Enfilade

Distributed by Yale UP:

Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2022), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107291, £45 / $55.

The first collective, critical historical study of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of women in London and Paris became professional artists, exhibiting and selling their work in unprecedented numbers. Many rose to the top of their nations’ artistic spheres and earned substantial incomes from their work, regularly navigating institutional inequalities expressly designed to exclude members of their sex. In the first collective, critical history of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era, Paris Spies-Gans explores how they engaged with and influenced the mainstream cultural currents of their societies at pivotal moments of revolutionary change.

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences of these narrative painters, portraitists, sculptors, and draughtswomen, this book challenges longstanding assumptions about women in the history of art. Importantly, it demonstrates that women built profitable artistic careers by creating works in nearly every genre practiced by men, in similar proportions and to aesthetic acclaim. It also reveals that hundreds of women studied with male artists, and even learned to draw from the nude. Where traditional histories have left a void, this generously illustrated book illuminates a lively world of artistic production.

Featuring an extensive range of these artists’ paintings, drawings, sculptures, and writings, alongside contemporary prints, satires, and works by their male peers, A Revolution on Canvas transforms our understanding of the opportunities and identities of women artists of the past.

Paris A. Spies-Gans is a historian and an art historian. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Getty Research Institute, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Her research concentrates on the history of women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression.

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Note (added 17 January 2024) — As announced in January 2024, A Revolution on Canvas was awarded an HBA Book Prize, for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600 and 1800. It’s recognition to add to that which has already been heaped on the book by other organizations:

• Winner of the 2023 Stansky Book Prize, sponsored by NACBS
• Shortlisted for the 2023 Berger Prize, sponsored by The British Art Journal
• Received Honorable Mention from the Louis A. Gottschalk Prize, sponsored by ASECS
• Named one of the Top Art Books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper
• Named one of the Top Art Books of 2022 by The Conversation

From Penn Press:

Susan Brandt, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-0812253863, $40.

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.

Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

Susan H. Brandt is a Lecturer in the Department of History at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

From MQUP:

Lori Jones, Patterns of Plague: Changing Ideas about Plague in England and France, 1348–1750 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2022), 408 pages, ISBN 978-0228010791 (hardcover), $130 / ISBN: 978-0228010807 (paperback), $40.

An innovative study of plague in medieval and early modern Europe reveals the changing perceptions surrounding epidemic disease over centuries and across national borders.

For centuries, recurrent plague outbreaks took a grim toll on populations across Europe and Asia. While medical interventions and treatments did not change significantly from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, understandings of where and how plague originated did. Through an innovative reading of medical advice literature produced in England and France, Patterns of Plague explores these changing perceptions across four centuries. When plague appeared in the Mediterranean region in 1348, physicians believed the epidemic’s timing and spread could be explained logically and the disease could be successfully treated. This confidence resulted in the widespread and long-term circulation of plague tracts, which described the causes and signs of the disease, offered advice for preventing infection, and recommended therapies in a largely consistent style. What, where, and especially who was blamed for plague outbreaks changed considerably, however, as political, religious, economic, intellectual, medical, and even publication circumstances evolved. Patterns of Plague sheds light on what was consistent about plague thinking and what was idiosyncratic to particular places and times, revealing the many factors that influence how people understand and respond to epidemic disease.

Lori Jones is a historian of medieval and early modern medicine at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.

From Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press:

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, ed., Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Campus History (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1638040200, £95 / $130.

This essay collection explores the inextricable link between rhetoric, public memory, and campus history projects. Since the early twentieth century after Brown University appointed its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, higher education institutions around the globe have launched initiatives to research, document, and share their connections to slavery and its legacies. Many of these explorations have led to investigations about the rhetorical nature of campus history projects, including the names of buildings, the installation of monuments, the publication of books, the production of resolutions, and the hosting of public programs. The essays in this collection examine the rhetorical nature of a range of initiatives, including the creation of land acknowledgement statements, the memorialization of universities’ historic financial ties to the slave trade, the installation and removal of monuments or historical markers, the development of curriculum for campus history projects. The book takes a chronological approach, beginning with the examination of a project at a university that was built on the site of a historic Native American town, moving through a series of essays about initiatives that grew out of universities’ associations with slavery and its legacies in the United Kingdom and America, and ending with a critique of several pedagological approaches in campus history courses designed for undergraduate students.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University where she teaches and researches early African American Literature. She is author of Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community and Faculty Director of the award-winning Call My Name Project for which she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published articles and books with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press as well as in African American Review and American Literary History. She is also the research and community engagement coordinator for the Clemson’s Woodland Cemetery Project.

C O N T E N T S

Rhondda Robinson Thomas — Introduction: The Inextricable Link between Rhetoric and Remembrance in Campus History Projects
1  Andrew Denson — ‘Always Cherokee Land’: Campus History and Indigenous Placemaking in Western North Carolina
2  Stephen Mullen — Acknowledging the Legacies of Enslavement in British Universities: Slavery, Abolition, and the University of Glasgow
3  Christopher P. Lehman — Acknowledging Slavery’s Ties to Minnesota’s Public Universities through Historical Markers
4  Monet Lewis-Timmons — Beyond Kitty’s Cottage: The Double-Containment of Catherine ‘Miss Kitty’ Boyd and Black Commemoration Practices in Oxford, Georgia
5  Cecelia Moore — Reckoning with Silent Sam: The Confederate Monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
6  Charles F. Irons — White Memory and White Violence at Elon University
7  Prithi Kanakamedala — ‘We Must Stand United’: Re-telling a Radical History of Bronx Community College at the City University of New York
8  Charissa Fryberger — Looking Racism in the Face at Clemson University