Things Seminar

Dr Jane Partner (Cambridge) Dr Irene Galandra Cooper (CRASSH, Cambridge) Abstracts Dr Jane Partner Reading the Early Modern Body: The Case Study of Textual Jewellery This paper presents part of the initial research for the book Reading the Early Modern Body, which seeks to bring together the many ways – both concrete and abstract – in which the body was presented and interpreted as a text during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the central concerns of this research is to examine the ways in which the body could be made into a material text through the actual bodily wearing of language, something that might be achieved through script tattoos, embroidered clothing, inscribed busks, girdle books and textual jewellery. My aim in bringing together these diverse practices is to place them within the broader context of the other less literal but even more widespread practices of interpreting the body that were also framed as acts of reading. Gestures, physiognomic features and transient expressions could all be treated as languages of the body, and interpreting them was a social skill that was particularly necessary in a courtly environment. My paper approaches some of these larger issues by taking the case study of textual jewellery, exploring the ways in which inscribed or letter-shaped jewels could act as markers of identity. The texts that they carry commonly commemorate gifts of love or patronage, advertise familial connections, or assert the piety of the wearer. Alongside examining some particular textual jewels and their depictions in contemporary portraiture, I will also consider literary references to this type of item – for example the motto that is ‘graven in diamonds’ around the neck of the deer in Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘Whoso List to Hunt’. My discussion will suggest that the accomplishments of knowing how to present one’s own body so that is said the right things, and of how to accurately read the texts presented by other bodies, were crucial skills in the court environment, where corporeal reading operated within a complex, multi-layered network of symbolic reading and interpretation. Jane Partner is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she carries out research on a range of literary and art-historical topics, often concerning the intersection between the two fields. Her first book is Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2018). Arising from her current research for Reading the Early Modern Body, Jane is also planning another project about gems and jewellery in early modern literature. Both these enquiries relate to her own practice as a sculptor with a particular interest in the body and wearable art. Dr Irene Galandra Cooper Potent and Pious: Re-thinking Religious Materiality in Sixteenth-Century Kingdom of Naples Combing through the inventories of early modern Neapolitans, I have been repeatedly struck by the ubiquity of objects made in rock crystal, hyacinth stones, emeralds, as well as other precious and semi-precious stones. Shaped as beads and threaded as rosaries, or formed as pendants carved with Christian images, these objects were highly prized for their outward aesthetics, their iconographies, but also for their curative powers. In them, the distinction between 'religion', 'art', and 'science' is elided: were they treasured for their beauty, their Christian association, or their inner virtues? Combining archival and material sources, I will examine in what ways portable devotional objects were perceived to be so powerful to be able to cure someone's body and soul, and who, across the social spectrum, could afford to tap into their potency. I will also ask how could one recognise its ingenious nature and if particular senses were more useful than others to inform these experiences. Irene Galandra completed her doctorate as a member of the ERC-funded project Domestic Devotions: the Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600 at the University of Cambridge, where she explored the materiality of devotion in sixteenth-century Naples. Irene was also one of the curators of the successful exhibition Madonnas and Miracles: the Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum between March and June 2017. Irene is now Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Italian Renaissance art and material culture at the Department of Modern and Medieval Languages, History of Art and the Faculty of History. She is currently also a researcher at CRASSH's Genius Before Romanticism project. Previous to her PhD, Irene worked for the Wallace Collection, Christie’s, the National Gallery in London, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She has published on practices relating to small devotional jewellery such as rosaries and agnus dei.

Professor Neil Kenny (University of Oxford) Edwin Rose ( University of Cambridge) Abstracts Professor Neil Kenny The mineral-hunters: Martine de Bertereau and her husband Jean du Chastelet One kind of object dominated not just the life of Martine de Bertereau (1590–1643), but also her family’s past and so to an extent her social identity: minerals. Little wonder, then, that she married a fellow mineralogist, Jean du Chastelet. They spent their years and their resources prospecting throughout Europe, on a vast scale, before dying in Richelieu’s dungeons. What economic, social, epistemic, and also cultural and narrative frames did their object of choice impose upon them? And what does their singular pursuit of minerals tell us about the relation between knowledge, family, gender, and social hierarchy in early seventeenth-century France? Neil Kenny is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004) and an earlier book on the word history of the ‘curiosity’ family of terms. His last monograph was Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015). He is currently completing a book called Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France. The example he is discussing today grows out of that project, but is not included in it. Edwin Rose Collecting natural history in late eighteenth-century Britain The late eighteenth century witnessed a distinct rise in natural history collecting, both on a commercial and a scholarly level, alongside a growth in travel by naturalists, the main object of which was for them to acquire natural history specimens for their collections and record their observations of the natural world. One of the most prolific naturalist-travellers was Thomas Pennant (1726–98), whose collection remains intact and is primarily held by the Natural History Museum, London. In this paper, I give a general overview of Pennant’s collecting activities, examining his working practices in the field along with how he synthesised the information and objects he collected to compile his seminal work, British Zoology. This lavishly illustrated publication reached multiple editions from 1766 to 1812. Pennant’s collection was compiled from taxidermy, primarily birds and quadrupeds, from around the globe; shells, fossils, minerals, a small herbarium of dried plants, and a library which amounted to over 10,000 volumes, all of which he kept at his home at Downing Hall, Flintshire, North Wales. Pennant’s natural history collection was rigorously organised according to a variety of different systems of classification, such as that devised by John Ray (1627–1705) and that developed by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) from the 1730s. The understanding of the connections between this large collection of physical objects, Pennant’s travels and his publications gives a direct insight into how these physical objects were used to create natural knowledge during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Edwin Rose is currently a PhD candidate in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His interests are primarily concerned with the history of natural history, collecting and bibliography from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, although the main concentration of his current research rests in the period between 1750 and 1830. Edwin has published widely on the history of natural history, in particular on the collections of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and the British Museum, and his most recent article entitled ‘Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world’s first public museum 1753–1768’ was published in the British Journal for the History of Science in April, 2018. As well as his PhD research, Edwin has two forthcoming publications, one for a special issue in Notes and Records of the Royal Society entitled ‘From the South Seas to Soho Square: The Library of Joseph Banks and the Practice of natural history’ and another which he has co-authored with Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln) entitled ‘Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils’, to be published in Nuncius in January 2019.

Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk (University of Leeds) Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk The Secret Life of a Colour Card Who decides the colours of the seasons, and why? This presentation explores the hidden history of colour prediction for the creative industries by exploring how a shade card is designed. It pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of the transatlantic fashion system through a case study of the world's pioneering colour forecasting organization, its leading lady Margaret Hayden Rorke, and her Paris colour scouts. The colour forecasting methods that Mrs. Rorke set up in 1920s New York are still used today.

Mervyn Millar (Independent Artist/Puppetry Director & Designer) Perception and Performing Things How is it possible that we can feel empathy for a thing? Since the beginning of civilisation, humans have been compelled and transfixed by performing objects and puppets. From our earliest play, to some of our most sophisticated entertainments, performing things draw on sculpture, movement, texture and context to stimulate emotional responses in an audience. Please "bring a thing" - any object from 1400-2000 that is big enough to hold in two hands and light enough to hold in one hand and is not too fragile to be handled enthusiastically. Theatre director and puppeteer Mervyn Millar was Artist in Residence at QMUL University in London in 2017, exploring the neurology and psychology of our responses to animated objects. His work in theatre has included War Horse, Circus 1903 and work at several leading theatre and opera companies in the UK and Europe. www.significantobject.com

Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge) Emily Fitzell (Independent Artist, University of Cambridge)

Cecilia Bembibre (University College London) Mark Jenner (University of York)

Dr Tom Blaen (University of Exeter)

Dr Stefan Hanß (University of Cambridge) Dr Jose Ramon Marcaida (University of Cambridge)

Thomas Rusbridge (University of Birmingham) Philip Warner (National Leather Collection)

Dr Mary Newbould (University of Cambridge)

Professor Jo Ann Oravec (University of Wisconsin at Whitewater) Sleight of Hands: Cheating and Deception Detection by Human Observers and Artificial Intelligence Systems

Professor David Gentilcore (University of Leicester) Richard Fitch (Historic Royal Palaces)

Rebecca Unsworth (QMUL/V&A) Dr Elizabeth Currie (Central Saints Martins)

Associate Professor Sean Silver (University of Michigan) Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)

Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling) Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE (UCL)

Dr Daniel Jütte (Associate Professor, Department of History, New York University: Eurias Fellow, CRASSH 2016-17) Jacqueline Nicholls (Independent Artist) Abstracts Jacqueline Nicholls Doors, Gates & Curtains Traditional Jewish texts utilises imagery of different types of entrances, each evoking particular ideas with regard to the relationship between physical reality and the world of the divine. This visual art presentation will focus on drawings that interpret relevant Talmudic texts about doors, gates and curtains as barriers and entrances. Daniel Jütte Living Stones: Architecture and Embodiment in Premodern Europe Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following the call of this year’s seminar convenors—to “investigate human understanding of the world vis-à-vis objects”—the talk will probe the history of one particular idea: the house as a living being. The focus will be on the late medieval and early modern period when human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. I will also address the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.

Victoria Bartels (University of Cambridge) *Site visit to the Fitzwilliam*

Encounters on the Shop Floor: Embodiment and the Knowledge of the Maker Dr Marta Ajmar (Victoria &Albert Museum) Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College, London) Fleur Oakes (Independent artist) This talk will present research from a five-year collaborative project co-led by Marta Ajmar and Roger Kneebone, supported by the V&A Research Institute (VARI) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It will consider the models of thinking and doing that emerge from 'encounters on the shop floor', where invention and innovation result from the exchange between different kinds and communities of 'knowledge-makers'. The significance of embodiment in the processes of cognition and learning will be explored, moving beyond an unhelpful divide between 'mind' and 'hand' and between 'intellectual' and 'manual' knowledge and their disciplinary and institutional compartmentalisation. During this seminar we will present the project in conversation with textiles artist Fleur Oakes. Our speakers aim to connect different worlds and experiences of knowledge-making around a common nucleus of embodied practice, combining academic work with the scientific expertise of the surgeon and the craft of the artistic practitioner.

Dr Victoria Avery (Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge) Andrew Lacey (Artist and Independent Scholar) Bronze was used in Renaissance Italy for numerous types of functional objects (artillery, bells, coins, lamps, inkwells) as well as decorative ones (equestrian monuments, statues, busts, medals). Extremely expensive, meaning-laden and complex to produce, works of art cast in bronze were desirable status symbols for Humanist patrons, and proofs of incredible technical mastery by sculptors and casters. Sculpture historian, Vicky Avery, and sculptor-founder, Andrew Lacey, will discuss 'bronze in Italy c. 1500' in terms of its meanings, usage and technology, focussing on the enigmatic Rothschild Bronzes, recently attributed to Michelangelo.

Dr James Poskett (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Remembering Haiti: Phrenology, Slavery and the Material Culture of Race, 1791-1861 Dr Stefan Hanß (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Familiar with the Matter: Slavery and the Body in the Early Modern Mediterranean Abstracts: Dr James Poskett. Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust was deployed by both supporters and opponents of abolition. More broadly, this talk suggests that the history of race needs to be understood as part of a history of material exchange. Dr Stefan Hanß. Traditional definitions of slavery strongly connect forced labour to the absence of a slave’s autonomy of decision over his body. Coerced labour, in that sense, is enforced, ensured and perpetuated through an owner’s power over another human’s body. Sociologists and anthropologists, however, have broadened the definition of body techniques and practices that prompt historians to rethink the relationship of labour and the body. My presentation thus discusses slavery in the early modern Mediterranean in the light of recent research on the history of the body. I examine how the bodies of slaves were a targeted yet negotiated scene of constraint and agency. Whilst Mediterranean slave-owners indeed tried to mark slavery through the bodies of enslaved men and women, their strategies in body practices enabled slaves to constantly re-negotiate their servile status. I first examine archival lists in which slave-owners described their slaves’ bodies in detail. These descriptions enabled identification and guaranteed the slaves’ status as commodities on the one hand. On the other, slaves were familiar with the significance of these lists. Consequently, they tried to influence both the processes of commodification and their servile status by making active use of their masters’ records. My presentation’s second focus lies on how former slaves described their own bodies and body practices in servility. When enslaved Germans returned to the German lands, they often wrote in incredible detail about the shaving rites they had to endure whilst living in Ottoman or North African servitude. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narratives, again, underline that slaving and body practices posed constraints as much as scopes of actions of which slaves were well aware of and keen to use.

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)

Materials II Lindsey Cox (University of Kent) How and why materials matter in relation to Tudor and Jacobean portrait miniatures

Materials I Alice Dolan (University of Hertfordshire) 'A kind of coarse linen': Material Ambiguities in Eighteenth-Century England Anna Reynolds (University of York) 'A Waste and Roaring Wilderness': Scriptural Wastelands and Early Modern Wastepaper Heidi Carlson (University of Cambridge) Thatch, stone and brick: the domestic buildings of early colonial Ireland

Ephemera and the Body Michelle Wallis (University of Cambridge) Papering Over the Past: Ephemeral Print and the History of Medicine in England before 1720 Nailya Shamgunova (University of Cambridge) European perceptions of penis bells as a method of prevention of sodomy among the peoples of South East Asia in the 17th Century Miranda Clow (Royal College of Art) Negotiating Value: Printed Paper and the Beginning of the Fire Insurance Industry

Dr Jen Evans (History, University of Hertfordshire) Kindling Cupid’s Fire: Aphrodisiacs in early modern England Abstract Dr Jen Evans: Some ‘things’, like foods, are unfortunately ephemeral; they are produced and consumed leaving little of their materiality behind. Yet food can have multiple meanings and can be engaged with as a range of things – as sustenance, as medical remedies, as enhancers of sexual pleasure. It was common knowledge in early modern England that sexual desire was malleable, and could be increased or decreased by a range of foods, including artichokes, oysters and parsnips. This paper will explore the understanding of some early modern aphrodisiacs and show that they were understood not just to be titillating sexual curiosities, but were a crucial element in medical regimes designed to restore and improve fertility. Moreover, in this paper I will begin to unpick the different ways in which aphrodisiacs might have been approached as material objects by considering not just the foods that were eaten, but those that were used as gifts, those used as dildos, and the pungent foods and substances that were used as fumes and fragrances. This paper will reveal that the world of early modern aphrodisiacs was very varied but was nearly always substantially influenced by medical ideas about the fertility of the body.

Professor Helen King (Classical Studies, Open University) The Material Womb Professor Michelle O’Malley (Art History, University of Sussex) Botticelli and Reproduction Abstracts: The material womb In the western tradition of thinking about the body, wombs have not only been illustrated in a variety of shapes, but been made in a variety of materials: ancient terracotta ‘votive wombs’ meet today’s brightly coloured, perky knitted wombs, while eighteenth-century glass wombs give way to nineteenth-century rubber wombs. In this paper, as an aspect of a wider project concerning what has been thought to constitute a body ‘part’, I will consider the colours and materials used for wombs. I shall be arguing that something more than factual knowledge guides the visual representation of the womb, and that taking the long view changes the assumptions we now make, and the questions we put to the past. Botticelli and Reproduction In the art historical tradition of thinking about Renaissance painting, we conceptualise pictures as ‘autograph’ and ‘workshop’, admiring the former as, say, a Botticelli, and often denigrating the latter as a slavish and dull copy. But these two strands of production were not divergent: both were outputs of the business of a master painter, and both involved, in varying degrees, the input of the master and his assistants. In this paper, I will consider the production of Botticelli’s ‘workshop’ works, drawing particularly on technical analysis to discuss approaches to the manufacture of these material objects created for the Renaissance home. I will argue that ‘workshop’ work—Botticelli’s re-produced things—represent decisions he made about manufacture in the business and that their construction calls into question some of our most fundamental tools for assessing attribution and understanding how Renaissance painters worked.

Dr Anne Secord (History and Philosophy of Science, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge) Containing the World: Boxes, Books, and Botany in late C18th and C19th England Dr Lucy Razzall (English, Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge) Containing the Word: Books and Boxes in Early Modern England Abstract Dr Lucy Razzall. Containing the Word: Books and Boxes in Early Modern England. In this paper I want to think about the material and imaginative connections between books and boxes in early modern England. Books were often kept in boxes in this period, but there are further material connections between them – while boxes might be lined with paper, books might well be bound by the same craftsmen who make leather-covered boxes. Early modern material culture furnishes us with plenty of (often playful) objects which draw on the evocative overlap between books and boxes, such as lockets, hand warmers, and instruments, which look like books but which function as vessels for things other than words. Early modern authors were certainly alert to the visual and imaginative similarities between books and boxes, often playing on them in their choice of metaphors for their own writing. Focussing on a late Elizabethan epigram collection, this paper explores the playful capacity of print to manipulate the identity of the material text, and to remind us of the material and imaginative connections between poems, books, and other boxes of tricks.

Professor Lisa Jardine (Director of the Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, UCL) "An Important Piece of Jewellery worth 80,000 Florins": Moving Gems for Occasions around Early Modern Europe Professor Evelyn Welch (Vice Principal of Arts and Sciences, KCL) Furs and Feathers in the Early Modern World: Moving Fashion across Global Borders

Dr Robbie Richardson (English, University of Kent) “[T]he most mysterious thing in the World”: British Interpretations of First Nations Material Culture Abstract This paper will look at the relationship between British people in the eighteenth century and the North American cultural objects that they privately collected or viewed in museums, cabinets of curiosities, coffeehouses, and other venues. More specifically it will look at the body of First Nations material culture that arrived in large amounts throughout the century and the ways that these objects shaped British perceptions of Native people and their own sense of identity. There has been little scholarship on the ways in which this material, imbued with First Nations skill, knowledge, and memory, was perceived by British people and interacted with other forms of representation in print and visual culture. While we must remember, as Susan Stewart suggests, that cultural objects in collections “are naturalized by the erasure of labor and the erasure of context of production,” at the same time wampum, calumets, and tomahawks were regularly written into fictional texts and came to be understood for both their physical appearance and symbolic functions; furthermore, they became metonymic for Indians, whose perceived fetishistic relationship to their own material culture both reflected on and critiqued British consumer culture.

Dr Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal College of Art) Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology) Joint paper: I say "shard", you say "sherd": Contrasting and Complimentary Approaches to an Early Modern "Venice Glass"

Dr Sara Pennell (Independent Scholar) Roisin Inglesby (Assistant Curator, Victoria & Albert Museum) Abstracts Dr Sara Pennell ‘A cake of beeswax, which I knew to be mine’: materiality and identification amongst the mundane in eighteenth-century England Beyond fine and decorative art histories, wherein the work of scholars is in part to provide the objects (the ‘art’) with contexts and provenance that make them fully legible within a culture which values the artist/maker, as well as the role of the known owner/patron, objects which lack these identifiers, or a paper trail that can supply such evidence, often recede in our accounts of material pasts. Many of these objects lack distinguishing aesthetic or formal features which tie them into discourses of art and design; or have, in the documentary sources so often utilised by socio-economic historians to populate the early modern past with ‘things’, resided in the category of ‘lumber’ and ‘small things forgotten’, or indeed evaded most such records by their ephemerality. Very few of these things, however, were truly anonymous to their owners, users, makers. The efforts made to identify, and claim ownership of, seemingly mundane things or objects of very small value, by victims of robbery, theft and burglary at the Old Bailey and in newspaper advertisements of the period, reveal the profound attention paid to surface detail, the wear and tear evident on objects, and even the transient material states goods might pass through, as ways of identifying possessions. Such attention to materiality, in the face of high-velocity urban circuits of new and used goods, both licit and illicit, can tell us much about how chattel property, be it ever so modest and perhaps on first glance, indistinguishable from others of its type, was claimed, owned and made ‘mine’ by early moderns. Roisin Inglesby Women’s needlework and the expectations of biography Anonymous objects pose a problem for museums. Without knowing who made something, how can it convincingly be displayed, interpreted and explained? In a context overwhelmingly dependent on attribution to an artist, designer or maker, where do you start when there is no hope of biography? This talk considers an anonymous 17th-century embroidery of Mary Magdalene, recently discovered in the V&A’s stores. Iconographically unique, the embroidery cannot simply be assimilated into standard interpretations of women’s domestic needlework, yet as an ‘orphan’ object, we have no way of tracing its provenance or original context. I will suggest that while anonymity can obscure meanings and demoralise researchers, it also creates new opportunities for interpretation. By forcing scholars to consider them without prior reference to their creators, anonymity can liberate things from the expectations of biography.

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.