Enfilade

From Bib des Arts:

Calin Demetrescu, Les ébénistes de la Couronne sous le règne de Louis XIV (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2021), 448 pages, ISBN: ‎978-2884532273, €59 / $94.

Cet ouvrage est le fruit d’un travail de recherche mené sur plus de dix ans. Par un dépouillement de nombreux documents d’archives, la plupart inédits, l’auteur révèle des aspects méconnus de la biographie des artisans ayant œuvré pour le Garde Meuble de la Couronne et pour les Bâtiments du Roi. Cette approche donne vie aux relations de travail—et de famille—au sein d’une véritable nébuleuse d’artisans (menuisiers ébénistes, bronziers, ornemanistes) français et étrangers, catholiques venus d’Italie et protestants venus des pays du nord de l’Europe.

Une méthode de travail originale, fondée sur l’approche des séries analogiques, a permis des identifications et des attributions d’œuvres majeures : notamment à Alexandre-Jean Oppenordt, par exemple, dont la possible collaboration avec André-Charles Boulle est ici mise en évidence. Outre une étude des œuvres de Domenico Cucci déjà connues, l’auteur propose également une révision des attributions à Pierre Golle ainsi qu’une nouvelle chronologie de l’œuvre d’André- Charles Boulle. Plus de 400 illustrations en couleur documentent utilement la démarche de l’auteur de cette somme qui comblera tous les admirateurs du Grand Siècle et qui sera un outil de travail indispensable pour les conservateurs de musée comme pour les antiquaires et les collectionneurs.

Auteur d’articles et d’ouvrages sur les styles Louis XIV et Régence, Calin Demetrescu, historien d’art, ancien conservateur des musées de la Ville de Bucarest et collaborateur scientifique du département des objets d’art du musée du Louvre pendant plusieurs années, est l’un des spécialistes connus et réputés pour ses recherches et publications relatives aux ébénistes et au mobilier des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Ses découvertes dans le domaine ont permis des avancées notables dans les connaissances sur les ébénistes de cette période, dont ceux faisant l’objet de cette remarquable étude. Sa thèse sur le sujet reçut le Prix Georges-Nicole de la Société d’Histoire de l’Art français.

From Georgetown UP:

Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, eds., with a foreword by Lauret Savoy, Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2021), 368 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1647120962, $30.

A microcosm of the history of American slavery in a collection of the most important primary and secondary readings on slavery at Georgetown University and among the Maryland Jesuits

Georgetown University’s early history, closely tied to that of the Society of Jesus in Maryland, is a microcosm of the history of American slavery: the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the contradictions of liberty and slavery at the founding of the United States; the rise of the domestic slave trade to the cotton and sugar kingdoms of the Deep South in the nineteenth century; the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war; and slavery’s persistent legacies of racism and inequality. It is also emblematic of the complex entanglement of American higher education and religious institutions with slavery.

Important primary sources drawn from the university’s and the Maryland Jesuits’ archives document Georgetown’s tangled history with slavery, down to the sizes of shoes distributed to enslaved people on the Jesuit plantations that subsidized the school. The volume also includes scholarship on Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland and at Georgetown, news coverage of the university’s relationship with slavery, and reflections from descendants of the people owned and sold by the Maryland Jesuits.

These essays, articles, and documents introduce readers to the history of Georgetown’s involvement in slavery and recent efforts to confront this troubling past. Current efforts at recovery, repair, and reconciliation are part of a broader contemporary moment of reckoning with American history and its legacies. This reader traces Georgetown’s “Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Initiative” and the role of universities, which are uniquely situated to conduct that reckoning in a constructive way through research, teaching, and modeling thoughtful, informed discussion.

Adam Rothman is a professor in Georgetown University’s Department of History. He is the author of Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, which was named the Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and received the American Civil War Museum’s book award. He is also the author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South and the coauthor of Major Problems in Atlantic History. He served on Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in 2015-16, and is currently the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. He was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2018, where he created the podcast African-American Passages: Black Lives in the 19th Century.

Elsa Barraza Mendoza is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University and the assistant curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. She is a former Fulbright-Garcia Robles fellow. Her research has been supported by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. She is currently writing her dissertation on the history of slavery on Georgetown’s campus.

Lauret Savoy is the David B. Truman Professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the marks of history on the land. The author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, she also descends from people enslaved by Jesuits.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Editors’ Note

Foreword, Lauret Savoy

Introduction, Adam Rothman

Part 1 | History

Essays
1  Craig Steven Wilder, War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution
2  Robert Emmet Curran, ‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805–38
3  Elsa Barraza Mendoza, Catholic Slave Owners and the Development of Georgetown University’s Slave Hiring System, 1792–1862
4  James O’Toole, Passing: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

Documents
5  Enslaved People Named in a Deed, 1717
6  A Sermon on the Treatment of Slaves, 1749
7  Edward Queen Petitions for Freedom, 1791
8  Isaac Runs Away from Georgetown College, 1814
9  A Jesuit Overseer Calculates the Cost of Slave Labor, 1815
10  Baptism of Sylvester Greenleaf at Newtown, 1819
11  Fr. James Ryder, SJ, Criticizes Abolitionism, 1835
12  The Society of Jesus Sets Conditions on the Sale of the Maryland Slaves, 1836
13  Articles of Agreement between Thomas Mulledy, Henry Johnson, and Jesse Batey, 1838
14  A Jesuit Priest Witnesses Anguish at Newtown, 1838
15  Bill of Sale for Len, 1843
16  A Jesuit Priest Reports on the Fate of the Ex-Jesuit Enslaved Community in Louisiana, 1848
17  Aaron Edmonson, the Last Enslaved Worker at Georgetown, 1859–62
18  Labor Contract at West Oak Plantation, Iberville Parish, Louisiana, 1865
19  Photograph of Frank Campbell, ca. 1900

Part 2 | Memory and Reconciliation

Essays
20  Ira Berlin, American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice
21  Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
22  Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality after the Genome

The Working Group
23  Matthew Quallen, Slavery’s Remnants, Buried and Overlooked
24  Toby Hung, Student Activists Sit in outside DeGioia’s Office
25  Report of the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, to the President of Georgetown University
26  James Martin, SJ, How Georgetown is Coming to Terms with Slavery in Its Past

The GU272 Descendants
27  Rachel L. Swarns, 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
28  Rachel L. Swarns and Sona Patel, ‘A Million Questions’ from Descendants of Slaves Sold to Aid Georgetown
29  Terry L. Jones, Louisiana Families Dig into Their History, Find They Are Descendants of Slaves Sold by Georgetown University
30  Cheryllyn Branche, My Family’s Story in Georgetown’s Slave Past
31  Rick Boyd, Many in Slave Sale Cited by Georgetown Toiled in Southern Maryland

Reconciliation and Reparation
32  Remarks of Sandra Green Thomas at Georgetown University’s Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope
33  Remarks of Fr. Timothy Kesicki, SJ, at Georgetown University’s Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope
34  Terrence McCoy, Her Ancestors Were Georgetown’s Slaves. Now, at Age 63, She’s Enrolled There-as a College Freshman
35  Marc Parry, A New Path to Atonement
36  Jesús A. Rodríguez, This Could Be the First Slavery Reparations Policy in America
37  Javon Price, Changing Perceptions on the GU272 Referendum

Epilogue, Elsa Barraza Mendoza

Timeline
Further Reading
Index

From Clemson UP, with distribution by Liverpool UP and OUP:

Alison DeSimone, The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2021), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1942954774, $120 / £90.

In eighteenth-century England, ‘variety’ became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation.

Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She co-edited, with Matthew Gardner, Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has published articles in the A-R Online Anthology, Händel-Jahrbuch, and Early Modern Women. Her article “‘Equally Charming, Equally Too Great’: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London” won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. She is currently an associate editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables

Introduction
1  The Performance of Miscellany in Variety Concerts, 1700–1711
2  ‘An Assemblage of Every Kind’: The Pasticcio Opera Tradition as Miscellany
3  Shaping English Identity in the Songbook iscellany
4  Composition, Cosmopolitanism, and Musical Miscellany
5  Variety in Criticism and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England

Notes
Index

From the University of Pittsburgh Press:

Joseph Clarke, Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0822946571, $60.

A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public. Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.

Joseph L. Clarke is assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a licensed architect. His scholarship explores how modern architecture has defined itself as a discipline through particular techniques, theories, and representational conventions.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Note on Translations

Introduction: ‘The Night Shall Be Filled with Music’
1  Domesticating Echo: Clamors in Print
2  Spaces Heard and Seen: Constructing Acoustic Naturalism
3  The Catacoustic Imagination: Enchantment by Immersion
4  Redeeming the Senses: The Acoustics of Total Art
5  Listening Out of Place: Modern Architecture and acoustique électronique
Conclusion: On Further Reflection

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Princeton UP:

Basile Baudez, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0691213569, $65.

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs, military engineers’ conventions, and, finally, painters’ affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public.

Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice.

Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.

Basile Baudez is assistant professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His books include Architecture et tradition académique and A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France, 1765–1837.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Prologue: Architectures in Black and White
1  Imitative Colors
2  Conventional Colors
3  Affective Colors
Conclusion: The Anxiety of the Architect

Appendix: The Draftsman’s Tools

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Image Credits