Call for Papers | The Public Country House
From the Call for Papers:
The Public Country House: ‘Treasure of Quiet Beauty’ or a Site for Public Histories?
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16–17 May 2024
Proposals due by 2 January 2024
§ “I venture to think that the country houses of Britain with their gardens, their parks, their pictures, their furniture and their peculiar architectural charm, represent a treasure of quiet beauty.” –Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian and former owner of NT Blickling Hall, 1937.
§ “[There is] a growing awareness of the complexity and significance of the country house in all is manifold and multifarious ways, from slavery to gender, the local community to the British Empire, horticulture to transport, politics to recreation.” –David Cannadine, “The British Country House Revisited,” in D. Cannadine and J. Musson (eds), The Country House: Past, Present, Future (Rizzoli, 2018), p. 15.
§ “Understanding the importance of imperial wealth and artefacts to the purchase, building and furnishing of … country houses underscores how these built environments—far from being exclusively British or English—were shaped by long histories of global interaction.” –Margot Finn and Kate Smith, “Introduction,” in M. Finn and K. Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (UCL Press, 2018), p. 12.
The British country house: family home or public cultural asset? Glorious exemplar of historic taste or contested site of public history? A visually enthralling historic stage set, or a site to inform understanding of our national histories? There are millions of visits to country houses every year in the UK, and recent events have demonstrated how the public country house is emerging as a new front line of public history. In England, the Country House Scheme, first established in the 1930s by Lord Lothian, has allowed many of the most significant country houses and their estates to transfer ownership to the National Trust through acceptance in lieu of taxation. This has meant that in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, country houses—sometimes with their collections—could be saved for the nation to enjoy as a “treasure of quiet beauty.” Nearly ninety years on, the research landscape surrounding country houses has transformed, encompassing topics beyond questions of patronage, the histories of interior taste and style, to also address collective histories of people and place, and local, regional, national and global histories and object provenance.
The country house is no longer only a unique index of aristocratic or elite artistic and architectural taste over time, it is also a living cultural resource for its increasingly diverse audiences. How are these multi-layered sites—at once former and present family homes, public museums, heritage attractions, and exemplars of global exchange networks in microcosm—curated, presented and interpreted in the present? What does this shift and the accompanying research mean for the way these sites present and interpret their houses, gardens and collections? And what might the country house of the future look like?
Taking place online and at the V&A South Kensington on 16th and 17th May 2024, this two-day conference explores what role the country house plays in our national understanding of social and global histories, art and culture, and the axes of change around which such sites are turning, including diverse audience expectation, the climate crisis, and national historical narratives. The conference will focus on public country houses: i.e. those owned, opened, and managed by charitable organisations with an obligation to provide public benefit.
The Public Country House: ‘Treasure of Quiet Beauty’ or a Site for Public Histories? will bring together an international community of colleagues working across heritage, museums, arts and culture, and academia to explore the past, present, and potential future/s of the country house. Through panels, roundtable discussions, and creative interventions, together we will map the barriers to presentation and interpretation in publicly accessible country houses, share ideas and examples of innovative curatorial and interpretative practice internationally, and develop tools and methodologies for change that cut across disciplinary boundaries. We invite proposals for 15- to 20-minute presentations of any format. We also welcome full panel proposals as well as roundtable discussions, workshops, and creative submissions.
Proposals might engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Researching the Country House
• Narratives of loss and destruction: the history of the saving of the country house in the 21st century, fifty years on from the V&A’s Destruction of the Country House exhibition
• Authenticity: Understanding the significance and preservation of the material past
• The potential for country houses to act as case studies in shared national histories
• Exploring the received family histories of place alongside the plural significance of local, regional, national, and global histories, including of contested histories or marginalised histories
21st-Century Meanings of the Public Country House and Its Evolving Roles
• Imagining and celebrating the country house of the future
• Country houses and estates as the nuclei around which entire communities and big historical moments are contingent
• Climate change, the environment, and the country house
• Country houses as sites of creativity and innovation: the dialogues between historic collections and contemporary art
Evolving Methodologies for Interpretation and Display for a Range of Different Audiences
• The future of country house audiences and visiting trends
• Critique of country house re-presentations for different audiences: national and international case studies
• Tools and methodologies for audience engagement, particularly regarding presentation and interpretation—e.g. immersive and sensory presentation, interpretation and experience
The above themes may be interpreted as broadly or creatively as you wish. We are particularly keen to hear from those working in heritage spaces, museums, galleries, cultural organisations, or as creative practitioners. Abstracts of about 250 words (with a brief bio) should be sent to the project’s principal investigator, Dr Oliver Cox (o.cox@vam.ac.uk) by 9.00am (GMT) on Tuesday, 2 January 2024. We would be grateful if you could also let us know if you have any access requirements (e.g. online-only attendance). If you’re not sure how or where your proposal might fit, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
This conference is part of ‘Private’ spaces for public benefit? Historic houses as sites for research and knowledge exchange innovation, a collaborative project led by the V&A and the National Trust. The project is generously supported by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship Award.
Cultural Heritage Magazine, October 2023
Detail from one of a pair of Spanish-colonial screens depicting a landscape in the Japanese style, possibly made in Mexico City, perhaps 1660s, pigments on paper embellished with embossed and gilded clouds and arches, each screen 249 × 340 cm (Ham House, Surrey, NT 1139576, photograph by Leah Ban).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Cultural Heritage Magazine is published twice each year, in May and October by the National Trust:
Cultural Heritage Magazine, issue 3 (October 2023)
4 Welcome — John Orna-Ornstein, the National Trust’s Director of Curation and Experience, introduces the autumn issue
6 Briefing: News, events, and publications, plus research and conservation round-ups
Taking the plunge | Archaeological excavations in the basement below Bath Assembly Rooms have revealed the remains of a rare 18th-century cold bath. It is thought to be the only one of its kind located in a historic assembly room, which in the 18th and 19th centuries was a popular place of entertainment, conversation, dancing, and gambling in fashionable towns. In the 18th century, medical practitioners recommended cold bathing as beneficial for various physical and mental ailments, including gout. As a result, plunge pools and cold baths surged in popularity . . . (7).
14 In Conversation — James Rothwell talks to John Benjamin about the National Trust’s under-explored jewellery collections
24 Textile Transmissions — James Clark and Emma Slocombe on repurposing church vestments in the Reformation
Nostell, West Yorkshire, neo-classical lodge, designed by Robert Adam, 1776–77, sandstone ashlar (purchased with HLF funds, 2002). Included in 60 Remarkable Buildings of the National Trust.
34 Set in Stone — George Clarke and Elizabeth Green discuss their shared love of built heritage
Preview of Green’s 60 Remarkable Buildings of the National Trust (National Trust Cultural Heritage Publishing, 2023), which includes an introduction by Clarke.
42 Modern Lives — John Chu and Sean Ketteringham on new research into 20th-century art collections
50 Election Threads — Helen Antrobus on dress, domesticity, and politics
60 Borrowing a Landscape — Emile de Bruijn on a Japanese-style folding screen at Ham House
Preview of de Bruijn’s Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland (National Trust and Bloomsbury, 2023).
68 Acquisitions: Selected highlights, 2022–23
Acquisition of an important group of items historically associated with Chirk Castle, Wrexham (acquired by purchase, 2023) . . . The acquisition includes four important early 18th-century landscape paintings depicting the Chirk estate, three by the artist Pieter Tillemans (1684–1734) and one by John Wootton (c.1682–1764); family portraits by artists including Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely; rare 17th-century furniture in the Servants’ Hall; estate documents including a manuscript of 1563 that shows the first known depiction of Chirk; Neo-classical furniture by Ince and Mayhew; and historic artefacts including items associated with the English Civil War and a rare 17th-century Puritan hat (69).
74 Meet the Expert, Heather Caven, Head of Collections Management and Care
New Book | Borrowed Landscapes
From Bloomsbury:
Emile de Bruijn, Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300985, £35 / $45.
The art and ornament of China and Japan have had a deep impact in the British Isles. From the seventeenth century onwards, the design and decoration of interiors and gardens in Britain and Ireland was profoundly influenced by the importation of Chinese and Japanese luxury goods, while domestic designers and artisans created their own fanciful interpretations of ‘oriental’ art. Those hybrid styles and tastes have traditionally been known as chinoiserie and japonisme, but they can also be seen as elements of the wider and still very relevant phenomenon of orientalism, or the way the West sees the East. Illustrated with a wealth of new photography and published in association with the National Trust, Borrowed Landscapes is an engaging survey of orientalism in the Trust’s historic houses and gardens across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Drawing on new research, Emile de Bruijn demonstrates how elements of Chinese and Japanese culture were simultaneously desired and misunderstood, dismembered and treasured, idealised, and caricatured.
Emile de Bruijn studied Japanese at the University of Leiden and museology at the University of Essex. After working for the auctioneers Sotheby’s, he joined the National Trust, where he currently works as a decorative arts curator. Among his previous publications is Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017).
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Pattern Emerges, 1600–1690
2 Emblems of Aspiration, 1690–1735
3 Peak Chinoiserie, 1735–1760
4 Fictions Have Their Own Logic, 1760–1780
5 Competing Perspectives, 1780–1870
6 The Age of Japonisme, 1870–1900
7 New and Old Orientalisms, the 20th Century
Picture Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Call for Articles | Irish Heritage Studies
Vicereines of Ireland: Portraits of Forgotten Women exhibition at Dublin Castle, 2021, curated by Myles Campbell
(Photo by Kenneth O’Halloran, courtesy of Office of Public Works, Dublin Castle)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From Ireland’s Office of Public Works:
Irish Heritage Studies: The Annual Research Journal of the Office of Public Works, Inaugural Issue
Abstracts due by 15 December 2023; final texts due by 29 September 2024
The Office of Public Works, Ireland, is pleased to announce the launch of its annual research journal, Irish Heritage Studies, and invites submissions for the first volume to be published in spring 2025. The journal will showcase original critical research rooted in the substantial portfolio of material culture in the care of or managed by the OPW: built heritage; historic, artistic, literary, and scientific collections; the national and international histories associated with these places and objects; and its own long organisational history. Papers will contribute to a deeper understanding of this important collection of national heritage and investigate new perspectives on aspects of its history. The journal is designed for a broad public, specialist, and professional readership.
Established in 1831 (and with antecedents dating back to 1670), the Office of Public Works is a central government office currently with three principal areas of responsibility: managing much of the Irish State’s property portfolio; managing Ireland’s flood risk; and maintaining and presenting 780 heritage sites including national monuments, historic landscapes, buildings, and their collections.
We invite submissions on the following historical themes, ranging from the early medieval period to the close of the twentieth century:
• the design history of properties, demesnes, and parks in the care of or managed by OPW
• the furniture, archives, libraries, historical botanical collection, fine and decorative art collections in the care of OPW—including the State Art Collection—and items of material culture held elsewhere with connections to these properties and collections
• the social, political, biographical, and global histories connected with these properties and collections
• previously marginalised historical narratives connected to these properties and collections, such as women’s voices, Ireland minority ethnic/global majority heritage, queer lives, and disability history
• the organisational history of public works bodies in Ireland since the seventeenth century such as the Surveyor General’s activities for the crown in Ireland and the Barrack Board, prior to the formalisation of the OPW. The full spectrum of OPW’s diverse history since 1831 including civil engineering, famine relief, loan administration, architectural builds and conservation, archaeological conservation, curatorship, and interpretation of monuments and historical sites. This remit encompasses activities at properties owned or managed by the OPW, as well as OPW work undertaken at other State-owned properties (for example: Leinster House, the Four Courts)
We welcome scholarly papers from a range of perspectives, including (but not limited to) art, architectural, social, scientific and book history, cultures of collecting and display, museum and conservation studies, contested history and provenance research. We are also interested in interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies. Discrete single-object case studies should seek to place the chosen subject within its broader cultural and historical context. We welcome submissions from academics, post-graduate students, allied professionals, independent researchers, and OPW personnel, and actively encourage the work of early career scholars. Submissions should draw on original and unpublished research. Manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed before definitive acceptance for publication. The journal will be published in hardcopy, with later release for e-book sales and finally open access online.
Each volume will consist of eight to twelve papers. Final manuscripts will be 4000–8000 words (plus endnotes), typically with twelve illustrations. In addition to these more traditional essays, we welcome shorter pieces of above 1000 words (plus endnotes), typically with six illustrations. Submissions should be in English, and multi-authored contributions are welcome.
The timeline for volume one is as follows:
• deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 December 2023
• feedback to authors: 15 January 2024
• deadline for selected contributions (text and images) from authors: 17 June 2024
• peer-review process completed and final text returned by authors: 29 September 2024
• publication: spring 2025
Abstracts are welcome at any time for future volumes.
If you are interested in proposing a paper, please email an abstract of approximately 500 words (300 words for shorter case studies) with a provisional title and a brief biographical note (not CV) to Caroline Pegum, editorial manager, at IHSjournal@opw.ie by 15 December 2023. All submissions will be acknowledged. Informal enquiries are welcome at the same email address.
Conference | A Mundane History of Collecting, 1600–1918
From ArtHist.net:
The Backstage View: A Mundane History of Collecting, 1600–1918
Collegium Maius, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 26–27 October 2023
Organized by Michał Mencfel and Camilla Murgia
After more than half a century of intense scientific exploration, resulting in hundreds of in-depth studies, the history of collections has established itself as one of the privileged fields of research in the humanities. Various issues such as the provenance of objects in collections; ways in which these objects have been ordered, arranged, and displayed; rooms and buildings in which they have been kept and exhibited; narratives beyond objects and collections; biographies of collectors; social practices connected with collections, etc. have been versatilely investigated. Consequently, collecting—fascinating in its own right—has proved also to be a sensitive indicator of broad cultural and social phenomena connected with artistic, scientific, philosophical, societal, and political movements.
Indeed, recent research has shown how the art market has been crucial to the history of collections in specific cultural contexts that have undergone a series of exchanges and openings linking different economic elements and realities (Brill’s Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets). Furthermore, particular attention has been paid to both the circulation of works of art from the perspective of collecting strategies (Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting Strategies in Europe and the United States 1550–1950, ed. by Adriana Turpin and Susan Bracken, 2021), and of provenances (Study of Collecting and Provenance and the Getty Provenance Index).
Collecting, however, also relies on a great number of less noble and less sophisticated but nevertheless indispensable practices. These include negotiating with artists and dealers, observing (or escaping) the formalities, paying (or avoiding paying) customs fees, transporting and securing the collectibles, restoring and framing the pieces of art, etc. The present call for contributions aims to invite proposals for papers focusing on this everyday—somewhat down-to-earth and mundane—side of collecting. What about this background, consisting of daily actions, practical skills, and made-to-measure resolutions, that contributes to the constitution of collections and the act of collecting itself? How does this meticulous, essential and somehow ‘invisible’ infrastructure enable the purchase, conditioning, sale, and exchange of artwork?
This conference aims to explore the various aspects regarding the mundane site of the history of collecting. We intend to question the multitude of logistic, administrative, organisational, and managerial practices that contribute to the act of collecting and how they affect selling and buying artwork. We are interested in identifying and studying the elements that mark out the diverse and versatile apparatuses of collecting in specific cultural, social, and economic realities, both private and public. Changes in issues, paradigms, and availability are at the heart of our study.
Conference Organizers
Michał Mencfel (Adam Mickiewicz University), mmencfel@amu.edu.pl
Camilla Murgia (Université de Lausanne), camilla.murgia@unil.ch
t h u r s d a y , 2 6 o c t o b e r 2 0 2 3
9.00 Registration
9.30 Welcome by Michał Mencfel (Adam Mickiewicz University) and Camilla Murgia (Université de Lausanne)
1000 Panel 1 | References
• Katharina Januschewski (Universität Paderborn) — Selling Italian Landscapes to the Russian Empire: Sylvester Shchedrin’s Letters from Italy (1818–30) as a Source for International Art Transport Logistics and Sales Strategies
• Malena Rotter (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel) — ‘I Am Gradually Acquiring the Necessary Material for a Gallery of Italian Pieces’: Landgrave William VIII of Hesse-Kassel (1682–1760) and His Italian Collection
11.10 Coffee
11.30 Panel 2 | Mundanity
• Ulrike Müller (Antwerp University and Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) and Davy Depelchin (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) — Staging Privately-Owned Artworks: Private Collectors and the Exhibitions for Living Masters in Brussels, 1830–1860
• Maria Chiara Scuderi (University of Leicester) — Missionary Exhibitions as Mundane Sites for Private Collections: The Case of Dryad ‘Handicrafts’
12:40 Lunch
14.15 Panel 3 | Curating
• Arianna Candeago (Ca’ Foscari University Venice) — On the Art Market in Late 18th-Century Venice: Everyday Practices from the Letters of Collectors and Intermediaries
• Michelle Huang (University of St Andrews) — Curatorial Considerations and Practices behind the Acquisitions of the George Eumorfopoulos Collection of Chinese Art by the British Museum and the V&A
15.20 Coffee
15.40 Panel 4 | Practices
• Dorothee Haffner (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin) — Organising and Visualising Collections: Changing Principles and Functions
• Laia Anguix-Vilches (Radboud University Nijmegen) — Women in the Backstage: Gender-Related Challenges in Institutional Collecting Practices
f r i d a y , 2 7 o c t o b e r 2 0 2 3
9.30 Welcome by Michał Mencfel (Adam Mickiewicz University) and Camilla Murgia (Université de Lausanne)
9.45 Keynote Lecture
• Erin Thompson (City University of New York) — Backstage, Viewed from the Archives: Researching Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property
10.45 Coffee
11.00 Panel 5 | Trading and Cataloguing
• Nadia Rizzo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) — The Unfortunate Vicissitudes of Jean Gossaert’s Malvagna Triptych
• Bénédicte Miyamoto (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) — Auction Clerks and Paper Trails: The Bureaucracy of Collection Transfers in 18th-Century Britain
• Elizabeth Pergam (Society for the History of Collecting) — Trading Art History: Art Dealer Archives and Day-To-Day Business of Collecting
12.45 Lunch
14.30 Panel 6 | Shaping Collections
• Martyna Łukasiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University) — Fortune and Vision: The Art Market and the Emergence of Major Art Collections in Copenhagen, 1850–1900
• Silvia Marin Barutcieff (University of Bucharest) — Collecting Art in Modern Romania: Social Circumstances and Economic Endeavors, 1881–1918
15.40 Closing Notes and Coffee
Call for Papers | Revivalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
William Burges, H. W. Lonsdale, and Thomas Nicholls, Banqueting Hall, Cardiff Castle, Wales, ca. 1870s.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the Call for Papers:
Revivalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 19 February 2024
Organized by Peter Lindfield
Proposals due by 24 November 2023
Keynote Speaker: Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin (University of Cambridge)
The past often informs the present in many, interconnected ways. For example, Howard Colvin in his well-known essay on the “Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival” offers a nuanced reading of medieval architecture’s perpetuation in C17–C18 Britain (‘Gothic Survival’) and the style’s quite separate revival. Like the ‘Gothic Revival’, references to and recreations of the past can take many different forms across the arts and humanities; these revivals can leverage mimesis, or perhaps they are more frivolous and based upon loose associationism. Revivals’ form, fidelity, function, and motivation are therefore varied and crucial to understanding and mapping the materiality and ideas from history to its continued relevance, recycling, and recreation in the present.
This conference wishes to examine the legacies of the past and the past’s recreation under the broad label of ‘revival’ across time, place, and discipline: how and why has the past been reworked, recreated, or revived; what are the minimum requirements for work(s) to be considered a revival; can revivals be counter-cultural? The conference also wishes to examine how revivals have been interpreted (both positively and negatively); and how revivals can be and are set against the source material that inspired them.
20-minute papers on any aspect of revivalism across the arts and humanities are solicited for this in-person conference. Proposals that explore interdisciplinary manifestations of revivalism are especially welcome. Topics could include:
• Art, architecture, or applied design
• Literature (fiction and non-fiction)
• Revivalism, pastiche, and forgery
• Historiography of revival
• Interdisciplinary revivals
• Motivation(s) for revivals/ism
• Comparisons between revivals and the revived
300-word proposals should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr Peter N. Lindfield, FSA, Welsh School of Architecture (LindfieldP@Cardiff.ac.uk) no later than 24 November 2023.
York Georgian Society Lecture Series
J.M.W. Turner, The Arch of the Old Abbey, Evesham, 1793, brush and wash, watercolor, and pen and ink over graphite on paper
(Providence: RISD Museum, 69.154.60).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Upcoming lectures from the York Georgian Society:
Jane Grenville | Revisiting Pevsner’s Yorkshire, North Riding: Updating a Classic
York Medical Society, Saturday, 21 October 2023, 2.30pm
Dr Jane Grenville will discuss Pevsner’s research methods and show how the explosion of architectural historical research in the intervening half century and the appearance of the internet have enabled a hugely expanded second edition. She will then present selected highlights of Georgian architecture in the county, including a discussion of Forcett Park, whose mysteries remain, to some extent, intact—and the pleasures and pains of updating Pevsner’s entry on Castle Howard in the light of so much subsequent research.
Jane Grenville’s transition from dirt archaeologist to buildings research was inspired by working as a teenager with Dr Harold Taylor (Anglo-Saxon Architecture). After research on churches and parish formation in pre-Conquest Lincolnshire (unfinished), she joined the Listed Buildings Re-Survey for Yorkshire in 1984, and her knowledge expanded to all periods. Like Pevsner, she became a ‘GP’ in the field. She worked in professional conservation until joining the Archaeology Department at York, where she initiated undergraduate standing buildings modules and an MA—and then ensured the continuation of the famous MA in Conservation Studies after the demise of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies. She retired in 2015 after a spell in senior management. Pevsner was the perfect retirement project.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Nicholas Tromans | ‘Put Up a Picture in Your Room’: Art at Home in Earlier 19th-Century Britain
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 November 2023, 2.30pm
The early nineteenth century saw the opening up of a fabulous array of collections of paintings to the public—both in dedicated museums and in galleries attached to grand private residences. But what about pictures in more modest homes? This lecture asks about the theory and practice of displaying pictorial art in middle-class domestic settings, taking its cue and title from an 1834 essay by the Romantic writer Leigh Hunt. What was the purpose of the domestic picture? Who was it for? How should it be hung and in which rooms of the house? By opening up the private lives of pictures, and considering relationships between paintings, prints and urban interiors, it becomes possible to gain a new perspective on the everyday experience of art.
Nicholas Tromans in an independent art historian based in London. He has worked in universities, museums and auction houses. A specialist in nineteenth-century British art, he has written or edited books on David Wilkie, Orientalist painting, Richard Dadd, G. F. Watts and (with Susan Owens) Christina Rossetti. His most recent book, on which this lecture is based, is The Private Lives of Pictures: Art at Home in Britain 1800–1940 (Reaktion, 2022). His current project is a book about the relationship of art to psychiatry since the late eighteenth century.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Bennett Zon | ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’: A Musical Mystery Tour
York Medical Society, Saturday, 25 November 2023, 2.30pm
Beloved by Christians and non-Christians alike, Christmas carols are amongst the few musical genres to transcend religious and cultural differences. Uniting people through the magic of seasonal song, carols help us share our feelings and communicate the true meaning of Christmas. But what is the true meaning of Christmas? And what was the true meaning of Christmas when Christmas carols became popular in the eighteenth century? This paper tries to find out by telling the true but shocking story of the meaning behind Britain’s most popular carol “Adeste Fideles,” otherwise known as “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Join Bennett Zon for a ‘Musical Mystery Tour’ tracing its history from the 1740s to the present, through London Embassy chapels, recusant houses, Protestant churches, and Catholic cathedrals.
Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University, and Director of the International Network for Music Theology. He is also Director of Durham’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International, and was recently elected President of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. He is general editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge) and the book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge), and editor of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Zon researches music, religion, and science in the long nineteenth-century. Recent publications include Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017) and the co-edited volume Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines (2019). Zon is one of two general editors of the forthcoming five-volume Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology, and is currently writing No God, No Science, No Music, a history using music to explore the relationship between religion and science from the Big Bang to the present.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
David Adshead | The History, Role, and Future of the Georgian Group
York Medical Society, Saturday, 13 January 2024, 2.30pm
The lecture will explore the history, role, and future goals of The Georgian Group, including its objectives to preserve Georgian buildings and landscapes and encourage public understanding and appreciation of Georgian architecture, town planning, and taste as demonstrated in the applied arts, design, and craftsmanship.
David Adshead is Director of The Georgian Group. Formerly Head Curator and Architectural Historian of the National Trust, he is a past chairman of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and has published widely on British architecture and historic houses and their collections.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Adam Bowett | Mapping the Mahogany Trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries
York Medical Society, Saturday, 10 February 2024, 2.30pm
This lecture charts the growth of the mahogany trade from its small beginnings in the early 18th century to its global peak in the late 19th. The trade was shaped both by British colonial policy and by Britain’s relations with the other European colonial powers, with successive wars against France and Spain being the most potent drivers of change. It was initially centred on the British Caribbean islands, especially Jamaica, but rapidly expanded to encompass Central America, Cuba, and Hispaniola. In the process, furniture making in Britain was transformed, and in the 19th century mahogany was the world’s most commercially important high-class furniture wood. By the early 20th century the mahogany stocks of most Caribbean islands and large parts of Central America were dangerously depleted, and all three species are now protected under the CITES agreements.
Adam Bowett is an independent furniture historian and chairman of the Chippendale Society. Since 1992 he has also worked as an advisor on historic English furniture to public institutions and private clients in both Britain and North America, including The National Trust, English Heritage, Arts Council England, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Strawberry Hill Trust, The Wallace Collection, and numerous British regional museums. Dr Bowett lectures widely and teaches furniture history at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He publishes work in both popular and academic journals and is the author of several books on English furniture and furniture-making.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Hannah Rose Woods | Reflections on Decayed Magnificence: Nostalgia in Georgian Britain
York Medical Society, Saturday, 9 March 2024, 2.30pm
This talk will explore the ways in which people in Georgian Britain looked back to the past. While we might look back today with our own retrospect and picture the Georgian era as an elegant heyday of stateliness and stability, people throughout the long eighteenth century often characterised the age in which they were living as one of disorienting transformation. From yearning for a vanished ‘Merry England’ of rural community, to landscaping Arcadian idylls inside the grounds of stately homes, or else dreaming about the grandeur of the Roman Empire, nostalgia could be a profoundly reassuring coping mechanism. The ways in which they created these idealised or imagined pasts gives us a unique insight into how people viewed the changes that were defining their own age, and how they felt about the societies in which they lived.
Hannah Rose Woods is a cultural historian who is particularly interested in the history of people’s emotional lives. Her first book Rule, Nostalgia: a Backwards History of Britain (Penguin, 2022) explored nostalgia for a rose-tinted national past over five centuries of British history, from the present day to the Reformation of the sixteenth century. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history, and is now an independent writer and researcher. She is a columnist for The New Statesman, and has written on history, politics and culture for publications including The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and History Today.
Registration is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
All are welcome to YGS lectures. Admission is free to members and students, and a suggested donation from non-members of £5.
Call for Papers | Mind, Body, and the Arts, 1100–1800
From the Call for Papers:
Mind, Body, and the Arts, 1100–1800
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, 28 March 2024
Organized by Alexander Wragge-Morley and Carmel Raz
Proposals due by 15 November 2023
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK as part of The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health Research Networking Grant
In recent decades, scholars across the humanities have grown increasingly interested in historical understandings of the effects of art on the mind and body. In the Middle East, for instance, Islamicate medics regarded certain musical modes (maqāmāt) as having therapeutic properties, linking them to states of mind and body thought to depend on the four humors. In pre-modern China, writers such as the Song historian Lu You (1125–1210) identified poetry as a means of healing a mind that was closely interwoven with the body. Meanwhile, in Europe, emotional states such as melancholy, nostalgia, or hysteria were theorized as stemming not only from an imbalance of the humors but also to stimulants ranging from the eerie tones of the glass armonica and the disturbing effects of romantic fiction, to the therapeutic effects of the color green.
This workshop asks whether we can reconfigure our understandings of art and health by decentering modern Western accounts of aesthetic experience and psychology. To this end, it will emphasize global early modern perspectives on the links between the body, health, and artistic production/experience. It will bring historical accounts of embodied experience into dialogue with artistic productions—and their associated cosmologies—found across a wide range of early modern cultures around the world. In particular, it will investigate whether there were links between the notion of balance/imbalance in the body, and the notion of harmony / dissonance in artistic productions and aesthetic experiences.
This conference forms part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health, led by Alexander Wragge Morley and Carmel Raz. It will consist of three workshops: this workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany and subsequent workshops at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, UK and at Lancaster University, UK.
For the current workshop, we are soliciting papers that will be submitted for a special issue of a leading peer-reviewed journal in the humanities. Draft versions of those papers will be circulated ahead of the workshop, so that participants can discuss them together. We welcome proposals from scholars working on the period 1100–1800 in (but not necessarily limited to) the fields of: history of science and medicine, musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, dance studies, literary studies, the history of music theory, history of art, or literary studies. Funding will be available to assist with the travel and accommodation costs of invited participants. Please send an abstract of 250–500 words by 15 November 2023 to a.wragge-morley@lancaster.ac.uk.
Exhibition | Raphaël Barontini: We Could Be Heroes
From the English summary (via ArtFacts) of the exhibition opening this week at the Panthéon (Jessica Fripp’s review of Barontini’s Blue Lewoz appeared in J18 last October) . . .
Raphaël Barontini: We Could Be Heroes
Panthéon, Paris, 19 October 2023 — 11 February 2024
In October, Raphaël Barontini will unveil a major presentation at the Panthéon in Paris, focusing on the history and the memory of anti-slavery struggle. With this monument of national memory, which honors numerous and important figures in the abolitionist movement (i.e. Condorcet, abbé Grégoire, Toussaint Louverture, Louis Delgrès, Schoelcher, Félix Éboué), Raphaël Barontini aims to shine a spotlight on heroic figures of the fight against slavery. Whether well-known or not, each played critical roles in achieving abolition.
The artist has designed a monumental, on-site installation composed of flags and banners in a guard of honor. The north and south transepts will host two panoramic textile installations, Barontini is planning a live performance during the opening: a West Indian carnival procession. The collaborative creation will involve musicians and dancers. In bringing to life the memory of these struggles, they will be interacting with the textile and graphic works installed within the artist’s creation.
New Book | The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
Coming in November from Norton:
Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 (New York: Norton, 2023), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-1324035589, $45.
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation—all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution. Darnton’s authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of many acclaimed, widely translated works in French history that have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A scholar of global stature, he is a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Enfilade 
leave a comment