Things Seminar

Dr Maya Corry (History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Dr Adam Smyth (English, Oxford)

Doing things with errors

Nicholas Smith and Colin Clarkson (University Library, Cambridge)

Practical printnig

Abstracts

Doing things with errors

‘God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine,’ laments Edmund Spenser’s Una in he Faerie Queene. But what can we, as readers and critics, do with errors in printed books? This paper suggests that the history of the Renaissance book is also a history of error, and proposes that we need to learn how to treat typographical slips seriously, or, at least, that we need to think more about their hermeneutical potential. The paper suggests two ways of proceeding: first, to treat errors as moments when, in breaking down, the book briefly but often vividly reveals the processes of its production; and second, to read errors and errata as literary forms that shaped the literary imagination of authors such as Spenser and Milton.

Practical printnig

This paper describes the practical difficulties and potential pitfalls associated with the stages in the production of a printed work in the hand press period: composition, imposition and presswork. The speakers will bring along some type, composing sticks and other exhibits to illustrate this process, and will also demonstrate on a tabletop printer, which, while rather different from those used for book work, will give some idea of what is involved. They will show a short film made to accompany the “Private lives of print” currently being exhibited at the University Library.

Dr Chris Wingfield (Senior Curator (Archaeology), Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Dr Leah Clark (Art History, The Open University)

Abstracts

Chris Wingfield

Collecting Things, Making Objects: Missionaries, Museums and Moving Idols

The London Missionary Society (1814 - 1910) is chiefly known from a number of contemporary engravings, and its contents are recorded in two surviving catalogues (1826 and c.1860). However, these are just some of the many instances of inscription through which items from this collection have been repeatedly ‘objectified’ over the last two centuries. This talk will explore the role of inscription in processes of object-making, as well as the potential for surviving inscriptions to enable the reconstruction of processes of movement and mobility, and thus reveal the complex entanglements in which collected things can become involved, at times in spite of the efforts and intentions of those who collected them.

Leah Clark

Collecting, Exchange, and the Culture of Things in the Renaissance Court

In the Archivio di Stato di Modena, where the records of the Este and the court of Ferrara are maintained, there exists a series of account and inventory books belonging to Duchess Eleonora d’Aragona (b. 1450-d. 1493). By focussing on one particular account book, this talk will examine how the objects recorded within such a book were sociable things—in their intended uses, but also in terms of the people who maintained them, recorded them in inventories or account books, and those who handled them during their movement. By concentrating on the mobility of objects in court culture, this paper will illuminate how through their circulation, objects navigated an often paradoxical status: on the one hand, they were symbolic goods reflecting magnificence and operating as repositories of knowledge, while on the other hand, they were often used as liquid capital, functioning as pawns for loans.

Dr Simon Werrett (Dept of Science and Technology Studies, UCL)

Haileigh Robertson (History,Royal Armouries,York)

Abstracts

Simon Werrett

Theatre and Effect in Early Modern Fireworks

Much of the literature on early modern fireworks displays tends to treat them as texts, to be deciphered and read for their symbolic and allegorical content. In this talk I focus on the performative aspects of early modern pyrotechnics and the practical, material techniques used to create fireworks spectacles in the period. Under the heading theatre I explore the way fireworks were stage-managed and related to pyrotechnic images and knowledge in printed books and manuscripts. Under the heading effects, I review the performative properties of different kinds of fireworks such as sound and colour and the logic of early modern performances – the ways materials were supposed to relate to one another in order to produce effects. I conclude by showing how these performative elements were not only critical in making fireworks effective tools of state and court spectacle, but also had an impact on natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Haileigh Robertson

The Role of Gunpowder in Early Modern Science

Gunpowder was a subject of interest for many early modern experimental natural philosophers. Attracted by the massive physical power given off on ignition, the early moderns experimented frequently with gunpowder. Owing to gunpowder’s most obvious application, in warfare, some of the experiments conducted had the intention of improving gunpowder—both procurement and performance. The early modern experimentalists however, especially those following Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) projected mode of inquiry, saw gunpowder as much more than a military propellant. Natural philosophers involved with the Hartlib Circle and early Royal Society, for example, proposed new ways of harnessing gunpowder’s energy. Whilst gunpowder’s utility was undoubtedly important for the early modern experimentalists, there was much more to be gained from the close study of the incendiary substance. Bacon and Robert Boyle (1627-91), for example, used gunpowder to resolve disputes over matter theory. Gunpowder experiments were significant not only because they were practically interesting. They occasioned theorising over fundamental issues in early modern science.

This paper explores the uses of gunpowder in early modern natural philosophy. I outline how gunpowder was used, why it was used, and the implications of its employment. Drawing on the reproduction of early modern gunpowder experiments conducted in collaboration with the Royal Armouries (Leeds), I examine precisely how gunpowder affected early modern experimental science. It will be demonstrated how gunpowder served the natural philosophers who employed it, as well as the specific challenges it posed. I argue that for early modern experimental natural philosophers gunpowder was not only about what it could do, but what it could tell us. Gunpowder was a source of potential knowledge

Dr Jane Hamlett Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Dr Alastair Owens (School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London)

Abstracts

Dr Jane Hamlett

Institutional Things: Material Culture and Patient Experience at Bethlem, 1870-1910

This paper draws on research for the ESRC At Home in the Institution Project -- a cross-institutional study of space and material culture in lunatic asylums (as they were known to contemporaries), schools and lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian England. Built en masse in the nineteenth century, institutions created new material worlds that their inmates had to try and negotiate. The paper will examine interior decoration, furnishing and provision of goods within asylums. Taking Bethlem Hospital, then based in Lambeth, as a case study, I will explore the efforts made to domesticate this establishment through home-like décor. However, the main focus will be patients' responses to and engagement with material culture. The paper will draw on a unique collection of hundreds of letters preserved in Bethlem's case books, which offer an unparalleled record of inmates' reactions to their environments and the things they thought were most important. In a highly controlled material world, small goods, the portable and peripheral, became vital to patients as they attempted to maintain identity and agency within institutional walls.

Dr Alastair Owens

People and things on the move: domestic material culture, poverty and mobility in Victorian London

The development of what Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence (1999) termed ‘ethnographic’ approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. Building on critiques of such approaches, this paper examines the material culture of poor households in Victorian London. Drawing upon a study of Victorian archaeological remains excavated from a site in Limehouse in London’s East End, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, it aims to place ‘mobility’ as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place and poverty. While historians and archaeologists have tended to regard mobility as an obstacle to understanding the lives of the poor, here I want to show how by examining the temporal routines and geographical movements of people and things across a variety of time frames and spatial scales, we can perhaps better grasp the struggles and uncertainties of life in Victorian London’s most socially deprived communities. I conclude that as historians of material culture, we need to be more open to the restlessness and dynamism of people and objects.

Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge): ‘The Ascent of Man': visual priming, material culture and early photographs of Ceylon

A man climbing a coconut tree – the recurrent visual narrative of early photographs portraying, exoticising Ceylonese customs. A businesswoman climbing a coconut tree – the latest interpretation of a particular gender trope defining popular visual culture in South Asia. This paper explores the visual priming framework that unites these two representations, the first available across numerous visual records from the late nineteenth century, such as drawings, paintings and photographs, and the second a composite media made by American artist Rajkamal Kahlon in 2011. The proposed comparative analysis will review anthropological perspectives pertinent to representations of cultural power relations in colonial Ceylon, and will discuss how recently re-interpreted visual narratives of particular gender identities function within, as well as shape, new dimensions of contemporary South Asian material culture. Case studies selected from the photographic collections held by the British Library, the Centre of South Asian Studies (Cambridge), and the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections will be discussed alongside Kahlon’s artwork ‘You’ve come a long way, Baby!’.

Professor Elizabeth Edwards (Director of Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester): Folded in Time: Contemplating a Photographic Album

In this paper I use a family album - domestic images inserted in a mass- produced chromolithographed album - as a springboard for thinking about the nature of late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical imagination. I explore this object as a series of nested materialities in which the temporalities of family, local and national histories are both represented and embedded. Following a close critical reading of the object itself, I use Michel Serres' concept of folded time to consider the wider historiographical significances of the material and temporal processes which this album illuminates.

100 Hours of Things: Materiality, Expertise and Encountering Objects

Elizabeth Haines (Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Science Museum)

Dr Juliette Kristensen (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Matthew Paskins (Department for Science and Technology Studies, UCL)

Abstract

Since October 2013, the members of the 100Hours project, founded by Kate Smith and Leonie Hannan at University College, London, have each been interrogating a specific item from the Museums Collections at UCL. We have made repeated visits to our chosen objects, punctuated by discussion sessions with a variety of researchers. As a group we have experimented in accumulating ‘one hundred hours’ of looking and thinking. This panel presents the reflections of Liz Haines, Juliette Kristensen, and Mat Paskins on participating in that process. In three short discussion pieces, we outline will our perspectives on this collective interrogation of the methods and meaning of materiality in historical work.

Liz Haines, will be considering the aesthetics of various material epistemologies and how they might structure our relationships to historical artefacts.

Juliette Kristensen will explore the critical tensions between the call for a flat ontology and the viscerality of phenomenological experience, through focusing on the concepts of attention and touch. Mat Paskins will talk about a meteorite from Augusta County, Virginia, and the life-worlds which have gathered fleetingly around it.

Dr Anna Maerker (History, Kings College London)

The materiality of “body things"

Dr Margaret Carlyle (HPS, University of Cambridge)

Inventing birthing bodies in Enlightenment France

Abstracts

Dr Anna Maerker

How do materials shape cultures of healing, and how do healing cultures influence the development and use of materials? Historically, a wide range of materials have been crucial for the development of medicine. The introduction of plants from the New World significantly increased the number of drugs available to early modern patients. At the same time, this expansion challenged traditional systems of knowledge and exchange, and prompted the development of new practices both of classification and economic regulation. The improvement of steel created the possibility of new types of prostheses as well as reshaping the relationship between patients, artisans and physicians. The fabric of the body itself, used as raw material for medical intervention and research, creates ethical problems to the present day, from the extraction of paupers’ teeth for rich clients in the eighteenth century to the experimental use of cell cultures in the twentieth century. Today I would like to explore four interrelated areas of investigation using brief preliminary case studies of four “body things”: Materials and meaning, materials in medical practice, materials and communities, materials and experience.

Dr Margaret Carlyle

What do pelvis-measuring pliers, artificial arms, breastpumps, and pregnant mock-women have in common? They are all facets of technological development in an age of Enlightenment at a time when midwives and medical men turned to material culture to find solutions to age-old problems encountered in the birthing chamber. This paper focuses on the boom of birthing instruments in eighteenth-century France, which were designed as practical implements and constructed from materials including metal, crystal, textiles, wax, and wicker. While some, like the teaching manikin, mimicked the birthing body as part of classroom simulations, the “pelvimètre” functioned as a prenatal measuring device, while the breastpump stimulated the postnatal body to produce infant milk. The multiple usages of these pedagogical, quantifying, and prognosticating tools indicate the spirit of mechanical invention that pervaded the culture of birthing more broadly in this period. This was a culture in which both male and female authorities participated, and the underlying goal of this paper is to demonstrate the complementary and sometimes antagonistic roles played by men and women in regimes of medical invention. Examples of male-female conflict also provide an opportunity to explore the gendering of “bodily things” related to birthing in this period. Finally, these inventions are situated within ongoing public debates over the state’s role in promoting population growth through safer birthing practices and the increasing importance of consumerism to medical materiality.

Natalie Lawrence (History and Philosophy of Science) The 'Devil of Taiwan' and the 'Scaly Lizard' in colonies and cabinets.

Heidi Egginton (History) 'A Museum of Furniture': Collecting Antiques in the West End Department Store, c. 1900-1914

Tess Little (History) La femme tondue revisited: contextualising photography of Liberation France, 1944-45

Irene Cooper (History) Refocusing the Rosary: Devotional Things in Early Modern Italy

Eleanor Chan (History of Art) English Cognitive Style, Material and Immaterial: Embroidered and/or Geometric Traces of Post Reformation Visuality

Giulia Galastro (History) Forbidden Finery: the aims and targets of early modern Genoese sumptuary law