Enfilade

Published by Head of Zeus and distributed by IPG:

Dudley Dodd with an introduction by James Stourton and photographs by Marianne Majerus, Stourhead: Henry Hoare’s Paradise Revisited (London: Apollo, 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1788543620, £40 / $65.

An illustrated history of the landscape garden at Stourhead, created by generations of the Hoare banking dynasty.

Cross the south lawn at Stourhead and enter the leafy embrace of the Shades. Descend through the ancient and rare trees, and as the ground falls away a great lake appears. It is punctuated with classical temples, and a great arched bridge lunges to the other side of the water. Continue on and you will find a mystical, jagged grotto; a gothic hideaway; gods, muses and saints. This is how Henry Hoare—known as Henry the Magnificent—would have approached the garden he designed with Henry Flitcroft. It truly is an English arcadia. Perhaps he imagined himself as a journeying Aeneas, or wished to recreate a Claude Lorrain landscape? This is the history of a unique landscape, created in a misty Wiltshire valley by generations of the Hoare banking family. It follows its evolution, describing how flights of folly, individual flair and tastes, combined with careful stewardship, have formed a national treasure and one of the finest examples of the English landscape garden.

Dudley Dodd had a long career with the National Trust, where he was Secretary of the Arts Panel, and has published widely on Stourhead, whose first modern guidebook he wrote in 1981, as well as guidebooks to several other National Trust houses. He is co-author of Roman Splendour, English Arcadia: The Pope’s Cabinet at Stourhead.

From U of Penn Press:

Joy Palacios, Ceremonial Splendor: Performing Priesthood in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1512822786, $55.

By the end of France’s long seventeenth century, the seminary-trained, reform-minded Catholic priest had crystalized into a type recognizable by his clothing, gestures, and ceremonial skill. Although critics denounced these priests as hypocrites or models for Molière’s Tartuffe, seminaries associated the features of this priestly identity with the idea of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman.

Ceremonial Splendor examines the way France’s early seminaries promoted the emergence and construction of the true churchman as a mode of embodiment and ecclesiastical ideal between approximately 1630 and 1730. Based on an analysis of sources that regulated priestly training in France, such as seminary rules and manuals, liturgical handbooks, ecclesiastical pamphlets and conferences, and episcopal edicts, the book uses theories of performance to reconstruct the way clergymen learned to conduct liturgical ceremonies, abide by clerical norms, and aspire to perfection.

Joy Palacios shows how the process of crafting a priestly identity involved a wide range of performances, including improvisation, role-playing, and the display of skills. In isolation, any one of these performance obligations, if executed in a way that drew attention to the self, could undermine a clergyman’s priestly persona and threaten the institution of the priesthood more broadly. Seminaries counteracted the ever-present threat of theatricality by ceremonializing the clergyman’s daily life, rendering his body and gestures contiguous with the mass. Through its focus on priestly identity, Ceremonial Splendor reconsiders the relationship between Church and theater in early modern France and uncovers ritual strategies that continue to shape religious authority today.

Joy Palacios is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary.

From UVA Press:

Adam Sills, Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 318 pages, ISBN: 978-0813945989 (hardback), $115 / ISBN: 978-0813946009 (ebook), $35 / ISBN: 978-0813945996 (paperback), $45.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In tandem with such developments, however, a trenchant anti-cartographic skepticism also emerged. This critique of the map can be seen in many literary works of the period that satirize the efficacy and value of maps and highlight their ideological purposes. Against the Map argues that our understanding of the production of national space during this time must also account for these sites of resistance and opposition to hegemonic forms of geographical representation, such as the map.

This study utilizes the methodologies of critical geography, as well as literary criticism and theory, to detail the conflicted and often adversarial relationship between cartographic and literary representations of the nation and its geography. While examining atlases, almanacs, itineraries, and other materials, Adam Sills focuses particularly on the construction of heterotopias in the works of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. These ‘other’ spaces, such as neighborhood, home, and country, are not reducible to the map but have played an equally important role in the shaping of British national identity. Ultimately, Against the Map suggests that nation is forged not only in concert with the map but, just as important, against it.

Adam Sills is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.

This week (11–12 August) marked the fifth anniversary of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. This collection of essays appeared in hardback in 2021; it’s due to be released in paperback this fall from Bloomsbury:

Sierra Rooney, Jennifer Wingate, and Harriet Senie, eds., Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-1501356940 (hardcover), $130 / ISBN: 979-8765100462 (paperback), $35.

Monuments around the world have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, and the 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, protesters and politicians in the United States have removed Confederate monuments, as well as monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Dr. J. Marion Sims, questioning their legitimacy as present-day heroes that their place in the public sphere reinforces. The essays included in this anthology offer guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement and social dialogue. Essays analyze specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate.

Sierra Rooney is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She is the author of numerous articles on public monuments and controversy.
Jennifer Wingate is Professor of Fine Arts at St. Francis College. She was co-editor of Public Art Dialogue (2017–2020) and is the author of Sculpting Doughboys: Memory Gender, and Taste in America’s Worlds War I Memorials (2013). She has published on representations of the domestic display of FDR portraits, WWI memorials, and public art.
Harriet F. Senie is Professor Emerita of Art History at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is the author of Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (2015), The ‘Tilted Arc’ Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (2001), and Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (1992). She has edited several anthologies on different aspects of public art.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Why Monuments Matter — Sierra Rooney (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) and Jennifer Wingate (St. Francis College)

Part I: Teaching Strategies
1  Developing Essential Questions for a Student-Driven 4th Grade Monument Study — Adelaide Wainwright (Oregon Episcopal School)
2  Encouraging Intervention: Project-Based Learning with Problematic Public Monuments — Mya Dosch (California State University-Sacramento)
3  Mapping Art on Campus — Annie Dell’Aria (Miami University)
4  Moving Beyond ‘Pale and Male’: A Museum Educator Approach to the Campus Portrait Debate — Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye (Yale Center for British Art)
5  ‘From Commemoration to Education’: Re-setting Context and Interpretation for a Confederate Memorial Statue on a University Campus — Sarah Sonner (Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas-Austin)
6  Making Material Histories: Institutional Memory and Polyvocal Interpretation — Kailani Polzak (University of California-Santa Cruz)

Part II: Political Strategies
7  Dismantling the Confederate Landscape: The Case for a New Context — Sarah Beetham (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)
8  Learning from Louisville: John Breckenridge Castleman, His Statue, and a Public Sphere Revisited — Chris Reitz (University of Louisville)
9  Addressing Monumental Controversies in New York City Post Charlottesville — Harriet Senie (City University of New York)
10  The Preservation Dilemma: Confronting Two Controversial Monuments in the United States Capitol — Michele Cohen (Architect of the Capitol)
11  Up Against The Wall: Commemorating and Framing the Vietnam War on the National Mall — Jennifer K. Favorite (City University of New York)
12  ‘I feel like I have hated Lincoln for 110 years’: Debates over the Lincoln Statue in Richmond, Virginia — Evie Terrono (Randolph-Macon College)

Part III: Engagement Strategies
13  Paper Monuments as Public Pedagogy — Sue Mobley (Colloqate Design)
14  Charging Bull and Fearless Girl: A Dialogue — Charlene G. Garfinkle (Independent Scholar)
15  The Afterlife of E Pluribus Unum — Laura Holzman (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis), Modupe Labode (National Museum of American History), and Elizabeth Kryder-Reid (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis)
16  Unforeseen Controversy: Reconciliation and Re-contextualization of Wartime Atrocities through ‘Comfort Women’ Memorials in the United States — Jung-Sil Lee (George Washington University and Maryland Institute College of Art)
17  Free History Lessons: Contextualizing Confederate Monuments in North Carolina —  Matthew Champagne (North Carolina State University), Katie Schinabeck (North Carolina State University), and Sarah A. M. Soleim (North Carolina State University)
18  Future History: New Monumentality in Old Public Spaces, An interview with Artist Kenseth Armstead — Maria F. Carrascal (Artipica Creative Spaces, Spain)

Index

Coming soon, with distribution by ACC Art Books:

Marieke van Delft, Kay Etheridge, Hans Mulder, Bert van de Roemer, and Florence Pieters, Maria Sibylla Merian: Changing the Nature of Art and Science (Tielt: Lannoo: 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-9401485333, $70.

The revolutionary artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) has come into the spotlight in recent years. The life and work of this German-born woman, who would later settle in the Netherlands, has been studied internationally by entomologists, botanists and historians and are a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and writers. In 2016, Lannoo Publishers, in collaboration with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, republished her masterpiece Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium as a facsimile. This well-illustrated book assembles the most recent scientific knowledge about this remarkable woman. The authors examine, among other things, Merian’s pioneering work on the reproduction and development of insects, the methods and materials she used for her work, her remarkable journey to Suriname, her network of family, friends and patrons, and her widespread influence on the history of art and science. Her work is compared to that of early modern and contemporary artists and scientists

This book gathers essays by of 23 international experts, most of whom are connected to the international Maria Sibylla Merian Society. The editorial team consists of Marieke van Delft, Kay Etheridge, Hans Mulder, Bert van de Roemer, and Florence Pieters.