Enfilade

From Bucknell UP:

Barrett Kalter, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660-1780 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 249 pages, ISBN 978-1611483789, $80.

The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful–and for that reason, contested–ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and the imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meaning. The regular procession of chronological time accentuated the deviance of anachronism and ephemerality, while the opposition of unique artifacts to ubiquitous commodities exoticized things that straddled this divide.

Inspired by the authentic products as well as the anomalous by-products of contemporary scholarship, writers, craftsmen, and shoppers appropriated the past to create nostalgic and ironic alternatives to their own moment. Barrett Kalter explores the history of these “modern antiques,” including Dryden’s translation of Virgil, modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, Gray’s Gothic wallpaper, and Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Though grounded in the ancient and medieval eras, these works uncannily addressed the controversies about monarchy, nationhood, commerce, and specialized knowledge that defined the present for the English eighteenth century. Bringing together literary criticism, historiography, material culture studies, and book history, Kalter argues that the proliferation of modern antiques in this period reveals modernity’s paradoxical emergence out of encounters with the past.

Introduction: The Time Bound and the Modern Antique
Chapter 1 The “Cobweb-Law” and the Fundamental Law: History, Chronology, and Poetic License
Chapter 2 Chaucer Ancient and Modern: Standardization, Modernization, and the Eighteenth-Century Reception of The Canterbury Tales
Chapter 3 DIY Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Chapter 4 Horace Walpole’s Fugitive Pieces: Collecting and Ephemerality
Conclusion

Barrett Kalter is Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In the book’s final chapter, Richard Johns, curator of prints and drawings at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, addresses, “‘The British Caesar’: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and the Visual Arts.” From the publisher:

John Hattendorf, Augustus Veenendaal, and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, eds., Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat (Zutphen: Karwansaray Publishers, 2012), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-9490258047, € 75.

The subject of numerous books in English, Marlborough has typically been seen only in terms of British political and military history. In this book, twelve leading specialists of the period broaden the perspective by assessing Marlborough in the wider and more diverse contexts of the European situation, the common soldier in the British army, the complementary activities of navies, the differing perspectives of the Austrians, Dutch, French, and Germans as well as in the context of the British popular press and the visual arts.

John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, is perhaps now best known for his role in the War of the Spanish Succesion. His victories at battles such as Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenaarde, and Malplaquet have firmly established him as one of Britian’s greatest military heroes. His success also brought his family unprecedented wealth, power and influence. Physically handsome, he rose to power not only thanks to his military genius, but also his personal service as a very successful courtier. It was his interrelated personal, political, and family connections, combined with those his wife developed, that were the key elements in reaching and sustaining his positions of power. While the 1st Duke of Marlborough is firmly established in the British historical canon, far less has been said about him in a broader European context. Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat attempts to address this disparity through a series of articles writen by noted international historians and experts. In this new book, the Duke is not only examined from the perspective of his enemies and allies, but also for his influence on social, military, and art history as a whole.

Edited by John B. Hattendorf, Augustus J. Veenendaal and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, Marlborough: Soldier and Diplomat is lavishly illustrated with contemporary artwork and photographs of important places in Marlborough’s world. Each of its twelve chapters are dedicated to forming a complete but multi-faceted view of this important figure in European

From Wordwell Books:

Lynda Mulvin, ed., The Fusion of Neo-Classical Principles (Dublin: Wordwell, 2012), 200 pages,  ISBN: 978-1905569557, €35.

Our understanding of Neo-Classicism is currently in an interesting phase of development, a progression to which this volume will make a significant contribution. As Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s keynote paper argues, scholarly attention is shifting from a focus on the production of works of art and buildings to a focus on consumption. The only chapter in the book that deals with painting, Brendan Cassidy’s on the reputation of Gavin Hamilton, neatly exemplifies the polarities of production and consumption. Hamilton painted his pictures in Rome where they were admired by travelling British patrons but, upon their arrival in England, they were consumed by the public with far less enthusiasm. Cassidy advances a very particular reason for this: that Grand Tourists tended to be very young men who took pleasure in identifying Hamilton’s historical subjects whilst on the sacred territory of Rome by reference to their schoolboy steeping in classical texts but, on their return to more distant northern Europe, were happy to conform with the predominant taste for landscape painting and portraiture.

Conor Lucey’s chapter, on the architectural pattern books that can be identified as having been in the hands of Dublin artisans, is a good contribution to the theme of diffusion of design ideas from one place to another, as is John Wilton-Ely’s on the design revolution of Robert Adam. As Wilton-Ely argues, the targeting and marketing of a ‘style’ is a sign of economic modernity. Another aspect of economic modernity in the eighteenth century is the quasi-professional organisation of the means of production, and Barbara Arciswewska’s essay on the reform of the English Office of Works instigated by the new Hanoverian dynasty is a very important contribution to scholarship in this respect.

In this volume the chapters of Michael McCarthy and Toby Barnard deal explicitly with the problem of when Neo-Classicism begins and ends. McCarthy argues that the fierceness of the nineteenth-century ‘battle of the styles’ has caused us to lose sight of the more gentlemanly basis on which the debate took place in the eighteenth century, but Barnard explores the religious disputes in Ireland that saw the Gothic commandeered by the Protestant community and the Catholics turning to classicism – and perhaps not unwillingly, given that their sense of civic duty was modelled on their classical educations like the young English aristocrats who, as we have seen, form the basis of Cassidy’s chapter.

The issue of the thoroughgoing Greek Revival, which would have hardly any place if this volume were circumscribed in chronological terms by the dates 1750-1800, is vigorously dealt with in this volume by three essays. Susan Pearce looks back to that first truly great phase of archaeological discovery in Greece that followed the Napoleonic Wars and in particular at the extraordinary understandings of Greek architecture and architectural sculpture of C.R. Cockerell.  Lynda Mulvin’s own chapter on Cockerell’s work in Ireland pursues these ideas into built form are, while Patricia McCarthy deals with the much more extensive Irish projects of Richard and William Morrison. Also in this connection, Joe McDonnell through the works of the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson and Paul Caffrey with a collection of miniatures examine the emergence of Neo-Classicism in other media in Ireland.

A final strand to this rich volume can be found in the transference of design ideas between different artistic media. This is explored in the essays of Tracy Watts and Eddie McParland.

These essays will make a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to current scholarly debates about the nature of Neo-Classicism, that critical cultural development that signals the arrival both of recognisable modernity and of internationalism in the western tradition. Moreover the essays have been written by some of the leading experts on the subject.