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In 1988-89 the three hundredth anniversary of an important historical event, the ascension of William and Mary to the thrones of England and Scotland, was celebrated in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The symposium on Dutch garden art held at Dumbarton Oaks in May 1988 was the only scholarly event during the anniversary year that focused wholly upon gardens. This wide-ranging collection of essays charts the history, scope, and spread of Dutch garden art during the seventeenth century. A group of scholars, mostly Dutch, surveys what has been called the "golden age" of Dutch garden design. Essays discuss the political context of William's building and gar...
"This remarkable volume will take its place as the classic study of the key period in the history of the Dutch garden."--Choice
Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific and novel ways that yielded a profusion of linguistic, conceptual, metaphorical, and material intersections. Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two outstanding English botanical writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of the herbal. In-depth readings of their work are situated amid chapters that establish the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's cultural practices in order to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.
This book focuses on the city of St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire from the early eighteenth century until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. It uses the Russian court as a prism through which to view the various cultural changes that were introduced in the city during the eighteenth century.
What does it mean to be a documentary filmmaker in today's world? How are new technologies changing documentary filmmaking? What new forms of documentary are emerging? Recent technological developments have made the making and distribution of documentary films easier and more widespread than ever before. Creative Documentary: Theory and Practice is an innovative and essential guide that comprehensively embraces these changing contexts and provides you with the ideas, methods, and critical understanding to support successful documentary making. It helps the aspiring 'total filmmaker' understand the contemporary contexts for production, equipping you also with the understanding of creativity a...
Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans. From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans' objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.
Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...Rediscovering Aristotle on the shores of Lesbos and Leonardo da Vinci fossil hunting in the Tuscan hills, this is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.
Contains: Hopper, F.,Clusius' world: the meetings of science and nature [interpreter of Clusian flora: Jacques de Gheyn II]. - p. 13-36; Jong, E. de,Nature and art : the Leiden Hortus as 'Musaeum'. - p. 37-52; Tjon Sie Fat, L.Clusius' garden: a reconstruction. - p. 3-12 [+ 3a, pl.]; Wijnands, D.O.,Commercium botanicum: the diffusion of plants in the 16th century. - p. 75-84,[+ 84a ill.]
Passion and Control explores Dutch architectural culture of the eighteenth century, revealing the central importance of architecture to society in this period and redefining long-established paradigms of early modern architectural history. Architecture was a passion for many of the men and women in this book; wealthy patrons, burgomasters, princes and scientists were all in turn infected with architectural mania. It was a passion shared with artists, architects and builders, and a vast cast of Dutch society who contributed to a complex web of architectural discourse and who influenced building practice. The author presents a rich tapestry of sources to reconstruct the cultural context and meaning of these buildings as they were perceived by contemporaries, including representations in texts, drawings and prints, and builds on recent research by cultural historians on consumerism, material culture and luxury, print culture and the public sphere, and the history of ideas and mentalities.
Eric de Jong and his wife, Jenny plunged into parenthood when they adopted three siblings from the children's dying mother. The new family set about living happily ever after in their rambling farmhouse outside Harare. But ever after proved short lived as Zimbabwe's small window of stability closed in on them quickly when Robert Mugabe unleashed a war on white farmers and opposition party members, launching an era of economic, social and political turmoil which eventually saw the family fleeing the country for fear of being killed.Eric well knew the cost of conflict, but his fierce love of his country and his principles saw him immersing himself in the dangerous opposition politics of the day where elections were rigged and fellow party members were tortured and murdered.Eric de Jon's irrepressible sense of humour bubbles throughout this absorbing, honest and deeply personal account of a growing family, of love, entrepreneurial success and failure, mental illness, political exile, and the distressing and often absurd collapse of a beautiful African country and stoicism of its people.