Things Seminar

Dr Stella Panayotova (Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (Reader in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Cambridge)

Abstract

Re-Constructing Illuminated Manuscripts and Paintings

This talk will present recent research undertaken by the speakers in collaboration with Marie D'Autume (École normale supérieure, Cachan), Paola Ricciardi (MINIARE project, Fitzwilliam Museum) and Spike Bucklow (Hamilton Kerr Institute). Two case studies will illustrate the discovery and recovery of medieval and Renaissance images in illuminated manuscripts through the integration of advanced mathematical methods, historical research, art-historical and non-invasive technical analyses. The first case study focuses on a Book of Hours made in Anjou c.1430 and recycled as a second-hand wedding gift in Brittany c.1442. The second case study concerns images of nudity in the c.1505 Primer of Claude de France which were censored in the early modern period. It demonstrates the application of automated virtual image restoration by mathematicians in order to remove the overpainting and restore the images digitally, since current conservation practices do not allow for the actual restoration of illuminations. In a third case study we demonstrate the ability of mathematics to digitally restore the painting Adoration of the Shepherds by Sebastiano Del Piombo (1519). It demonstrates the ability of mathematical restoration techniques to produce a digital restored template of a painting that can potentially aid the art conservators in the physical restoration of it.

Christine Slottved Kimbriel (Assistant to the Director, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge)

Dr Joanne Sear (History,Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge)

Professor Deborah Howard (Architecture & History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Prof Deborah Howard

Recovering the lost soundscape of Palladio’s church of the Redentore in Venice

Dr Joanne Sear

'To the chapel of St. Andrew … a broken basin of silver'. The importance of ‘material’ in late medieval religious bequests

This presentation considers the importance of the materials used for a range of religious articles bequeathed in the late medieval period. These items were either personal religious possessions, or were personal household goods bequeathed with the purpose of becoming objects associated with a religious purpose. These goods will be placed into context to explore how the materials used for these small personal possessions reflected wider ecclesiastical usage of a similar material, such as alabaster, or were believed to have apotropaic qualities which may have been linked to folk beliefs, such as the non-precious materials used for rosaries.

Dr Antony Buxton (Tutor in Design and Domestic History, Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford)

Professor Ulrich Leben (Associate Curator of Furniture, The Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor)

Dr Antony Buxton

'A Few Sorrie Stooles’: reading the social dynamic of the non-elite early modern household through its material culture

This brief paper will outline the use of probate inventories and wills as evidence of the practice, and therefore the changing social dynamic and ideology of the non-elite early modern household, in a study focused on the Oxfordshire market town of Thame in the seventeenth century.

Prof Ulrich Leben

Knowledge - Awareness - Connoisseurship as a tool in the study of Material Culture

Dr Donal Cooper (History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Professor François Penz (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

Dr Richard Stone (History, University of Bristol)

What is Cider? What was Cider? Recovering Seventeenth Century Material Culture

Dr Deborah Toner (History, University of Leicester)

Pulque and Pulquerías

Abstracts

Dr Richard Stone

What is Cider? What was Cider? Recovering Seventeenth Century Material Culture

What is cider? With the rocketing of cider sales in recent years, and the development of a plethora of ‘fruit ciders’, this is a question to which the answer is not as clear as it might at first seem. Does adding fruits other than apples make it a ‘wine’, and does filtering or adding preservatives somehow make it not ‘real’ and ‘traditional’ cider? Drawing on the speaker’s experience as both a modern day cider maker and a historian, this paper seeks to uncover exactly what kind of drink(s) cider was, and how widely it was consumed in seventeenth century England. In many ways this is a period which can be seen as the ‘Golden Age’ for cider, with many of the foremost minds of the fledgling Royal Society devoting their energies to refining what they saw potentially as England’s national drink, and a rival for foreign wines. The writings of these men provide a window onto a remarkably diverse range of practices and products, and force us to reconsider our notions of what exactly is ‘traditional’, and indeed modern day legal definitions of ‘cider’.

Dr Deborah Toner

Pulque and Pulquerías

The history of pulque is in many ways the history of Mexico. It is a material product—an alcoholic drink totally unlike any other—that reveals shifts in the ways that Mexico’s intangible and culturally diverse heritage has been understood and experienced by different social and ethnic groups within Mexico, and by non-Mexicans around the world. However, it is a product with which many people, especially outside of Mexico, are deeply unfamiliar and one whose future is uncertain.

This paper will reflect on the distinctive materiality of pulque and pulquerías—bars in which pulque has been sold since the sixteenth century—at different moments in Mexico’s history. This will enable an exploration of the very different social functions and cultural meanings that pulque has embodied over time, as well thinking about why it has been both popular and controversial throughout Mexico’s history.

Iona McCleery (Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds)

Emma Spary (History, University of Cambridge)

Abstract

Iona McCleery

Getting a taste for elephant: foodstuffs in West African travel narratives

Portugal played a significant but rather neglected role in the global food exchanges of the 15th and 16th centuries. Historians have usually emphasised the reception of New World foods or Indian and Indonesian spices in European cuisine and pharmacy. This talk will focus instead on food as a material part of cultural encounters in West Africa and the Atlantic islands between c. 1450 and c.1550, as described by merchants and explorers. Foodstuffs in these narratives such as fruits, cereals, legumes and meats like elephant flesh had a number of symbolic meanings, but their significance was always bound up in their presentation as material goods. The talk will explore how they were physically encountered and morally critiqued through touch, smell and taste. Most foods were usually identified according to their marketability as commodities. Sometimes they were seen as essential for survival.

Emma Spary

The taste of the pineapple: or how to know the unknowable in eighteenth-century France

Flavours present particular challenges for the historian of material culture. Even more so than foods themselves, they denote a particular kind of absence figured at once by the absent body of the past/other consumer, and by the absence of the tasted substance itself. This problem is exacerbated in the case of exotic foods as they moved, in the course of the early modern period, from being unknown and foreign to being familiar and everyday. Yet foods in a key sense represent the ultimate term of materiality, since they entered and constituted the very fabric of the body itself, the primary and definitive experience of materiality. Therefore, a history of material culture that excludes flavours is greatly impoverished. Yet how can historians address this predicament of embodiment? One route into the problem, I will argue, is by exploring the politics of tasting. Using discussions of the taste of exotic fruits over the period from the late 17th to the late 18th centuries, I will show how accounts of their taste constructed some very specific agendas, from the immediate problem of explaining ‘how something tasted’ to claims that evaluated tropical flavours in the light of contestations over French colonialism and governance.

Hilary Davidson (Independent Scholar)

Spike Bucklow (Senior Research Scientist and Teacher of Theory, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Ben Outhwaite (Cambridge University Library, Joint Head of Special Collections, Head of Genizah Research Unit)