Enfilade

From Passés Composés:

Cécile Berly, La légèreté et le grave: Une histoire du XVIIIe siècle en tableaux (Paris: Passés Composés, 2021), 150 pages, ISBN: 978-2379334009, €24.

Le XVIIIe siècle s’ouvre avec Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère d’Antoine Watteau et s’achève avec La Mort de Marat de Jacques-Louis David : la naissance de la fête galante versus l’agonie d’un tribun révolutionnaire. Deux chefs-d’œuvre qui illustrent la légèreté et la gravité d’un siècle, deux facettes antagonistes mais complémentaires d’une même époque.

Les dix œuvres ici racontées sont ainsi autant de jalons pour saisir ce siècle passionnant dans ses innombrables contradictions : elles correspondent toutes à un moment du XVIIIe et disent son histoire artistique, culturelle, philosophique, sociale, économique et, bien évidemment, politique. Autant de chefs-d’œuvre qui ont forgé une société nouvelle, éprise de liberté, d’indépendance et de transgressions, au fil d’un siècle qui, sous la plume sensible de Cecile Berly, oscille sans cesse entre une légèreté savamment entretenue et une gravité qui confine au drame.

Historienne, spécialiste du XVIIIe siècle, Cécile Berly a publié plusieurs ouvrages sur Marie-Antoinette. Elle a également présenté et annoté la correspondance de Madame de Pompadour, et est l’auteure des Femmes de Louis XV et de Trois femmes: Madame du Deffand, Madame Roland, Madame Vigée Le Brun.

From Passés Composés:

Flavie Leroux, L’autre famille royale: Bâtards et maitresses d’henri IV à Louis XVI (Paris: Passés Composés, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-2379334801, €22.

La faillite de l’absolutisme

Maîtresses et bâtards sont au cœur de l’histoire monarchique et tiennent, à l’avènement de ce qu’on appelle « l’absolutisme », un rôle de premier plan. Mais quel est-il ? Et surtout comment la famille royale peut-elle s’en accommoder alors que sur elle reposent la légitimité et la continuité du pouvoir ? C’est à cette question que Flavie Leroux répond en relisant les règnes des Bourbon, d’Henri IV à Louis XVI. Elle redonne leur place aux maîtresses successives et à leurs enfants, aussi bien dans l’idéologie monarchique que dans la réalité du pouvoir et de la vie de cour. D’abord famille de substitution sous Henri IV, avec Gabrielle d’Estrées et les Vendôme, ils s’imposent ensuite, avec Henriette d’Entragues, Louise de La Vallière ou Mme de Montespan, comme une famille parallèle que le roi garde auprès de lui et impose aux côtés de sa lignée légitime. Cette « contre famille » va concurrencer la « véritable » famille à un point tel que, sous Louis XV puis Louis XVI, c’est la crédibilité du pouvoir des Bourbon qui est mise en péril par cette nouvelle organisation. Entre famille, pouvoir et société, un livre inédit, brillant et décisif sur l’inexorable déclin de la monarchie française avant la Révolution française.

Docteur de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, chargée de recherche au Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, membre associée au Centre de recherches historiques, Flavie Leroux est spécialiste d’histoire de la cour et des femmes en France à l’époque moderne, en particulier des maîtresses royales, auxquelles elle a consacré sa thèse et un ouvrage, Les maîtresses du roi, de Henri IV à Louis XIV (2020).

From Norton:

Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York: Liveright, 2022), 592 pages, ISBN: 978-163149698, $40.

A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States.

There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus ‘discovers’ a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing ‘New World’ as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction.

Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures.

By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hamalainen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome.

Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of ‘colonial America’ is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an ‘Indigenous America’ that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

Pekka Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University and the author of The Comanche Empire, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. He lives in Oxford, England.

From Routledge:

Arlene Leis, ed., Women, Collecting, and Cultures beyond Europe (New York: Routledge, 2022), 282 pages, ISBN: 978-1032135465, £130 / $150

This edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women’s collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women’s voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women’s relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks.

Arlene Leis is an independent art historian who received her PhD from University of York.

C O N T E N T S

Collecting to Collectingism: New Directions in Women’s Transcultural Practices — Arlene Leis

Part I: Points of Transcultural Exchange
1  Européenerie in Feminine Space: Qing Imperial Women and Collecting in China’s Long Eighteenth Century — Chih-En Chen
2  Coerced Contact: The Dzungar Court Costume of a Swedish Knitting Instructor — Lisa Hellman
3  Trading Places: The Japanese Art Collection of O’Tama Kiyohara Ragusa — Maria Antonietta Spadaro
4  Created to Gleam: Decorum, Taste, and Luxury of Four Dresses from Viceregal Mexico — Martha Sandoval-Villegas and Laura Garcia-Vedrenne

Part II: Natural History, Colonial Encounters, and Indigenous Histories
5  The Botanist Was a Woman: Classifying and Collecting on the First French Circumnavigation of the Globe — Glynis Ridley
6  Pineapple Lady: Expertise and Exoticism in Agnes Block’s Self-Representation as Flora Batava — Catherine Powell-Warren
7  A Memsahib’s ‘Natural World’: Lady Mary Impey’s Collection of Indian Natural History Paintings — Apurba Chatterjee
8  Women and Huipils: The Treasuring of an Indigenous Garment in New Spain — Martha Sandoval-Villegas
9  Colonial Pantomime: Queen Marie I of Portugal’s Human Cabinet of Curiosities — Agnieszka Anna Ficek

Part III: Settlers, Immigrants, and New Frontiers
10  Settler Botanists, Nature’s Gentlemen, and the Canadian Book of Nature: Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Wild Flowers — Cynthia Sugars
11  Collecting Indian Art in Santa Fe: The Bryn Mawrters and the Politics of Preservation — Nancy Owen Lewis
12  The Spectacle of Sponsoring an Ottoman Trousseau — Gwendolyn Collaço
13  Las Bexareñas and their Wills: Women’s Material Culture and Cataloguing Practices in Spanish San Fernando de Béxar — Amy M. Porter

Part IV: Recovery, Collaboration, and Repatriation
14  ‘He Surely Existed’: Women of the Early Folk Art Collecting Movement and Thomas W. Commeraw, Forgotten African-American Potter — Brandt Zipp
15  Adjacency in the Collection — Toby Upson
16  Collecting Fibre Arts in Arnhem Land — Louise Hamby
17  From Women’s Hands: Learning from Métis Women’s Collections — Angela Fey and Maureen Matthews

From Amsterdam UP:

Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, eds., Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 282 pages, ISBN: 978-9463729239, €122.

Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. This book challenges dominant notions of the ‘fixed,’ immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.

Paul Nelles is Associate Professor of early modern history at Carleton University. His research focuses on the history of books, writing, and religion in early modern Europe. His study of Jesuit communication, The Information Order: Writing, Mobility and Distance in the Making of the Society of Jesus (1540–1573), is forthcoming.

Rosa Salzberg is Associate Professor of Early Modern History, University of Trento. Her research focuses on communication, urban history and the history of migration and mobility in early modern Europe, with a focus on Venice. She is the author of Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (2014).

C O N T E N T S

Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, Movement and Mobility in the Early Modern World: An Introduction

Moving Bodies
1  John Gallagher, Linguistic Encounter: Fynes Moryson and the Uses of Language
2  Gerrit Verhoeven, Wading through the Mire: Mobility on the Grand Tour, 1585–1750
3  Carolin Schmitz, Travelling for Health: Medicine and Rural Mobility in Early Modern Spain

Crossing Borders
4  Irene Fosi, Mobility and Danger on the Borders of the Papal States, 16th–17th Centuries
5  Paola Molino, News on the Road: The Mobility of Handwritten Newsletters in Early Modern Europe
6  Darka Bili., Quarantine, Mobility, and Trade: Commercial Lazzarettos in the Early Modern Adriatic

Global Networks
7  Paul Nelles, Devotion in Transit: Agnus Dei, Jesuit Missionaries, and Global Salvation in the Sixteenth Century
8  Felicita Tramontana, Getting to the Holy Land: Franciscan Journeys and Mediterranean Mobility
9  Sebouh Aslanian, From Mount Lebanon to the Little Mount in Madras: Mobility and Catholic-Armenian Alms-Collecting Networks during the 18th Century

Index

From Routledge:

Samir Younés and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural Type and Character: A Practical Guide to a History of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1138584037 (hardback), $128 / ISBN: 978-1138584051 (paperback), $36.

Architectural Type and Character provides an alternative perspective to the current role given to history in architecture, reunifying architectural history and architectural design to reform architectural discourse and practice. Historians provide important material for appreciating buildings and guiding those who produce them. In current histories, a building is the product of a time, its form follows its function, irresistible influences produce it, and style, preferably novel, is its most important attribute. This book argues for an alternative. Through a two-part structure, the book first develops the theoretical foundations for this alternative history of architecture. The second part then provides drawings and interpretations of over one hundred sites from different times and places.

Samir Younes is Professor of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame where he was Director of Rome Studies and Director of Graduate Studies. He teaches architectural design and theory. His books include: The Imperfect City: On Architectural Judgement; Architects and Mimetic Rivalry; The Intellectual Life of the Architect; and Quatremère de Quincy’s Historical Dictionary of Architecture: The True, The Fictive, and The Real.

Carroll William Westfall’s PhD in the history of architecture from Columbia University was followed by five decades of teaching before retiring from the University of Notre Dame. His scholarly and general articles run from studies of Pompeii to critiques of current practice. His books are In This Most Perfect Paradise, a study of Rome in the 15th century; Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism, a dialectic exchange with Robert Jan van Pelt; and Architecture, Liberty, and Civic Order: Architectural Theories from Vitruvius to Jefferson and Beyond, a review of architectural theory.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations

Preamble
Introduction

Part I
1  The History of Architecture We Have
2  The Alternative: Type, Character, and Style
3  Urbanism
4  The Components and Types of Good Urban Form

Part II
5  The Tholos
6  The Temple
7  The Theatre
8  The Regia
9  The Dwelling
10  The Shop
11  The Hypostyle

From Cambridge UP:

Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 280 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1108834452, $99.

Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body’s adeptness or the hand’s dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

Chloe Wigston Smith is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2013) and co-editor, with Serena Dyer, of Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020). Her current research, supported by a British Academy fellowship, centers on material culture and the Atlantic world.

Beth Fowkes Tobin, a recipient of NEH and NSF fellowships, is the author of The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages (2014), Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1830 (2005), and Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (1999).

C O N T E N T S

Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Scale and Sense of Small Things — Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin

Part I: Reading Small Things
1  ‘The Sum of All in All’: The Miniature Book and the Nature of Legibility — Abigail Williams
2  Nuts, Flies, Thimbles, and Thumbs: Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature and Scale — Katherine Wakely-Mulroney
3  Gothic Syntax — Cynthia Wall
4  Small, Familiar Things on Trial and on Stage — Chloe Wigston Smith

Part II: Small Things in Time and Space
5  On the Smallness of Numismatic Objects — Crystal B. Lake
6  Crinoidal Limestone and Staffordshire Teapots: Material and Temporal Scales in Eighteenth-Century Britain — Kate Smith
7  ‘Joineriana’: The Small Fragments and Parts of Eighteenth-Century Assemblages — Freya Gowrley
8  ‘Pray What a Pox Are Those Damned Strings of Wampum?’ — Robbie Richardson

Part III: Small Things at Hand
9  ‘We Bought a Guillotine Neatly Done in Bone’: Illicit Industries on Board British Prison Hulks, 1775–1815 — Anna McKay
10  ‘What Number?’: Reform, Authority, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Military Buttons — Matthew Keagle
11  Two Men’s Leather Letter Cases: Mercantile Pride and Hierarchies of Display — Pauline Rushton
12  The Aesthetic of Smallness: Chelsea Porcelain Seal Trinkets and Britain’s Global Gaze, 1750–1775 — Patricia F. Ferguson
13  ‘Small Gifts Foster Friendship’: Hortense de Beauharnais, Amateur Art, and the Politics of Exchange in Post-Revolutionary France — Marina Kliger

Part IV: Small Things on the Move
14  Hooke’s Ant — Tita Chico
15  Portable Patriotism: Britannia and Material Nationhood in Miniature — Serena Dyer
16  Revolutionary Histories in Small Things: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on Printed Ceramics, c. 1793–1796 — Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
17  A Box of Tea and the British Empire — Romita Ray

Afterword: A Thing’s Perspective — Hanneke Grootenboer

Select Bibliography
Index