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Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.
Hitherto relegated to the closets of art history and literary studies, book illustration has entered mainstream scholarship. The chapters of this collection offer only a glimpse of where a complete reconfiguration of the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts might ultimately take us. The use of the gerund of the verb “to reconfigure” in the subtitle of this collection, instead of the corresponding noun, underlines the work-in-progress character of this interdisciplinary endeavour, which aims above all to discern new vistas while charting or revisiting landmarks in the rich field of eighteenth-century book illustration. The specific interpretive lenses through which contributors to...
This volume analyzes historical processes of mobility by focusing on material objects. Mobility—as a shorthand for various related processes such as migration, transfer, entanglement, and translation—involves human actors, immaterial elements such as ideas and knowledge, but also objects in various forms and functions. For example, as material infrastructures they are the basis for transport and travel; as goods they are the object and purpose of trade or gift exchange. By focusing on the way objects determined certain processes of mobility and how their social meaning and materiality was transformed in these processes, the contributors hope to gain deeper insight into the historical relations between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Persia.
This book explores the meanings assigned to goods sold retail from 1550 to 1820 and how their labels were understood. The first half of the book focuses on mercantile language more broadly; how it was used in trade and how lexicographers approached new vocabularies. In the second half, the author turns to the goods themselves, and their relationships with such terms as ‘luxury’, ‘choice’ and ‘love’. The study of consumables opens up new ways of looking at the everyday language of the early modern period as well as the experiences of trade and consumption for merchant and consumer.
This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. The images included in the book provide readers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature.
The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an overview of the critical history of eccentricity; and secondly to conceptualise a notion that is often presented as a defining feature of the English “character”. It addresses the key issues raised by eccentricity and brings out interdisciplinary links between science, politics, literature and the arts: the sources and dissemination of the concept of eccentricity; its relationship with the English national character as historical and ideological constructs; the structural need for variation and divergence within accepted social norms; the paradoxical status of the eccentric as outsider – when eccentricity is transgressive and alienat...
By employing the innovative lenses of ‘thing theory’ and material culture studies, this collection brings together essays focused on the role played by Arabia’s things - from cultural objects to commodities to historical and ethnographic artifacts to imaginary things - in creating an Arabian identity over time. The Arabian identity that we convey here comprises both a fabulous Arabia that has haunted the European imagination for the past three hundred years and a real Arabia that has had its unique history, culture, and traditions outside the Orientalized narratives of the West. All Things Arabia aims to dispel existing stereotypes and to stimulate new thinking about an area whose patterns of trade and cosmopolitanism have pollinated the world with lasting myths, knowledge, and things of beauty. Contributors include: Ileana Baird, Marie-Claire Bakker, Joseph Donica, Holly Edwards, Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Victoria Hightower, Jennie MacDonald, Kara McKeown, Rana Al-Ogayyel, Ceyda Oskay, Chrysavgi Papagianni, James Redman, Eran Segal, Hülya Yağcıoğlu, and William Gerard Zimmerle.
This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.