider modern and contemporary trends round out the volume.

Jorge F. Rivas Pérez is the Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum. He is the co-editor of Revisión: A New Look at Arts in the Americas.

From Macmillan:

Peter Neumann, Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, translated by Shelley Frisch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0374178697, $27.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dealt a one-two punch to the dynastic system. Confidence in traditional social, political, and religious norms had been replaced by a profound uncertainty that was as terrifying for some as it was exhilarating for others. Nowhere was the excitement more palpable than among the extraordinary group of poets, philosophers, translators, and socialites who gathered in this Thuringian village of just four thousand residents.

Jena became the place for the young and intellectually curious, the site of a new departure, of philosophical disruption. Influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then an elder statesman and artistic eminence, the leading figures among the disruptors—the translator August Wilhelm Schlegel; the philosophers Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling; the dazzling, controversial intellectual Caroline Schlegel, married to August; Dorothea Schlegel, a poet and translator, married to Fritz; and the poets Ludwig Tieck and Novalis—resolved to rethink the world, to establish a republic of free spirits. They didn’t just question inherited societal traditions; with their provocative views of the individual and of nature, they revolutionized our understanding of freedom and reality. With wit and elegance, Peter Neumann brings this remarkable circle of friends and rivals to life in Jena 1800, a work of intellectual history that is colorful and passionate, informative and intimate—as fresh and full of surprises as its subjects.

Peter Neumann studied philosophy, political science, and economics in Jena and Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in philosophy and writes for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He is the author of the poetry collections secure and areas & days, which have been awarded several prizes and scholarships.
Shelley Frisch’s translations from the German―which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka―have been awarded numerous translation prizes. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

From Penguin Random House:

Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (New York: Knopf, 2022), 512 pages, ISBN: 978-0525657118, $35. When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in Jena, a quiet university town in Germany, in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations. At the heart of this inspiring book is the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will. Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She is the author of Founding Gardeners, Brother Gardeners, and The New York Times best seller The Invention of Nature, which has been published in twenty-seven languages and won fifteen international literary awards. Wulf has written for many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. She is a member of PEN America and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.

Distributed by Yale UP:

G. A. Bremner, Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, 1885–1920 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107314, £50 / $65.

This innovative study reappraises the Edwardian Baroque movement in British architecture, placing it in its wider cultural, political, and imperial contexts

The Edwardian Baroque was the closest British architecture ever came to achieving an ‘imperial’ style. With the aim of articulating British global power and prestige, it adorned civic and commercial structures both in Britain and in the wider British world, especially in the ‘white settler’ Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. Evoking the contemporary and emotive idea of ‘Greater Britain’, this new book by distinguished historian G. A. Bremner represents a major, groundbreaking study of this intriguing architectural movement in Britain and its empire. It explores the Edwardian Baroque’s significance as a response to the growing tide of anxiety over Britain’s place in the world, its widely perceived geopolitical decline, and its need to bolster confidence in the face of the Great Power rivalries of the period. Cross-disciplinary in nature, it combines architectural, political, and imperial history and theory, providing a more nuanced and intellectually wide-ranging understanding of the Edwardian Baroque movement from a material culture perspective, including its foundation in notions of race and gender.

G. A. Bremner is professor of architectural history at the University of Edinburgh, where he specializes in the history of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, with a particular focus on British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism.

From Yale UP and the Royal Collection Trust:

Simon Thurley, Rufus Bird, and Michael Turner, St James’s Palace: From Leper Hospital to Royal Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 308 pages, ISBN: 978-0300267464, £60 / $75.

The first modern history of St James’s Palace, shedding light on a remarkable building at the heart of the history of the British monarchy that remains by far the least known of the royal residences

In this first modern history of St James’s Palace, the authors shed new light on a remarkable building that, despite serving as the official residence of the British monarchy from 1698 to 1837, is by far the least known of the royal residences. The book explores the role of the palace as home to the heir to the throne before 1714, its impact on the development of London and the West end during the late Stuart period, and how, following the fire at the palace of Whitehall, St James’s became the principal seat of the British monarchy in 1698. The arrangement and display of the paintings and furnishings making up the Royal Collection at St James’s is chronicled as the book follows the fortunes of the palace through the Victorian and Edwardian periods up to the present day. Specially commissioned maps, phased plans, and digital reconstructions of the palace at key moments in its development accompany a rich array of historical drawings, watercolors, photographs, and plans. The book includes a foreword by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales.

Simon Thurley is a leading historian of royal palaces and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English court. Rufus Bird is a furniture specialist and former Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art, Royal Collection Trust. Michael Turner is an architectural historian and a former Inspector of Historic Buildings and Areas for Historic England.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword, HRH The Prince of Wales

Acknowledgments
Notes for the Readers

Simon Thurley, Introduction
1  Simon Thurley, From the Hospital of St James to the Civil War
2  Simon Thurley, The Restoration to Queen Anne
3  Rufus Bird, The Georgian Court
4  Michael Turner, George IV to the Second World War
5  Simon Thurley, The Palace Today

Notes
Abbreviations and Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
Plans A–D

From the London Topographical Society:

Frank Kelsall and Timothy Walker, Nicholas Barbon: Developing London, 1667–1698 (London: London Topographical Society, 2022), 240 pages, £35.

London grew rapidly in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and Nicholas Barbon (c.1640–1698) was central to its physical transformation. This first complete biography analyses how Barbon’s property development was closely connected to financial innovations. As a young doctor during the Plague year of 1665 Nicholas Barbon stayed in London to help victims, but thereafter his attention turned to building, to finance, and to economics. His first developments were in the City after the Great Fire. He then took advantage of the westward move of aristocratic houses to lay out streets in what had been their grounds, before building in the Temple, moving to sites in Soho and Westminster, eastwards beyond the City walls and north to Holborn. His development of Red Lion Fields (to the fury of neighbouring lawyers in Gray’s Inn) and Lamb’s Conduit Fields is discussed in detail, revealing the sophisticated—some might say ruthless—methods he used to raise funding. His speculative activity created rows of terrace houses and squares that became the norm for the city’s future development. At the same time he set up the first fire insurance company, the second bank, became an MP, and published on economic matters such as free trade and recoinage. He was in the parlance of the day a ‘projector’, and his story reveals a great deal about the way London, and Britain as a whole, was changing topographically, politically and socially in these crucial years.