Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Stacey Sloboda, ed., Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment: A Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350408029, $120.

Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of interior design and interior spaces from 1700 to 1850. Considering the interior as material, social, and cultural artefact, this volume moves beyond conventional descriptive accounts of changing styles and interior design fashions, to explore in depth the effect on the interior of the materials, processes, aesthetic philosophies, and cultural attitudes of the age. From the Palace of Versailles to Virginia coffeehouses, and from chinoiserie bathhouses to the trading exchanges of the West Indies, the chapters in this book examine a wide range of themes including technological advancements, public spaces, gender and sexuality, and global movements in interior designs and decorations. Drawing together contributions from leading scholars, this volume provides the most authoritative and comprehensive survey of the history of interiors and interior architecture in the long eighteenth century.

Stacey Sloboda is Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

c o n t e n t s

Preface

Introduction: The Interior in the Age of Enlightenment — Stacey Sloboda
1  Beauty: Cultural Aesthetics in the Enlightenment Interior — Anne Nellis Richter
2  Technology: Cultural Transfer, Imitation, and Improvement of Materials and Surfaces of the Interior — Noémie Étienne
3  Designers, Professions, Trades: Conceiving and Making the Interior — Conor Lucey
4  Global Movements: Exoticism and Hybridity in the Globalized Interior — Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding
5  Private Spaces: Performing the Home — Mimi Hellman
6  Public Spaces: Staging Ritual and Shaping Identity — Laurel O. Peterson
7  Gender and Sexuality: The Desire of Decor — Michael Yonan
8  The Interior in the Arts: Literary and Visual Representations — Karen Lipsedge and Melinda McCurdy

Bibliography
Index

The 6 volumes appeared in 2020; the stand-alone volume on the Enlightenment became available in 2022 (see below); another option will appear in 2024.

Amanda Flather (anthology editor), A Cultural History of the Home, volumes 1–6 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), ISBN: ‎ 978-1472584410, $610.

A Cultural History of the Home provides a comprehensive survey of the domestic space from ancient times to the present. Spanning 2800 years, the six volumes explore how different cultures and societies have established, developed and used the home. It reveals a great deal about how people have lived day-to-day in a range of regions and epochs by providing a historical focus on the location in which they will have spent much of their time: the domestic space.

1  Antiquity, 800 BCE–800 CE
2  Medieval Age, 800–1450
3  Renaissance, 1450–1648
4  Age of Enlightenment, 1648–1815
5  Age of Empire, 1815–1920
6  Modern Age, 1920–Present

Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters:
• The Meaning of the Home
• Family and Household
• The House
• Furniture and Furnishings
• Home and Work
• Gender and Home
• Hospitality and Home
• Religion and Home

This structure offers readers a broad overview of a period within each volume or the opportunity to follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter across volumes.

Amanda Flather is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex. She is the author of Gender and Space in Early Modern England (2006).

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Clive Edwards, ed., A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1472584250, $110. The paperback edition will be available in 2024.

During the period of the Enlightenment, the word ‘home’ could refer to a specific and defined physical living space, the location of domestic life, and a concept related to ideas of roots, origins, and retreat. The transformations that the Enlightenment encouraged created the circumstances for the concept of home to change and develop in the following three ways. First to influence homemaking were the literary and cultural manifestations that included issues around attitudes to education, social order and disorder, sensibility, and sexuality. Secondly, were the roles of visual and material culture of the home that demonstrated themselves through print, portraiture, literature, objects and products, and dress and fashion. Thirdly, were the industrial and sociological aspects that included concepts of luxury, progress, trade and technology, consumption, domesticity, and the notions of public and private spaces within a home. The chapters in this volume therefore discuss and reflect upon issues relating to the home through a range of approaches. Enlightenment homes are examined in terms of signification and meaning; the persons who inhabited them; the physical buildings and their furniture and furnishings; the work undertaken within them; the differing roles of men and women; the nature of hospitality, and the important role of religion in the home. Taken together they give a valuable overview of the manners, customs, and operation of the Enlightenment home.

Clive Edwards is Emeritus Professor of Design History at Loughborough University. He is editor of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (2015) and author of Turning Houses into Homes: A History of the Retailing and Consumption of Domestic Furnishings (2017), The Twentieth Century Interiors Sourcebook (2013), Interior Design: A Critical Introduction (2010), How to Read Pattern: A Crash Course in Textile Design (2009), Encyclopedia of Furnishing Textiles, Soft Furnishings and Floor Coverings (2007), British Furniture: 1600–2000 (2006), and Encyclopedia of Furniture Materials, Trades, and Techniques (2001).

c o n t e n t s

1  The Meaning of Home — Karen Lipsedge
2  Family and Household —Helen Metcalfe
3  The House — Stephen Hague
4  Furniture and Furnishings — Clive Edwards
5  Home and Work — Leonie Hannan
6  Gender and Home — Ruth Larsen
7  Hospitality and Home — Woodruff Smith
8  Religion and the Home — Matthew Neal

From Bloomsbury:

Christina Anderson (anthology editor), A Cultural History of Furniture, volumes 1–6 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 1824 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1472577894, $550.

Furniture is an artifact, so what can it tell us about culture? What social, religious, political, and economic factors have shaped its form and functions? How does furniture demonstrate the transformations in private and public life across time and cultures?

In a 6-volume work spanning 4,500 years, 70 experts chart the changing cultural framework within which furniture was designed, produced, and used in Western Europe. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and, to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

1  Antiquity, 2500 BCE–500 CE
2  Middle Ages and Renaissance, 500–1500
3  Age of Exploration, 1500–1700
4  Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1800
5  Age of Empire and Industry, 1800–1900
6  Modern Age, 1900–Present

Chapters address: Design and Motifs; Makers, Making, and Materials; Types and Uses; The Domestic Setting; The Public Setting; Exhibition and Display; Furniture and Architecture; Visual Representations; and Verbal Representations. The total extent of the pack is approximately 1,824 pages. Each volume opens with a series preface, an introduction, and notes on contributors; each concludes with notes, bibliography, and an index.

A Cultural History of Furniture is part of the Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access.

Christina M. Anderson is Research Fellow, History Faculty and Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

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Sylvain Cordier, Christina Anderson, and Laura Houliston, eds., Volume 4: A Cultural History of Furniture in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), ISBN: ‎9781472577856.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Series Preface

Introduction — M. B. Aldrich with Sylvain Cordier
1  Design and Motifs — Barbara Lasic
2  Makers, Making, and Materials — Yannick Chastang
3  Types and Uses — Mary-Eve Marchand
4  The Domestic Setting — Antonia Brodie
5  The Public Setting — Jeffrey Collins
6  Exhibition and Display — Frederic Dassas
7  Furniture and Architecture — Peter N. Lindfield
8  Visual Representations — Michael Decrossas and Sylvain Cordier
9  Verbal Representations — Tessa Murdoch

From Penn Press:

Robert Shaw, ed., Americana Insights, 2023 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 979-8988533108, $65.

Americana Insights 2023 presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. Groundbreaking essays by leading scholars provide a wealth of new insights on a wide array of artistic traditions. Covering a broad geographic area—including New England, the mid-Atlantic, South, and mid-West—and spanning the colonial era to early twentieth century, these essays enhance our understanding of the diverse American experience. This is the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including portraiture, furniture, jewelry, textiles, and works on paper. In the first volume, authors share groundbreaking research on the use of hooked rugs in the colonial revival era; revisit the work of a famed Connecticut portrait painter known as the Beardsley Limner and his namesake sitters; Rufus Porter’s work as an artist and entrepreneur; a distinctive group of paint-decorated dressing tables from New Hampshire; delicate cutworks made by an incarcerated inmate in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; painted tavern signs; jewelry in folk portraiture; New Jersey schoolmaster and calligrapher Thomas Earl; and signature quilts from the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Deborah M. Child, Pamela and Brian Ehrlich, Cynthia Fowler, Emelie Gevalt, Mark D. Mitchell, Eileen M. Smiles, Laura Fecych Sprague.

Robert Shaw is an independent curator and art historian who has written and lectured extensively on many aspects of American folk art. His many critically acclaimed books include Bird Decoys of North America: Nature History and Art (2010), American Quilts: The Democratic Art (2017), and American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds (2021). He has curated exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Shelburne Museum, where he served as curator from 1981 to 1994.

Americana Insights is a nonprofit publication dedicated to the study of Americana and American folk art. It was founded in 2021 by Jane Katcher in collaboration with David A. Schorsch, her longtime friend and mentor in the field, founding editor Robert Shaw, and a distinguished advisory board of museum professionals and scholars. In 2023, curator and scholar Lisa Minardi was appointed editor of Americana Insights. More information is available here»