Enfilade

Distributed in the USA and Canada by The University of Chicago Press:

Penelope Hunting, My Dearest Heart: The Artist Mary Beale (1633–1699) (London: Unicorn Publishing, 2020), 208 pages, ISBN: 9781912690084, £25 / $35.

Mary Beale (1633–1699) was one of the earliest professional women artists in Britain. Her successful career as a Baroque-era portrait artist was documented by her husband, Charles, whose almanacs provide a unique record of Beale’s patrons, painting technique, and family affairs. Her portraits of politicians, clergy, aristocracy, and intellectuals reflect the vibrant literary, scientific, and political scene of the seventeenth century.

Beale is recognized as a feminist icon for her success in the male-driven world of portrait painting, and in addition to being a professional artist, she was also as a poet and author. Her book Discourse on Friendship, published in 1667, argued for the equality of husband and wife in marriage—a radical concept at that time. My Dearest Heart, the first biography of Mary Beale, features more than 120 color illustrations of her ground-breaking artistry.

Penelope Hunting is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, chairman of the London Topographical Society, and a trustee of the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea. She is the author of many books, including History of the Royal Society of Medicine and, most recently, Riot and Revolution: Sir Robert Geffery 1613–1704.

From The Getty:

Susanne Gänsicke and Yvonne J. Markowitz, Looking at Jewelry: A Guide to Terms, Styles, and Techniques (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019), 132 pages, ISBN: 978-1606065990, $20.

The fascination with personal adornment is universal. It is a preoccupation that is primal, instinctive, and uniquely human. Jewelry encompasses a seemingly endless number of ornaments produced across time and in all cultures. The range of materials and techniques used in its construction is extraordinary, even revolutionary, with new substances and methods of fabrication added with every generation. In any given society, master artisans have devoted their time, energy, and talent to the fine art of jewelry making, creating some of the most spectacular objects known to humankind.

This volume, geared toward jewelry makers, scholars, scientists, students, and fashionistas alike, begins with a lively introduction that offers a cultural history of jewelry and its production. The main text provides information on the most common, iconic, and culturally significant forms of jewelry and also covers materials, techniques, and manufacturing processes. Containing more than eighty color illustrations, this guide will be invaluable to all those wishing to increase their understanding and enjoyment of the art of jewelry.

Susanne Gänsicke is senior conservator and head of antiquities conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Yvonne J . Markowitz is the Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan Curator Emerita of Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

From Johns Hopkins UP:

Crystal B. Lake, Artifacts: How We Think and Write about Found Objects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1421436500, $35.

A literary history of the old, broken, rusty, dusty, and moldy stuff that people dug up in England during the long eighteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, antiquaries—wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians—used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently unidentifiable things, whose origins were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not self-evident, tell people about the past?

In Artifacts, Crystal B. Lake unearths the four kinds of old objects that were most frequently found and cataloged in Enlightenment-era England: coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. Following these prized objects as they made their way into popular culture, Lake develops new interpretations of works by Joseph Addison, John Dryden, Horace Walpole, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. Rereading these authors with the artifact in mind uncovers previously unrecognized allusions that unravel works we thought we knew well.

In this new history of antiquarianism and, by extension, historiography, Lake reveals that artifacts rarely acted as agents of fact, as those who studied them would have claimed. Instead, she explains, artifacts are objects unlike any other. Fragmented and from another time or place, artifacts invite us to fill in their shapes and complete their histories with our imaginations. Composed of body as well as spirit and located in the present as well as the past, artifacts inspire speculative reconstructions that frequently contradict one another. Lake’s history and theory of the artifact will be of particular importance to scholars of material culture and forms. This fascinating book provides curious readers with new ways of evaluating the relationships that exist between texts and objects.

Crystal B. Lake is a professor of English language and literatures at Wright State University. She is the cofounder and coeditor of The Rambling.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Things Speaking for Themselves

Part I  Terms and Contexts
1  Leaving Room to Guess
2  Ten Thousand Gimcracks

Part II  Case Studies
3  Coins: The Most Vocal Monuments
4  Manuscripts: Burnt to a Crust
5  Weapons: A Wilderness of Arms
6  Grave Goods: The Kings’ Four Bodies

Afterword: The Artifactual Form

Notes
Works Cited
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0226632612, $35.

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.

Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, myths and rituals of fertility, images of decay in early modern allegory and melancholy, the ruins craze of the eighteenth century, and the creation of “new ruins” for gardens and other structures. Stewart focuses particularly on Renaissance humanism and Romanticism, periods of intense interest in ruins that also offer new frames for their perception. The Ruins Lesson looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing art.

Ruins, Stewart concludes, arise at the boundaries of cultures and civilizations. Their very appearance depends upon an act of translation between the past and the present, between those who have vanished and those who emerge. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. A former MacArthur fellow, she is the author of five earlier critical studies, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), winner of the Christian Gauss award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award. She is also the author of five books of poems, most recently Red Rover (2008) and Columbarium (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These titles, along with The Open Studio (2005) and The Forest (1995), are all published by the University of Chicago Press.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction: Valuing Ruin
1  Matter: This Ruined Earth
2  Marks: Inscriptions and Spolia
3  Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores—On the Ruin of Women
4  Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print
5  Model: The Architectural Imaginary
6  Mirrors: The Voyages and Fantasies of the Ruins Craze
7  The Unfinished: On the Nonfinality of Certain Works of Art
8  Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Photography Credits
Name Index
Subject Index

Recent historical fiction set in the eighteenth century . . . with a strand of Nordic noir woven in:

Niklas Natt och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman (New York: Atria, 2019), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1501196775, $28. [Originally published in Swedish as 1793.]

One morning in the autumn of 1793, watchman Mikel Cardell is awakened from his drunken slumber with reports of a body seen floating in the Larder, once a pristine lake on Stockholm’s Southern Isle, now a rancid bog. Efforts to identify the bizarrely mutilated corpse are entrusted to incorruptible lawyer Cecil Winge, who enlists Cardell’s help to solve the case. But time is short: Winge’s health is failing, the monarchy is in shambles, and whispered conspiracies and paranoia abound. Winge and Cardell become immersed in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams. From a farmer’s son who is led down a treacherous path when he seeks his fortune in the capital to an orphan girl consigned to the workhouse by a pitiless parish priest, their gruesome investigation peels back layer upon layer of the city’s labyrinthine society. The rich and the poor, the pious and the fallen, the living and the dead—all collide and interconnect with the body pulled from the lake. Breathtakingly bold and intricately constructed, The Wolf and the Watchman brings to life the crowded streets, gilded palaces, and dark corners of late-eighteenth-century Stockholm, offering a startling vision of the crimes we commit in the name of justice, and the sacrifices we make in order to survive.

Niklas Natt och Dag (‘Night and Day’) is a member of the oldest surviving noble family in Sweden. He enjoys playing the guitar, mandolin, violin, and the Japanese bamboo flute. The Wolf and the Watchman, his first novel, was named the Best Debut of 2017 by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers and is being published in thirty countries. He lives in Stockholm with his wife and their two sons.

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Dexter Palmer, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen: A Novel (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1101871935, $28.

In 1726, in the town of Godalming, England, a woman confounded the nation’s medical community by giving birth to seventeen rabbits. This astonishing true story is the basis for Dexter Palmer’s stunning, powerfully evocative new novel.

Surgeon’s apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master, John Howard, prides himself on his rationality. But John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event be­comes a regular occurrence, John and Zach­ary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this—strange, troubling, and possibly miraculous. John contacts sev­eral of London’s finest surgeons, three of whom soon arrive in Godalming to observe, argue, and perhaps use the case to cultivate their own fame.

When King George I learns of Mary’s plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences a world far removed from his small-town ex­istence and is exposed to some of the dark­est corners of the human soul. All the while Mary lies in bed, as doubts begin to blossom among her caretakers and a growing group of onlookers waits with impatience for an­other birth, another miracle.

Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dream of Per­petual Motion, which was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Re­views. He lives in Princeton.

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Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Blood & Sugar (Mantle Books, 2019), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-1509880775, £15.

Blood & Sugar is the thrilling debut historical crime novel from Laura Shepherd-Robinson. June, 1781. An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock—horribly tortured and branded with a slaver’s mark. Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham—a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career—is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable damage to the British slaving industry. He’d said people were trying to kill him, and now he is missing . . .

To discover what happened to Tad, Harry is forced to pick up the threads of his friend’s investigation, delving into the heart of the conspiracy Tad had unearthed. His investigation will threaten his political prospects, his family’s happiness, and force a reckoning with his past, risking the revelation of secrets that have the power to destroy him. And that is only if he can survive the mortal dangers awaiting him in Deptford . . .

“A page-turner of a crime thriller . . . This is a world conveyed with convincing, terrible clarity.”
–C. J. Sansom

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Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Daughters of Night (Mantle Books, 2020), 448 pages, ISBN: 9781509880829, £15.

From the brothels and gin-shops of Covent Garden to the elegant townhouses of Mayfair, Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Daughters of Night follows Caroline Corsham, as she seeks justice for a murdered woman whom London society would rather forget . . .

Lucia’s fingers found her own. She gazed at Caro as if from a distance. Her lips parted, her words a whisper: ‘He knows.’

London, 1782. Desperate for her politician husband to return home from France, Caroline ‘Caro’ Corsham is already in a state of anxiety when she finds a well-dressed woman mortally wounded in the bowers of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. The Bow Street constables are swift to act, until they discover that the deceased woman was a highly-paid prostitute, at which point they cease to care entirely. But Caro has motives of her own for wanting to see justice done, and so sets out to solve the crime herself. Enlisting the help of thieftaker, Peregrine Child, their inquiry delves into the hidden corners of Georgian society, a world of artifice, deception and secret lives. But with many gentlemen refusing to speak about their dealings with the dead woman, and Caro’s own reputation under threat, finding the killer will be harder, and more treacherous than she can know . . .