‘While these visions did appear’: Shakespeare on Canvas
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 3 January — 3 June 2012

Curated by Eleanor Hughes and Christina Smylitopoulos

Johann Heinrich Ramberg, "Olivia, Maria, and Malvolio, from 'Twelfth Night', Act III, Scene iv," 1789, oil on canvas (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund)

“While these visions did appear,” a selection of Shakespearian subjects drawn from the Center’s permanent collection of paintings, forms part of Yale’s university-wide celebration of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). This display focuses primarily on depictions of Shakespeare’s comedies, but also draws on comedic elements from the tragedies and histories, and encourages consideration of the multifaceted ways—verbal and visual—in which Shakespeare’s plays have inspired painters and audiences alike.

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CONFLICTING ART HISTORIES: DIALOGUES OF COSMOPOLITANISM AND NATIONALISM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE

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Freya Gowrley (University of Edinburgh), Taste à la mode: The consumption of foreignness in visual and material culture, 1740-80

This paper will examine the how the consumption of imported commodities functioned as a signifier of female respectability in the visual and material culture of the eighteenth century. A symbolic trope of singular importance depicting the monkey, tea equipage and black page boy was employed by artists first to portray, and eventually epitomise, the consumption of foreign luxuries by genteel female consumers. Such goods therefore played an active role in constructing – in terms of both practice and perception – the acquisitive habits of the female consumer.  Whilst emblematic of the consequential relationship between the consumption of cosmopolitan goods and the establishment of respectability in eighteenth-century polite culture, such objects were not only crucial to the construction of this fashionable gentility, but its satirical castigation. Via their connection with processes of imitation, fashionability and commodification, these consumables were posited as inherently gendered objects by eighteenth-century satirists, used to express contemporary fears over voracious female consumerism, effeminacy, and national contamination. Yet beyond this satirical function, the constitutive elements of this symbolic trio were also those actively adopted by the fashionable elite as the means by which to express their gentility. The specific combination of monkey, tea service and black page boy therefore constituted a potent visual language, capable at once of portraying the female consumption of foreignness, and forming an active commentary on the very same.

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Carly Collier (University of Warwick), British Artists and Early Italian Art during the Long Eighteenth-Century: Education, Expectations, the Influence of Contemporary Taste and the Grand Tour

As Shearer West’s 1999 essay made abundantly clear, the newly-founded Royal Academy was the locus for an enduring tension between xenomania and xenophobia from its inception in the mid-eighteenth century. That the institution’s early decades were overshadowed by the constant struggle between nationalism and cosmopolitanism – the desire to establish a national academy to evolve a British school, but the dependence on Italian art in general and the paradigmatic Italian academical model – is irrefutable.

My paper will explore this theme through the prism of the relationship between British artists and early Italian art c. 1770-1830. British taste during this era dictated that native artists looked to specific periods and artists to emulate – notably the ‘holy trinity’ of Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, as well as seventeenth-century landscape and figurative masters such as Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Accordingly, there was very limited availability of visual and literary material in Britain relating to the works of artists outside of this canon of taste, and particularly the  Italian ‘primitives’ (those artists of the Tre- and Quattrocento). There is, however, evidence that British artists paid attention to early Italian art whilst travelling or residing in the country (Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and John Flaxman are all interesting examples), which in varying degrees served to facilitate the ‘rediscovery’ of this art for their colleagues back home. This paper shall first examine the status quo as regards art education and the influence of taste, before analysing how the largely under-explored relationship between British artists and early Italian art added a new dimension to the  “unwritten and unresolved conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism” present in the artistic institutions and practices of the period. Overall, this paper aims to demonstrate how fundamental the contributions of British artists were to the national understanding of the history of early Italian art and its bearing on constructions of Britain’s own artistic genesis.

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Dr Patsy Hely (School of Art, Australian National University), All Things Bright and Beautiful, and British

On holiday in Bath in 1760, the Reverend John Penrose wrote to his daughter describing a breakfast he attended:

‘the tables were spread with singular Neatness. Upon a Cloth white as Snow were ranged Coffee Cups, Tea Dishes of different sizes, Chocolate Cups, Tea Pots, and everything belonging to the Equipage of the Tea Table…’

The late eighteenth century in Britain saw a flowering of the ceramic arts with Wedgewood, Chelsea, Bow, Royal Worcester and others all producing very finely manufactured domestic objects. The use of these ceramic wares had quite quickly become naturalized at most levels of society over the century – in urban centres at least.

Imagine then the small earthenware cup – thick, crude-handled, unglazed – displayed amongst the colonial artefacts in the Museum of Sidney in Australia. Apart from bricks and clay pips, this cup is one of the first locally made ceramic objects in the colony. Dating from around 1790, two years after the British arrived in 1788, the cup represents one of the earliest attempts to manufacture the basic necessities of everyday life at Sydney Cove.

The type and variety the Reverend Penrose catalogues above suggests a marvelling at the miracle of skilled British manufacture, an admiration that similarly took hold in Australia. This paper will examine the ways in which eating and drinking implements arriving on transports or support ships in late 18^th and early 19^th century Australia acted to construct ideas about ‘Britishness’ in a colony on the other side of the world.

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Matthew Martin (Melbourne College of Divinity/National Gallery of Victoria), English Porcelain, Catholic Collectors

This paper will explore English luxury porcelain production as an area with the potential to cast light on the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century British art.  The Chelsea factory, the leading eighteenth-century English luxury porcelain manufacturer, was, as Hilary Young has suggested, essentially a French manufactory operating in London; its proprietor Nicolas Sprimont was French, as were the majority of the artists and craftsmen working there.  Whilst much of the factory’s production was heavily imitative of porcelain produced at Meissen and Sèvres, Chelsea’s market was almost exclusively British and the advertising of its products was framed in terms of its superiority to German and French imports.  The association of Huguenots with the Chelsea factory suggests a significant role for confessional identity in the negotiation of an anti-Gallic stance in the factory’s market identity.  But despite the Protestant associations of many Chelsea personnel, a small but important group of sculptures produced at Chelsea in the late 1750s and 1760s employ explicitly Counter-reformation devotional imagery, including a Pietà group modelled by Joseph Willems, an example of which was owned by the 4th Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, a leading Recusant.  Based upon the Pietà in Notre Dame de Paris, Lord Clifford’s acquisition of this Chelsea group served both to mark his membership of a cosmopolitan aristocratic European Catholic culture, and through its status as an English luxury production, to signal his membership of the English elite.  Such an object thus expressed a uniquely English Catholic identity, at once nationalist and cosmopolitan.

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Dr Andrew Kennedy (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), Empire and nation in the topographical works of Thomas and William Daniell

This paper aims to analyse the pictorial and textual representation of empire and nation in two topographical series: Oriental Scenery (1795-1808), by Thomas and William Daniell, and  A Voyage Round Great Britain (1814-1825), by William Daniell and Richard Ayton.   My paper attempts to examine the ideological framework within which the Daniells’ representational strategies developed.  To do so, it will draw on some of the ideas about space and place in capitalist society put forward by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey.

These writers propose that the capitalist social order creates an abstract, universal space with the aim of dominating particular places.  I argue that such a space is represented in the Daniells’ views, most of which feature an apparently straightforwardly lucid depiction of sublime and/or exotic objects through a limpid atmospheric medium.  Places shown in this way, are, I suggest, both homogenised and differentiated, domesticated and made strange, via the deployment of an encyclopaedic Enlightenment empiricism.  The work of homogenisation serves, then, to reinforce the notion of the power of the British state, whether in the far north of Scotland, or in the Indian subcontinent.   Yet some sense of heterogeneity must also be maintained, in order to dramatise the work of power in subordinating such diverse territories and places to its will.

In such a context, the device of the coastal voyage in the later series appears to be an excellent way to suture an abstract national and imperial space, conveniently defined by a natural boundary, onto real places.  But that project is threatened when some of those places and their inhabitants reveal a heterogeneity that is hard to assimilate.

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Jordan Mearns (University of Edinburgh), Strength vs. Sentiment: The Poems of Ossian and women artists in later eighteenth-century Britain

James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1765) were simultaneously one of the most popular and most controversial literary sensations of eighteenth-century. While the body of existing literature relating to the poems and the literary debates they engendered is weighty, the artistic response to the poems, particularly in Britain, remains under-explored. In his consideration of Alexander Runciman’s Ossian’s Hall (1772—3) at Penicuik House, Midlothian, Martin Myrone has interpreted the poems as a vehicle intrinsically suited to the expression of spectacular historicized masculinity. This paper will show the extent to which Ossian had a dedicated female readership, and was depicted by a broad range of women artists including Angelica Kauffman and Maria Cosway and amateurs such as Lady Diana Beauclerk and Catherine Maria Fanshawe. Contrary to Myrone’s reading, women artists responded to the poems’ innovative sentimental idiom, producing scenes which conformed to the circumscribed range of acceptable female artistic practice. By examining a wide range of visual material I wish to suggest that Ossian provided a particularly apt text for female artists to engage with, which allowed for the exploration of gender roles and as a vehicle for the expression, not of raw masculinity, but scenes of refined and elegiac sentiment. A wider consideration of this paper will be the incorporation of Scottish subject-matter within the notional ‘British School’ of painting and its place in metropolitan exhibition culture.

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Dr John Bonehill (University of Glasgow), Loutherbourg and the ‘Spirit of Hogarth’

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s The Troops at Warley-Camp, reviewed by his Majesty was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. It was one of a pair of paintings commemorating the king’s presence at a spectacular mock battle staged two years earlier, as part of defensive safeguards introduced to meet a threatened French invasion. On exhibition at William Chamber’s newly opened Somerset House, Loutherbourg’s painting featured as part of an array of militaristic and patriotic imagery relating to the ongoing war waged against rebellious American colonists and their new Continental allies. These included pictures that drew comparisons between the present day defence of the realm and historic precedents, as well as works celebrating the nation’s land and maritime forces, grand histories, ambitious, full-length portraits, and landscapes such as Loutherbourg’s painting of the camp at Warley. Critics responded warmly to Loutherbourg’s picture, struck by ‘the grandeur of the scene’ but also its ‘touches of humour’. Indeed, it was a fine blend of the patriotic and the comic, the documentary and the theatrical. While some critics of the day were dismissive of Loutherbourg’s ‘French pomposity’, judging his manner highly artificial, others admired how readily he had assimilated the cultural traditions of his adopted country. Loutherbourg’s talent for social satire was considered of a kind with that of a notable native precedent, whose art was widely identified as being expressive of the national character, the painter being thought to ‘possess the Humour and Spirit of Hogarth’.

This paper will situate Loutherbourg’s Troops at Warley-Camp and the artist’s companion picture in relation to a range of cultural and political concerns, including the conduct of the American War and the defensive measures intended to protect the nation’s coastlines from the threat of French invasion, if also the commemoration of these events in paint, especially as they shaped critics’ calls for a national school of landscape painting. A survey of Loutherbourg’s critical reception, especially that prompted by his painting of the king’s review of the troops, shows his appeal to those who looked to the ‘spirit of Hogarth’ at this moment of national crisis. Yet, there were of course a number of unresolved tensions in this championing of an art apparently free of the perceived pedantry of Continental tradition, not least in its rejection of the values that defined the doctrines of the institution where the picture was on display and which had determined Loutherbourg’s own schooling as an artist.

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John Richard Moores (University of York), War with France in English political prints, c. 1740-1815

Robin Simon’s Hogarth, France and British Art challenged the view of William Hogarth as Francophobe nationalist by emphasising his cosmopolitanism and placing his art within a Continental context. Though he was dismissive towards the genre, Hogarth had a profound influence on lower forms of political and social prints (or ‘caricatures’). Much like Hogarth’s output, such prints have been interpreted as projecting anti-Gallic attitudes. The so-called ‘golden age of caricature’ coincided with those years in which Gerald Newman and Linda Colley considered hostility towards the French to have contributed to the formation of national identity. Numerous political and social prints from this time focussed on France, yet most studies of this genre have concentrated on how the British portrayed themselves and each other. Those which have discussed prints on France have promoted the view that English perceptions of the French were essentially hostile.

Informed by war and rivalry as well as by trade, travel, and cultural exchange, the prints projected some positive characteristics onto the French ‘Other’, were often less concerned in lampooning the French than in undermining the personalities and policies of the ruling regime at home, they contain varying degrees of sympathy and affinity with the French, and are demonstrative of a relationship more distinct and intimate than that shared with any other nation. In times of conflict enmity was inevitably more apparent, but even then the prints did not necessarily promote an Anglo-French relationship defined by antagonism and derision.

The Salon of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture: Archaeology of an Institution
National Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, 13-15 September 2012

Proposals due by 15 March 2012

International Symposium by Centre Interuniversitaire d’étude sur la République des lettres (CIERL), under the direction of Dr Isabelle Pichet

The historiography of the Salon of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris is often bereft of a key part of its history: how the Salon itself became an art institution. Originally integrated into the fêtes de l’Académie, over time the Salon came to be best known in the form of a temporary, independent, and recurrent exhibition. This event developed little by little, reimagining itself through and eventually blossoming as the popular biennal exhibition. The unique character of the Salon was established through the regular repetition of the exhibition cycle, a sequence that helped to root the event’s particular characteristics in the minds of the public and in the regard of other institutions. In creating this rhythm within Parisians’ horizon of expectation, the Salon provided a habitus for their audience; moreover, the Salon inspired curiosity and desire in the provinces and nations that sought to imitate it.

This conference seeks to define and better understand the trajectory followed by the Salon from its emergence in the late 17th century to its full maturity in the second half of the 18th century. This symposium aims also to identify the diverse parameters and conditions that contributed to the development and helped to affirm the singularity of the Salon. This call for papers solicits proposals that will increase our understanding of the foundations and limits that shaped the form and content of the Salon as well as help us to survey the influence and impact of these exhibitions on various aspects of French and European society. As a multidisciplinary event, this conference is a laboratory and reflection on current research and scholarly approaches that consider the Salon and its place in the “art worlds,” as well as literature, philosophy, politics, and history.

New, unpublished papers shall not exceed the twenty minutes allocated to each participant. Proposals for papers (title and abstract of 250 words, institutional affiliation) should be sent to the committee before March 15, 2012 at the following address: colloque.salon@lit.ulaval.ca

Plenary lecture by Dr. Kim de Beaumont, Adjunct professor at Hunter College, Art Historian specialist of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin

Applications due by 30 March 2012

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is pleased to announce a nine-month curatorial fellowship. The fellowship supports scholarly research related to the Clowes Collection at the IMA and provides curatorial training in the field of European painting and sculpture. The Clowes Fellow is fully integrated into the curatorial division of the Museum and has duties comparable to those of an assistant curator, ranging from collection research and management to exhibition development and the preparation of interpretive materials and programs.

To be eligible for the fellowship, the applicant must be enrolled in a graduate course of study leading to an advanced degree in the history of art or a related discipline, or be a recent degree recipient (within the last two years). Applicants must demonstrate scholarly excellence and promise, as well as a strong interest in the museum profession. U.S. citizenship is not required.

The Clowes Fellow will receive a stipend of $18,000 and an educational travel allowance of $2,000. Housing is provided in a scholar’s residence on the grounds of the museum. The nine-month fellowship period will begin September 4, 2012. The appointment is renewable.

Applications should include a cover letter explaining your interest in the fellowship, a curriculum vitae, a writing sample, a concise statement describing your area of research and its relationship to the Clowes Collection, and three letters of recommendation (academic and professional). Applications must be received by March 30, 2012.

Please send application materials to:
Ronda Kasl
Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture before 1800
Indianapolis Museum of Art
4000 Michigan Road
Indianapolis, IN 46208-3326

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From a UICB press release (17 January 2012) . . .

Tim Barrett of the University of Iowa Center for the Book Launches Paper History Website

Research by a University of Iowa led team reveals new information about why paper made hundreds of years ago often holds up better over time than more modern paper. Led by Timothy Barrett, director of papermaking facilities at the UI Center for the Book, the team analyzed 1,578 historical papers made between the 14th and the 19th centuries. Barrett and his colleagues devised methods to determine their chemical composition without requiring a sample to be destroyed in the process, which had limited past research. The results of this three-year project show that the oldest papers were often in the best condition, in part, Barrett says, due to high levels of gelatin and calcium.

“This is news to many of us in the fields of papermaking history and rare book and art conservation,” says Barrett. “The research results will impact the manufacture of modern paper intended for archival applications, and the care and conservation of historical works on paper.”

Barrett says one possible explanation for the higher quality of the paper in the older samples is that papermakers at the time were attempting to compete with parchment, a tough enduring material normally made from animal skins. In doing so, they made their papers thick and white and dipped the finished sheets into a dilute warm gelatin solution to toughen it. . . .

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From the project website, Paper through Time . . .

This website is designed for use by a wide range of visitors, from the complete novice to the paper-conservation scientist. Newcomers to the site may want to begin with the PROJECT OVERVIEW & AUTHORS and CONCLUSIONS sections for a quick sense of our research and what we learned. Those unfamiliar with papermaking history and technique may wish to start with European Papermaking Techniques 1300-1800 (under BACKGROUND) for an introduction to the craft. Visitors with a strong interest in papermaking history, materials and processes, paper permanence, paper science, and paper conservation are advised to begin at the top of the menu to the left and click on each tab, reading as interest and time permit. The site will be updated regularly. Suggestions for changes are welcome via email messages . . .

Things: Material Cultures of the Long Eighteen Century
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, ongoing series

Please note the change to the time and location of the seminar:
We meet alternate Tuesdays 12.30-2.30pm in the CRASSH Seminar Room at 7 West Road on the Sidgwick Site.

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The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts.

Each seminar features two talks considering the same type of object from
different perspectives.

24 January 2012 — Fashion
Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire) and Amy Miller (National Maritime Museum)

7 February 2012 — Advertising
Dr Philippa Hubbard (Adam Matthew Digital) and Jenny Basford (University of York)

21 February 2012 — Porcelain
Dame Rosalind Savill (Wallace Collection) and Dr Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick)

6 March 2012 — Artist’s Things
Dr Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)

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Subscribe to the group mailing list at https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/crassh-things

Visit the external blog at http://thingsc18th.wordpress.com/

Emblems of Nationhood: Britishness, 1707-1901
University of St Andrews, 10-12 August 2012

Proposals due by 1 March 2012

George Cruikshank, "Death or Liberty!" 1819 ( The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

National identity is a central point of enquiry that is repeatedly called upon in contemporary social and political rhetoric. Our conference, ‘Emblems of Nationhood, 1707–1901’, will address the roots of this theme by discussing depictions of Britain and Britishness in literature, philosophy, and art between the Act of Union in 1707 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Over the course of this multidisciplinary conference, we aim to explore how expressions of nationalism have moulded both critical perspectives on national identity and their creative products.

Discussing emblems of nationhood in 2012 is a fitting way to mark the twentieth anniversary of Linda Colley’s seminal account of Britishness, Britons: Forging the Nation, and coincides with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Several broad questions could potentially  be explored in the course of the conference: What did Britishness mean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how was it represented and perceived? To what extent is nationalism tied with military events and empire building? How “British” was Britain before the launch of the Empire?

How did concepts of nationalism enter the public consciousness, both within the British Isles and abroad? What is the impact of artistic and cultural depictions of Britain and Britishness in domestic and international contexts? How can these historical ideas of Britishness enhance our contemporary understanding of the concepts of nationalism and national identity?

Alongside panel sessions and a roundtable discussion on national identity in the period, public expressions of nationhood will also be represented: we are planning an exhibition of pictorial representations of Britishness in the form of cartoons, banknotes, war-landscapes, etcetera, as well as an evening of patriotic entertainment from the period. Suggested topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

•Britannia and definitions of Britishness
•Liberty and Empire
•Four nations, archipelago and Britishness
•The Auld Alliance
•British history and histories of Britain
•Foreign and British taste
•Mother-nation and Commonwealth
•The Gothic revival, Gothic novels, and the ancient Gothic constitution
•Foreign perceptions of Britain and Britishness
•National anthems
•Expressions of Britishness in applied arts, satirical prints and cartoons
•The Great Exhibition of 1851
•The iconography of British institutions
•Positive and negative forms of national identity

We seek 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers from postgraduates and established scholars from across the Arts and Humanities. The deadline for submission is 1st March 2012. Please email submissions to EmblemsOfNationhood@gmail.com. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers, Dr Kristin Lindfield-Ott (mko4@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Jennifer Whitty (jw836@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Proposals due by 23 March 2011

In vista della V edizione della giornata di studio intitolata Grand Tour del Terzo Millenio (V edizione) Ricerche di Storia dell’Architettura dei Borsisti e Artiste e Artisti Stranieri a Roma, che si terrà presso la facoltà di Ingegneria dell’Università di Roma – Tor Vergata il 20 aprile 2012, viene lanciato un call for paper (con scadenza 23 marzo 2012) indirizzato a tutti i borsisti, studiosi e professori stranieri attualmente in Italia che vogliono partecipare alla giornata di studio attraverso una breve relazione di circa 10-12 minuti che presenti i risultati delle loro ricerche relative a Roma: architettura e rappresentazione della città. La giornata di studio vuole favorire lo scambio tra le Istituzioni culturali straniere e l’Università di Tor Vergata, tradizionale luogo di confronto internazionale sulla cultura architettonica.

La giornata di studi apre un dialogo permanente tra l’Università di Roma Tor Vergata e le istituzioni culturali straniere di Roma, attraverso incontri periodici con cadenza annuale. La cattedra di Storia dell’architettura invita gli studiosi delle Accademie straniere a presentare le loro ricerche sulla storia dell’architettura, della costruzione e delle arti a Roma. Questi incontri, che hanno cadenza annuale, sono aperti agli studenti, dottorandi, docenti e a quanti sono interessati allo scambio tra studiosi di scuole e nazionalità diverse.

La giornata di studi è divisa in quattro sessioni:
1- architettura contemporanea (secc. XIX-XXI)
2- architettura dell’evo moderno (secc. XV-XVIII)
3- rapporti tra archeologia e architettura
4- ricerche su architettura e paesaggio
Una discussione finale concluderà la giornata.

Le proposte, riferite esclusivamente ai temi sopra indicati, possono essere inviate sotto forma di un breve abstract (600 caratteri o 100 parole), il cui titolo faccia riferimento a un’area tematica. Esse dovranno essere inviate entro il 23 marzo 2012, all’indirizzo del coordinatore Giuseppe Bonaccorso (bonaccorso@ing.uniroma2.it). Entro il 27 marzo sarà comunicato il calendario definitivo della giornata di studio. La lingua ufficiale del convegno è l’italiano; potranno essere presentati testi e relazioni anche in inglese, francese e spagnolo.

The site is under editorship of Matthew McCormack, reviews editor for the Journal of Eighteenth-century Studies; the area editors are Zak Ozmo (Music), Daniel Cook (Media), Alexander Marr (Exhibitons), and Michael Caines (Theatre).

My apologies for the recent interruption in posting. I’m in Venice with fourteen students for our January term and just haven’t been able to spend as much time with the site as I had envisioned (traveling with an eighteen-month old has added its own further complications, if also joys).

Regular posts should resume soon, and I’ll include some of the terrific eighteenth-century offerings I’ve encountered — often as lovely surprises alongside materials from very different periods. In the short-term, thanks for your patience. I’ll be back soon. -CH