Enfilade

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