Things Seminar

Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck (National Maritime Museum)

Felicity Powell (Artist)

Ben Carpenter (University of Wolverhampton)

Dr Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)

Paper slips, notebooks and health management.

Dr Helen Smith (University of York)

Paper Technologies

Abstracts

Paper slips, notebooks and health management

Dr Elaine Leong. Upon her death in 1688, Margaret Boscawen of Tregothnan, Cornwall, left bundles of loose paper slips and six paper notebooks of different shapes and sizes all filled to the brim with useful medical and household know-how. From gardening advice to recipes for particular cures to lists of beneficial distilled waters to external indices correlating to Boscawen’s printed medical books, the notebooks and slips contain and represent the wide scope of her practical knowledge. Focusing on Boscawen’s collection of paper notebooks and paper slips, I examine how one woman created and organized her collection of practical know-how and argue that Boscawen utilized the materiality of paper, pen and ink to categorize and codify household practical knowledge.

Paper Technologies

Dr Helen Smith. This 'paper' explores the use of what we might broadly term paper technologies in early modern England, from fold-out diagrams and volvelles to do-it-yourself death masks and decoupage. By turning attention to the formation and deformation of paper (and its use as a conceptual as well as practical tool), I hope to suggest the significance of paper as a flexible technology across a range of contexts, and to argue that paper does not simply receive the imprint of meaning but participates in the construction and articulation (not least in the sense of being 'distinctly jointed or marked') of knowledge.

Dr Sean Roberts (University of Southern California)

Dr Elizabeth Upper (UL Munby Fellow)

Things: Early Modern Material Cultures

Dr Cordula Van Wyhe (University of York)

The fabric of Female Rule in Leone Leoni's statue of Mary of Hungary, c.

1555

Desmond Shawe-Taylor (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures)

Abstracts

Desmond Shawe-Taylor

As part of a campaign to capture all of the information from the inventories held within the Royal Collection and Royal Archives, Royal Collection Trust is examining the comprehensive inventories of the collection made during the Regency period and at the same time considering William Henry Pyne’s The History of the Royal Residences of 1819. Together, these provide one of the most comprehensive accounts of an historic paintings collection. Accordingly, this talk provides an opportunity to stand back from what is essentially a mechanical task and examine what these inventories tell us about the display and appreciation of paintings in this period.

The purpose of the session is more to ask questions and to gather feedback from the audience than to provide theories, however, a number of key themes emerge. Firstly, the way in which, within the Royal Collection, long outdated decorative schemes survive alongside completely up-to-date ones and, secondly, how Old Master paintings seem to be valued for two, often quite separate, reasons, the aesthetic and the antiquarian. This period also allows us to contrast the collection of The Prince of Wales at Carlton House with the paintings accumulated at other royal residences.

Jane Wildgoose (Kingston University and Keeper of The Wildgoose Memorial Library)

The Duchess threatens to produce me among the antiquities(1) (Mary Delany, letter. August 16th, 19776)

and

Dr Mary Brooks (Durham University)

Re-materialising things: a conversation in time.

Conversations with broken things.

Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)

Automata

and

Dr Anna Maerker (Kings College London)

Model Bodies and Model Experts

Abstracts

Prof Simon Schaffer: Eighteenth century automata served a very wide range of uses, as things to display or satirise, admire or unmask. Such seemingly self-moving things functioned in a culture fascinated by the workings of the theatre and of the market, especially in juxtaposition of automata with other mobile things of the period, such as spring clocks and water pumps. And what happens when these things now appear on film?

Dr Anna Maerker: The Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History 'La Specola' in late-eighteenth-century Florence was famous for its life-sized wax models of the human body, part of a public display of nature that was designed to further public happiness through education and enlightenment. In this talk, I will focus on practices of model making and model use at La Specola to ask how things mediate human relationships and shape social groups. Based on material from my book Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815, the talk will investigate how model makers articulated their identity through model production, and how model display shaped the relationship between experts and the public.

Dr Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Dr Adam Smyth (Birkbeck)

Christelle Rabier (London School of Economics) and Simon Chaplin (Wellcome Library)

Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford)

The Animated Still Life

and

Jose Ramón Marcaida Lopez (University of Cambridge)

All things must pass. Playful vanity in seventeenth-century Spanish still-life painting