Maureen Daly Goggin

Beth Fowkes Tobin

Explored in this volume are women's material practices, which range from production within the fields of fine and decorative arts, including needlework and sculpture, to the bricoleur's re-use of natural and fabricated objects in such activities as fancy work, paper arts, and scrapbooking. Also, theorized and described are the ways in which women engaged in meaning making, identity formation, and commemoration through their production and manipulation of material artifacts.

Gendered Material Strategies

Women and Things, 1750-1950

An interdisciplinary study of visual representations of British colonial power in the eighteenth century.

Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-century British Painting

Picturing Imperial Power

Chloe Wigston Smith

Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness or the hand's dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature

Small Things in the Eighteenth Century

Playful, useful, decorative, revolutionary: small things possess a rich array of meanings, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Examining the compelling and often poignant connection between women and the material culture of death, this collection looks at the objects women make, the images they keep, the practices they use or are responsible for, and the places they inhabit and construct through ritual and custom. Women's material practices are explored as well as women's affective responses and sentimental labor that mark their expected and unexpected participation in the social practices surrounding death and the dead.

Women and the Material Culture of Death

Andrea Feeser

The purpose of this essay collection is to recover color's complex and sometimes morally troubling past. By emphasising color's materiality, and how it was produced, exchanged and used, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts.

The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800

The Materiality of Color

Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the 2nd Duchess of Portland (1715-1785), was one of the wealthiest women in eighteenth-century Britain. She collected fine and decorative arts (the Portland Vase was her most famous acquisition), but her great love was natural history, and shells in particular. Over the course of twenty years, she amassed the largest shell collection of her time, which was sold after her death in a spectacular auction. Beth Fowkes Tobin illuminates the interlocking issues surrounding the global circulation of natural resources, the commodification of nature, and the construction of scientific value through the lens of one woman’s marvelous collection. This unique study tells the story of the collection’s formation and dispersal--about the sailors and naturalists who ferried rare specimens across oceans and the dealers’ shops and connoisseurs’ cabinets on the other side of the world. Exquisitely illustrated, this book brings to life Enlightenment natural history and its cultures of collecting, scientific expeditions, and vibrant visual culture.

Beth Fowkes Tobin

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