Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Women and the Household in the Early Modern Book Trade, 1550–1750

Antwerp, 5–7 November 2025

Proposals due by 31 March 2025

Young saleswoman in a bookstore, Paris, 1782, etching.

This two-day conference aims to share knowledge of women’s rich and varied lives and works in the period before the rapid industrialisation of book production, which changed the face of home labour for early modern women.

The growing field of feminist bibliography has been built upon a recognition that early modern books were mostly products of the interwoven sectors of domesticity and trade. Many book trade practices took place within the home, enabling the unofficial training and labour of women and children. It was only the most successful enterprises that prompted investment in bespoke buildings, prompting a public-private dialectic which was sometimes merely superficial, since many were also managed or served by female family members and domestic servants. Some women owned businesses, premises and stock; managed apprentices and shops; and held ijaza (licenses) or copyright. Many others laboured invisibly, printing and sewing volumes, engraving blocks, and making ink and paper from home.

Traditionally understood as a male-dominated domain, pioneering research of the 1990s by, for example, Helen Smith, Paula McDowell, Susan Broomhall, Mark Lehmstedt, and Leslie Howsam enabled us to reconsider the place of women in the book trade in a much more systematic way. Since then, scholars such as Sarah Werner, Saskia Limbach, Heleen Wyffels, and Rémi Jimenes have developed the field, and Kate Ozment, Cait Coker, and Michelle Levy have provided new and valuable tools for feminist bibliography in The Women in Book History Bibliography and The Women’s Print History Project. And yet, the work of recovering the history of women and their place in the book trade remains challenging and labour-intensive.

Historiography, record-keeping, and even the process of archiving have been androcentric, and the historical—and for the most part, printed—evidence that survives about women and book production predominantly concerns widows. Often, we need to look beyond the imprint and the advertisement to the material culture of book production, to the physical evidence of the codex and the personal records of journals and correspondence to identify female family members like daughters, sisters, and wives. With this turn to material cultural methodologies, the under-explored collections in museums and archives can provide a richer picture, one that is improving with new collections development practices and increased resources being allocated by heritage sites and major research libraries to women’s histories and to the recovery of marginalised figures in the History of the Book.

This conference, as a part of the FWO research project Partners in Innovation: Women Publishers as Knowledgeable Agents in the Low Countries’ Book Trade, 1550–1750, coincides with the year devoted to the many women living and working in the Officina Plantiniana in 2025 at Museum Plantin-Moretus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is co-hosted with the Rubens House Museum, Antwerp. We invite participants to consider the supposed binary between home and work for women in the early modern book trade worldwide. Through this approach, we hope to share knowledge of women’s rich and varied lives and works in the period before the rapid industrialisation of book production which changed the face of home labour for early modern women. The event features a guided tour of Museum Plantin-Moretus and a show and tell of key artefacts from the collection.

We invite submissions for 20-minute papers addressing the following areas:
• Marriage and inheritance
• Networks, kinship, and patronage
• Representations of the household and women in the book trade
• Impact of women on the history of knowledge production
• Spatial and architectural perspectives
• Apprentices and apprenticing, formal and informal
• Reflections on methodologies for feminist recovery of women’s work in the book trade
• Transnational comparisons of home labour in the book trade
• Material cultural approaches to women’s book history
• Women’s work in all sectors of book production, including binding, paper making, etc.

Please send an abstract of 200 words to womenandplantin@antwerpen.be with your name, affiliation, email address, and a short bio of no more than 50 words by 31 March 2025. There will be a registration fee for presenters. Queries are welcomed.

Keynote Speakers
Susan Broomhall (Australian Catholic University) and Alicia Montoya (Radboud University)

Organising Committee
Nina Geerdink (Utrecht University), Kristof Selleslach (Museum Plantin-Moretus), Lieke van Deinsen (KU Leuven), Zanna Van Loon (Museum Plantin-Moretus), Helen Williams (Northumbria University), Patricia Stoop (University of Antwerp), and Pierre Delsaerdt (University of Antwerp)

From ArtHist.net:

Carpentry and Sculpture from Gothic to Art Nouveau

Hôtel de la Roche, Mons, Belgium, 19–21 July 2025

Proposals due by 30 March 2025

A combined effort of the Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes and The Low Countries Sculpture Society, whose libraries and archives have merged and are housed in the Hôtel de la Roche (1750) at Mons, the inaugural edition of the Annual Seminar on European Sculpture and Decorative Arts will take place in July 2025. This first edition will address questions about the production, consumption, collecting, and display of ‘carpentry furniture’ (in the Parisian sense of the expression) across Europe and North America, from the Gothic period to Art Nouveau. Issues of design history, collaborations between creators and producers, artists and artisans, as well as the relations with any other people involved are sought. Specificities of ‘carpentry furniture’, as opposed to other types of furniture design and production, may be investigated. This includes the study of relations between carpenters and sculptors, as well as that of historic sources, such as those published by André Jacob Roubo (1739–1791).

Its theme will draw, amongst others, but not exclusively, on the rich tradition of carpentry in the Low Countries, often in combination with magnificent sculpture in solid oak, particularly for church furniture, and on the Parisian tradition for meubles de menuiserie (‘carpentry furniture’), as differentiated from meubles d’ébénisterie (‘veneered furniture’) from the the 17th century onward, as formalised with separate guilds. ‘Carpentry furniture’ included seat furniture, console tables, floors and wall pannelling often with ornate sculptural elements, and always in solid wood, frequently painted and/or gilt, as opposed to veneered furniture. Gilt console tables were a particularly respected product of the Paris menuisiers.

The seminar has an international and multidisciplinary orientation. As such, we hope to attract lively participation from junior and senior scholars in the history of furniture and furnishings, sculpture, as well as practitioners of restoration-conservation in the same and other relevant fields. Short papers (maximum 30 minutes) of new research or work in progress may be presented in English or French. A minimal passive knowledge of both English and French is highly recommended to enable full participation in the ensuing discussions, which form the core of the seminar. The seminar will take place without an audience (apart from the speakers), but it will be filmed and broadcast live on YouTube.

The Society will cover accommodation expenses for foreign speakers at the seminar, as well as all group meals and the Sunday excursion. On the other hand, travel arrangements to and from Mons are the responsibility of the individual participants, and their travel expenses will not be reimbursed. We will endeavour to help with a shuttle from Maubeuge to Mons (20 km), as there is a direct train line from Paris to Maubeuge that is more reliable than the one to Mons.

Please send participation proposals with a 200-word abstract of the intended paper and a 200-word CV by email to info@lcsculpture.art by midday, 31 March 2025. We prefer to receive your abstract written in your mother tongue. We will then have it professionally translated into English and French for our scientific committee. News of the committee’s decisions will be sent in April. For further information, please contact The Low Countries Sculpture Society at info@lcsculpture.art.

From the Call for Papers:

Sacred Ceramics: Devotional Images in European Porcelain
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 30 September 2025

Organized by Matthew Martin and Rebecca Klarner

Proposals due by 30 April 2025

Meissen Figure of the Virgin Immaculata, probably modelled by Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, ca.1730–33 (Courtesy of E & H Manners, London).

The extensive sculptural output of Europe’s first kaolinic porcelain factory, the Saxon Meissen manufactory, has long attracted the attention of art historians. The large-scale animal sculptures executed so early in the factory’s history for the Japanese Palace, impress both for their technical ambition, and as evidence of the genius of Johann Joachim Kändler in capturing the liveliness of his animal subjects. But there is a significant area of Meissen’s sculptural output that has not to date received sustained attention: the sculptures on religious subjects produced during the reigns of Augustus II and Augustus III. Works such as Kändler’s Death of St Francis Xavier of c.1738–40 and the large Crucifixion group of 1743, represent some of the most complex sculptural works ever produced at Meissen. Yet these, and related works, have only relatively recently begun to be studied in detail (Antonin 2010; Leps 2020).

Despite this relative neglect, it is clear that Meissen’s religious sculptures played an important role in the projection of power at the Saxon Polish court. In part this was political: the conversion of Augustus II and Augustus III to Catholicism was necessary for them to be eligible for election to the crown of Poland. The marriage of Augustus III to the Catholic Maria Josepha of Austria also suggests much loftier political ambitions on the part of the Wettin electors, with the imperial crown clearly a potential prize. Signalling the Saxon court’s Catholicism was a vital political exercise and Meissen’s religious sculpture played a central role in this project (Cassidy-Geiger 2007).

But there are indications that a more complex cultural phenomenon lay behind the creation of porcelain devotional images. The pioneering work of Baxandall on limewood sculpture of the Renaissance has drawn attention to the deep significance that medium can hold in the conception and creation of devotional sculpture (Baxandall 1980). We suggest that a similar phenomenon may have been at play in the creation of porcelain religious images. The 1712 letter penned by the Jesuit Father François Xavier d’Entrecolles not only conveyed to Europe first-hand knowledge of Chinese porcelain production at Jingdezhen, it also construed access to this knowledge as a triumph of the Jesuit global mission—the successes of the Jesuits in China made the secret of kaolinic porcelain available to the Catholic princes of Europe. Porcelain’s alchemical heritage was also not without significance: success at the alchemical enterprise had always been deemed a donum dei (Principe 2013). Only with God’s blessing could the experimentalist succeed. These factors could lead to porcelain assuming a sacral character in Catholic court contexts. Devotional images in European porcelain exploited these cultural associations of the medium itself.

Of course, Meissen was not the only European porcelain factory to produce sculpture that employed counter-reformation iconography. The Doccia factory of Count Ginori—himself a natural philosophical experimentalist—was responsible for outstanding religious sculptures in a Florentine Late Baroque manner (Biancalana 2009), while Catholic court manufactories across the Holy Roman Empire—Vienna, Höchst, Fulda, Nymphenburg—produced devotional images in porcelain. Even factories in mid-eighteenth-century England—Chelsea and Derby—produced sculptures employing Catholic devotional imagery (Martin 2013). In each instance, cultural-political motives for the creation of these images can be reconstructed.

This one-day conference aims to investigate this neglected area of eighteenth-century European porcelain production. Topics for 20-minute papers to be presented at the V&A South Kensington on 30 September 2025 might include, but are not limited to:
• Who were the artists and patrons involved in these sculptures’ creation?
• What sources informed their production?
• How did these sculptures function in private and public contexts?
• What significance lay in the use of porcelain, or other ceramic mediums, to create devotional images?

To submit a paper proposal, please send an abstract of 200 words and a biography of up to 100 words to the convenors Dr Matthew Martin, University of Melbourne (mmartin1@unimelb.edu.au), and Rebecca Klarner, University of Leeds (fhrlmk@leeds.ac.uk), by 30 April 2025. Speakers will be informed of whether their proposals have been accepted by mid-May.