Enfilade

From Routledge:

Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, Basile Baudez, eds., Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1032250441 (hardback), $136 / ISBN: 978-1032250427 (paperback), $39.

This book investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts.

Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today and textile furnishings have long been used in interiors. Beyond its use as a material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. The essays edited and compiled here, work across disciplines to provide new insights into the enduring relationship between textiles and architecture. The contributors critically explore the spatial and material qualities of textiles as well as cultural and political significance of textile artifacts, patterns, and metaphors in architecture.

Textile in Architecture is organized into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political, religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors” explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. Including cases from Morocco, Samoa, France, India, the UK, Spain, the Ancient Andes and the Ottoman Empire, this is essential reading for any student or researcher interested in textiles in architecture through the ages.

Didem Ekici is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She is the co-editor of Housing and the City (Routledge, 2022). Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017) as well as the author of numerous articles on modern architecture culture. She is currently working on her monograph titled Body, Cloth, and Clothing in Architecture from the Age of Mass Manufacture to the First World War.

Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her first book, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) investigates the relationship between patronage, politics, and architectural style after the integration of the region into the Mongol empire. Her second book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022) analyses how transregional exchange and the use of paper shaped building practices across the Ottoman realm.

Basile Baudez is Assistant Professor of architectural history in the Art & Archaeology department at Princeton University. His first book Architecture et Tradition Académique au Siècle des Lumières (2012) questions the role of architects in early modern European academies. He co-edited several volumes dedicated to French architecture and curated exhibitions on architectural drawings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Art. His latest book, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021) questions the role of color in Western architectural representation from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. He currently works on an urban history of textiles in 18th-century Venice.

c o n t e n t s

Part 1 | Ritual Spaces
Introduction to Part One — Didem Ekici
1  The Red Tent in the Red City: The Caliphal Qubba in Almohad Marrakesh — Abbey Stockstill
2  ‘He will Lift off the Covering Which is Over All the Peoples’: Seeing Through Medieval Lenten Veils — Clare Frances Kemmerer
3  Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together — Anne E. Guernsey Allen

Part 2 | Public and Private Interiors
Introduction to Part Two — Basile Baudez
4  Le Rideau Tire: Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France — Mei Mei Rado
5  The Fabric of the New: Mediating Architectural Change in Late Colonial India — Abigail McGowan
6  Contrast and Cohesion: Textiles and Architecture in 1930’s London — Emily M. Orr

Part 3 | Materiality and Material Translations
Introduction to Part Three — Patricia Blessing
7  Textiles by Other Means: Seeing and Conceptualizing Textile Representations in Early Islamic Architecture — Theodore Van Loan
8  The Textility of the Alhambra — Olga Bush
9  The Textile Foundations of Ancient Andean Architecture — Andrew James Hamilton
10  The Ruler’s Clothes and the Manifold Dimensions of Textile Patterns on Muslim Funeral Architecture in the Mausoleum of the First Crimean Khans — Nicole Kancal-Ferrari
11  A Tented Baroque: Ottoman Fabric (and) Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century — Ashley Dimmig

From Yale UP:

James Davey, Tempest: The Royal Navy and the Age of Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 448 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0300238273, $35.

The French Revolutionary Wars catapulted Britain into a conflict against a new enemy: Republican France. Britain relied on the Royal Navy to protect its shores and empire, but as radical ideas about rights and liberty spread across the globe, it could not prevent the spirit of revolution from reaching its ships. In this insightful history, James Davey tells the story of Britain’s Royal Navy across the turbulent 1790s. As resistance and rebellion swept through the fleets, the navy itself became a political battleground. This was a conflict fought for principles as well as power. Sailors organized riots, strikes, petitions, and mutinies to achieve their goals. These shocking events dominated public discussion, prompting cynical—and sometimes brutal—responses from the government. Tempest uncovers the voices of ordinary sailors to shed new light on Britain’s war with France, as the age of revolution played out at every level of society.

James Davey teaches at the University of Exeter. He was formerly curator of naval history at the National Maritime Museum and is the author of In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustration and Maps
Acknowledgments
Note on Conventions

Prologue
Introduction
1  Lawless Mobs and a Gore of Blood: Naval Mobilisation and Impressment
2  War of Principle: Naval Conflict in Europe, 1793–5
3  ‘We the Seamen’: Protest and Resistance at Sea
4  Tides, Currents, and Winds: Navy and Empire, 1793–7
5  Splintering the Wooden Walls: The Threat of Invasion, 1796–8
6  The Delegates in Council: The Naval Mutinies of 1797
7  A Tale of Two Sailors: Camperdown and Naval Propaganda
8  Bad Luck to the British Navy! Mutiny and Naval Warfare, 1798–1801
Epilogue
Conclusion

Notes on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From the Getty:

Norman Bryson, Hersilia’s Sisters: Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution France (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN 978-1606067710, $75.

Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France.

In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power. Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art.

Norman Bryson is a professor of art history at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in the areas of eighteenth-century art history, critical theory, and contemporary art.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  The Festival of the Sabine Women
2  David in the Louvre in 1800
3  The Portrait of Henriette de Verninac
4  The Portrait of Juliette Récamier
5  Ancient Liberty, Modern Freedom
6  Aspasia, the Merveilleuse
7  Hersilia’s Accomplished Sisters
8  Salonnières
9  Brumaire

Bibliography
About the Author
Illustration Credits
Index

From Yale UP:

Ashli White, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300259018, $50.

How objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew diverse people throughout the Atlantic world into debates over revolutionary ideals

Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts. She considers how revolutionary things, as they moved throughout the Atlantic, brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways. Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.

Ashli White is associate professor of history at the University of Miami. She is the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.

From Arthena:

Marie Fournier, with a preface by Christine Gouzi, Nicolas-Guy Brenet (1728–1792) (Paris: Arthena, 2023), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-2903239718, €110.

Peintre emblématique du renouveau de la peinture d’Histoire avant la Révolution française, Nicolas-Guy Brenet fut l’élève de Charles Antoine Coypel, de François Boucher et de Carle Vanloo. Sa brillante carrière académique illustre l’ascension sociale et institutionnelle d’un homme issu d’un milieu modeste de graveurs. Après sa participation au cycle de l’histoire de Saint Louis pour la chapelle de l’École militaire en 1773, le succès des Honneurs rendus au connétable Du Guesclin par la Ville de Randon exposé au Salon de 1777 (Paris, musée du Louvre) fit de lui l’artiste le plus sollicité pour les commandes destinées à encourager la peinture d’Histoire sous le règne de Louis XVI. Ses nombreux retables peints pour les églises de province illustrent le dynamisme encore trop méconnu des commandes du clergé jusqu’à la Révolution. Professeur reconnu, il forma de nombreux élèves, dont le baron Gérard et Jean-Germain Drouais, mais demeura sans véritable postérité artistique et la critique du XIXe siècle lui reprocha d’incarner le “goût de son époque, répandu dans ses tableaux.” La découverte d’oeuvres inédites et de nouveaux documents d’archives permet d’éclairer la production d’un peintre talentueux, témoin des évolutions artistiques de la fin du siècle des Lumières.

Diplômée de l’École du Louvre et docteur en histoire de l’art de Sorbonne-Université où elle a été chargée de cours, Marie Fournier a soutenu sa thèse sur le peintre Nicolas-Guy Brenet en janvier 2022. Chercheuse indépendante, elle rédige des catalogues pour des collectionneurs et collabore scientifiquement à des projets d’expositions avec des galeries et des musées.