A friend of mine is in New Orleans this week and just sent me this great picture of one of the famous above-ground cemeteries in Louisiana. Because the terrain of Louisiana is primarily built upon swamp-land, cemeteries have to be built above ground as to prevent the rising of buried remains during times of flooding.

New Orleans Cemeteries Website

Article: “Uncovering the Truth about Above Ground Burial”

Collaborators: The Role of Collectors, Critics, Curators in Artistic Practice c. 1780-1914

26 June 2013, Humanities Research Centre, University of York

In May 1884 the art critic Marion Harry Spielmann wrote in defence of the often criticised profession of art criticism: ‘The critic – (I am not now referring to the mere notice writer of daily journalism) – spends his life in devotion not only to art but to artists: and, so far as public recognition is concerned, he reaps his reward in sneers and ‘chaff’: sneers from painters, thoughtless and irresponsible, like Mr Whistler; indifference from others less splenetic and querulous.’ Spielmann, a prolific author, editor and arts administrator, was an advocate for and close friend of numerous contemporary artists. Along with the collectors and curators whom he frequently worked with and wrote about, he was an active and influential participant in contemporary art practice in late-Victorian London.

Relationships between artists, collectors, critics and curators are often considered in isolation but rarely in tandem. Drawing upon a diverse range of case studies, covering a variety of local and global contexts, this one day post-graduate workshop aims to unpick consistencies, changes and crossovers in the sometimes fraught but often productive relationships between artists, collectors, critics and curators in the long nineteenth century. By bringing together students, early-career researchers and established academics, we hope the workshop will provide an informal but stimulating forum for conversation, debate and interdisciplinary exchange about the nineteenth-century art world and its constituents.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduate students, early career researchers and established academics. Papers might explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The advent of professional art critics and curators and its impact on artistic practice

• Patronage and collecting in the long nineteenth century

• Artists as collectors, critics and curators

• The fabrication and decoration of Museum buildings

• Curating contemporary art in the long nineteenth century

• The art press and art publishing

• The Grand Tour/tourists as collectors, critics and curators

• Conversations/collaborations in the studio

• Collectors, critics, curators and local/regional/national identities

• Agency and authorship in artistic practice in the long nineteenth century

• Documents: catalogues, contracts and correspondence

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Charlotte Drew (ckd502@york.ac.uk) and Eoin Martin (eoin.martin@warwick.ac.uk) by Friday 26 April.

This event is generously supported by the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

For more information about the centre see: http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/

Monday section: after participating in Luke Habberstad’s  analysis of a Chinese vessel, what did you learn about working with material culture?  How does Prown’s notion of “material as reflection of culture” compare and contrast with what Luke’s idea of “material making culture”?

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Monday: Luke Habberstad

Luke Habberstad is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History completing a dissertation on the development of imperial court institutions during the Western Han dynasty in China (206 BCE-9 CE). His interests are wide ranging, and he feels fortunate to be studying both a topic and a period that require asking big questions and employing a wide range of sources.

Wednesday: Sarah Gold McBride

Sarah Gold McBride is a third year PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Department of History. She also attended Berkeley for her undergraduate degree, where she wrote her senior thesis with Professor Waldo Martin. Her current research explores how nineteenth-century Americans used popular culture — including popular entertainment and scientific knowledge — to understand racial and gender difference.
An example of her work with visual resources can be found at US History Scene: “Power is on the Side of the Beard”: Masculinity and Facial Hair in Nineteenth Century America.

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Students are welcome to attend both sections if they desire.  Please e-mail the other section’s facilitators if you will be attending.  

The remains of the Ainsworth’s house in Moss Bank Park. Not the chimney of the Halliwell Bleachworks on the skyline.

For the final two weeks of March this was the scene of the first of four community excavations that Dig Greater Manchester will undertake this year. Despite the dig coinciding with the coldest March in 50 years and the heaviest snow, locally, of the winter (up to six inches in two days), more than 60 volunteers and the local history society helped out on the dig and around 70 people attended the Open Day on the final Saturday. There was plenty of exciting finds, including the somewhat surreal image of professional and volunteer archaeologists shovelling snow rather than dirt.

The aim of this year’s first dig was to locate the house built by the owners, the Ainsworths, and some of the housing occupied by the bleach and dye workers, also built by the Ainsworths. Within Trench 1 we uncovered the partial remains of the family wing of Moss Bank House. The remains showed three different building phases within the structure and during the last few days of the dig we uncovered a blocked mullioned window dating to the 18th century. Trench 2 revealed the remains of a 19th century wash house, and Trenches 3 and 4 revealed the partial remains of some 19th century workers housing.

These remains fall within one of the key research aims of the project: charting the creation of new cultural identities in the Industrial Revolution. By looking at the different types of finds from each site we are hoping to see if we can spot social differences between the occupants in the pottery, glass, and other material remains. So far, our DGM digs have looked at sites where the buildings have risen and fall in status during the Industrial Revolution; a feature reflected in the changing types of artefacts and building types recovered. The dwellings at Moss Bank Park suggest that the identification of differences in the finds assemblages at this latest site might not be straight-forward, due to the imbalance in the quantity of material recovered from each set of dwellings. There are some similarities in some of the pottery types, but it is not clear how far differences in depositional practices have affected these remains. However, there are status and display elements within the house of the Ainsworth family similar to some of the other sites we investigated in 2012. Once all 11 DGM site have been investigated a larger database, though, will provide clearer patterns of deposition and further lines of research which at the moment are only just beginning to emerge.

The University of Rochester Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies invites you to:

A Matter of Time: Temporalities of Material Culture

An interdisciplinary graduate studies conference in Rochester, NY
April 5-6, 2013 — Free and open to the public

www.vcsconference.com

As cultural critics have noted over the past thirty years, we seem to be living in an age of dematerialization. Increased information transfer speed, the disintegration of boundaries between private and public, and the commercialization of image networks have provoked anxiety regarding the control of objects and images. Yet, taking a critical stance toward the temporal thrust of this thinking—its teleology, its faith in progress—we seek to historicize this anxiety as merely another renegotiation in a continually evolving relation of time and matter. Has our relationship to material objects ever been fixed?

Events include:

* Keynote address by Dr. Ivan Gaskell , professor of cultural history and museum studies at Bard Graduate Center
* Panel on current trends in media preservation by students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
* Presentations by graduate students of literature, visual studies, art history, and cultural studies at universities in the United States, Canada, Poland, and Colombia

The evening of Friday, April 5 will conclude with a reception and 16mm film screening. Breakfast and lunch will be served on Saturday, April 6.

Please visit our conference website for a schedule of events, paper abstracts, and information about our keynote speaker: www.vcsconference.com . RSVP to our Facebook event for more updates: https://www.facebook.com/events/494369233953869/

Sponsors: The Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies; Deans’ Office, College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering; the Departments of Anthropology, Art and Art History​, Film and Media Studies, and Modern Languages and Cultures; Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies; the Graduate Organizing Group

The session entitled “Buns in the Oven, Bodies in Space: Women, Materials, Politics” was an opportunity to weave together Laura Price’s research on knitting, women, and the body, with Mia Hunt’s recent investigations into the politics of pregnant and maternal bodies and her embodied experience as an expectant mother.

Mia discussed how pregnancy brings the body back into view and stirs public anxiety about our societal need to control our bodily matter.  As Laura explained, knitting too can be perceived as “matter out of place” and, while it can make the body less threatening, it also runs a similar risk of unravelling.

Knitting during pregnancy can be seen as a reaction to the anxiety surrounding separation of mother and foetus, but also a way to protect the baby once in the world.  The knitted hat, for example, protects the baby’s head, which is still being “knitted together” post-birth (Pajaczkowska 2007).  The conceptualisation of this separation, and the visualisation of the unborn baby, has had implications not only for knitting.  Politically it has resulted in the idea of the “foetal citizen” and the social surveillance and governance of the mother – making even strangers feel vindicated in judging a pregnant woman’s body, behaviour, dress, and consumption practices. (See Deborah Lupton’s blog for further discussion.)

We explored a number of reasons why the UK’s rates of breastfeeding are among the worst in the industrialised West.  In relation to public space, we discussed the continued prudishness around public breastfeeding, as highlighted in recent literature, personal anecdotes, the increase of quarantining breastfeeding rooms, and a video showing more than 170 “lactivists” breastfeeding in Paddington Station in 2011.  Not only “lactivists”, but “craftivists” too have attacked the sexualisation of women’s breasts in the media, citing it as a contributing factor to public anxiety around seeing a non-sexualised breast.  For example, crafted banners have railed against The Sun’s “Page 3 Girl”, and “boob caps” play with the perceived need for discretion.

Source: http://lulastic.co.uk/activism/feminism/boobs-are-brilliant-but-not-news

Prudishness and micro-practices of public shaming have positioned breastfeeding as “out of place” and contributed to the shrinking life-worlds for many women.  For us, this provokes questions about the right to the city and gender inequity.  Breastfeeding in public makes women’s work visible.  As the work by many craftspeople and artists illustrates, care-work in the home is often invisible and deemed non-work through its spatiality and politics of love and care.

In the second half of our session, we discussed the issues of work/life balance in academia and a paper provocatively subtitled: “How many papers is a baby ‘worth’?” (Klocker & Drozdzewski 2012).  Although this is an issue for all, there are particular implications for early-career women academics: the most important time for academic productivity coincides with a dramatic decline in our fertility.  As we try to “have it all”, the statistics on mothers’ challenges in academia are as disheartening as public breastfeeding rates, and cannot speak to the potential detriments to the children involved.

As a number of people highlighted, although we try to keep the body quiet and keep our care-work away from our academic lives, life and work are constantly smashing into each other.  These are issues that institutions have been slow to take into account.  That said, during discussion, Katherine Brickell noted that some headway is being made, citing the Women and Geography Study Group’s successful lobby for crèche facilities at the RGS-IBG annual conference. (See the current issue of Area for a debate on the future of the WGSG.)

Responses to our presentation were lively and varied.  While some in attendance were incredulous that issues of public breast feeding still posed a challenge for women – or were still worth discussing – for many others, the stories, videos, crafts, and literature we presented seemed to highlight that women’s issues still demand attention, both in our research and in our institutions.  Indeed, we don’t have to look very far to see that gender imbalances are still present within Geography’s hierarchies.

Laura Price and Mia Hunt are PhD candidates in Cultural Geography.  Their research blogs can be found at http://knittedgeographies.wordpress.com/ and http://keepingshop.blogspot.com/

Click here to download the session’s supplemental reading list.

References:

Brickell, K. & K. Browne (eds.) (2013). Special section: Gender or women? Debating the future of the Women and Geography Study Group. Area, 45(1): 2 -15.

Klocker, N. & D. Drozdzewski (2012). Career progress relative to opportunity: How many papers is a baby ‘worth’? Environment and Planning A, 44(6): 1271-1277.

Pajackowska, C. (2007). Thread of attachment. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 5(2) 140 -152.

The Virtual Magic Bowl Archive is a collaborative environment for the publication of magic bowls in the Moussaieff, Dehays, and Barakat collections.  It is housed at the University of Southampton, under the direction of Dr. Dan Levene, with a number of other prominent collaborators in Europe, Israel, and North America.  While the archive, which includes photographs and transcriptions, currently has restricted access, The VMBA site contains several useful resources and descriptions of ongoing projects.  These include the Aramaic Magical Texts from Late Antiquity (AMTLA), a BIRAX project conducted by Dr. Dan Levene and Prof. Gideon Bohak, part of which is the valuable prosopography of the Babylonian Magic Bowls, compiled by Dr. Ortal-Paz Saar of Tel Aviv University, which covers the major corpora of bowls in the various dialects of Aramaic found in Sasanian and early Islamic Mesopotamia, i.e., Jewish Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic.  Additionally, the site describes Dan Levene’s Aggressive Jewish Aramaic Incantation Project, which resulted in a textual corpus, published as a print book; as well as his online introduction to the subject.

Here are some other examples of material culture in West African countries.  These are examples of clothing that we wear to special events like weddings and parties.  This has remained the culture for generations and it helps identify us and our culture. When a woman wears these clothes, it shows respect and also shows that we are proud to show our cultural clothes to others. They are different type of these clothes and different textures. Here you can see they are made into different styles.  Some of the styles show the status of the person wearing it.

This is what men wear for special events.

The other material thing that is considered a part of material culture is the kind of homes people live in. Houses in Congo differentiate people in the society.  Houses represent the status of individuals in the community.  If you come from a rich background, people we automatically tell that you are rich because you can afford to live in a very beautiful house.

The above  is an  example of a house for someone who is rich and has a high status in the society. Material culture has become very important to most Congolese people because if you own a house like this one you create a history and you will be respected.

Another example of homes people consider important and which give them high status is the French-style home.  French-style homes are built to show how much people value material culture. They also show outsiders that we have things that are important to us. I think having material culture is a good thing and can help you in some ways. Not all the homes in Congo are like those shown above.   These are only shown to demonstrate some of the material culture of Congo.

One of the most well-known sociological theories is George Ritzer’s idea of McDonaldization. This idea initially leads many to think of the company McDonald’s for which the term is properly coined after. McDonaldization defined by the sociologist George Ritzer is “The process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world” (Gordon). Ritzer’s based his idea’s on sociologist Max Weber’s work, that capitalism and industrialization were fueling a world in which our individual freedoms are being eroded.

By adapting Weber’s concerns to a more contemporary setting Ritzer saw that the fast food industry, in particular, is a great factor in how society is being effected today. The way that fast food industries prepare food for consumers is a prime example of Max Weber’s theory of the rationalization of the modern world. For instance, these companies use methods of scientific management for the improvement of economic efficiency (Wikipedia) and Fordism, which is the process of standardizing mass production (Wikipedia). These methods can guarantee, efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control to customers. Due to such practices, McDonald’s and other fast food companies included are having a negative effect over many other social institutions. Methods in the fast food industries continue to invade other aspects of our lives; health care, education, and even the media are impacted by McDonaldization’s expansion and acceptance in today’s society.

These four main dimensions of McDonaldization are achieved by taking rationalization to the extreme. In sociology, rationalization is simply defined as the way to replace logical rules for illogical ones (McDonaldization.com). By doing this, almost every task is simplified to its greatest possibility and results in an efficient, logical sequence of methods that can complete the task the exact way every time with the same precise desired outcome.

Having the ability to have controlled, consistent, and measurable outcomes are what any business works for. Seeing how these goals are rewarding for businesses and consumers, how might it be seen as a problem? As we all know, fast food is not the healthiest choice out there. It is high in fat, salt, and low in nutritional value. With obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems on the rise, it simply makes little sense for us to continue eating such products. This has non-Americans stumped as to why the norm is accepted when all the negative side effects of fast food are understood and yet we have no problem continuing to indulge in it. Once over the culture shock of our dependency on fast food, foreigners lose the ethnocentrism they once had and they themselves fall into our material culture.

Just like our craving for fast food, our educational system is seeking a more efficient model for our future generations. Standardized test and using inventions like social media have drawbacks (Bruenderman). Thanks to a rationalized model of education, teachers simply fill the students like boxes for the sole purpose of passing the next test. This process is efficient and means that the students have the best chance of graduation. Consequently, if all you learned in school were dates and facts, where would the personal interactions we all learned from go? As a result, what was once an intellectual exchange of knowledge between professor and student now results in nothing more than a business transaction. The students today are seen as consumers with the ideal that they need to go to college to get a job which in the past was looked at as a way to further a persons education rather than increasing their future salary. Regrettably, the restructuring of education from McDonaldization not only is occurring in schools but the media as well.

Today’s media, like the USA Today for example, has changed the way local newspapers present the news (Bruenderman) . Look at how headlines today are presented. Stories are shorter, contain only the needed information and infrequently do they continue to a second page. This lets the reader or viewer learn about many stories in a short amount of time without having to turn the page or flip channels. Media has also become brighter in the sense that journalists and reporters include brighter colors to grab attention. These tactics have lead to greater profits for news media outlets around the world. However, contemporary news is now more about entertaining the readers instead of informing them. Subsequently, the McDonaldization of the news does not accurately educate readers or let them form their own opinions on issues that are being reported about.

Taking the time to look at how much this country has shifted from quality to quantity shows how greatly the well being, learning, and our media insight have become McDonalized. Thanks to rationalization, people across these parts of society have become hypnotized into believing “more is better.”  I believe it would be highly beneficial to combat this growing problem if we look closely at all the different ways our lives are affected by McDonaldization, first starting with its effects on LansingCommunity College. Looking at how our daily observations and interactions in which we spend almost half the year could lead to a greater understanding of the negative effects McDonaldization has on our daily lives. In doing this, maybe we will find a way to reverse the effects this McDonaldized society has on us.

Work Cited

Bruenderman, Andrew. NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF McDONALDIZATION. Rep. no. 2. Vol. 1. N.p.: GattonCollege of Business & Economics, University of Kentucky, n.d. Print.

“Fordism.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

GORDON MARSHALL. “McDonaldization.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998.Encyclopedia.com. 21            Feb. 2013.

Kaufman, Peter. “The Rationality of Irrationality.” Web log post. N.p., 10 Sept. 2012. Web. 20 Feb.     2013. (McDonald space man picture found here as well)

“McDonaldization.com – What Is It?” McDonaldization.com – What Is It? N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.       (Lady Eating Burger Pic)

“McDonaldization Theory of George Ritzer.” YouTube. YouTube, 24 Oct. 2007. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

“Rationalization (sociology).” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

“Scientific Management.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

I guess this semester really is wrapping up. And just as I’m hitting my stride as a grad student! Ah well, there’s always a PhD. Sooner or later you’ll be reading blog posts by Dr. Dumm.

Conducting research at the RCPE in my free time.

***

Sometime at the beginning of March 1649, one Mumford, a bookbinder and “a poore man living in St. Pulchers Parish” had “taken some…Bookes to bind,” reportedly in order to earn money for his family and his pregnant wife.  Yet, according to the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus, “Information being given (by a base Sycophanticall jade who lived neare by him)” prompted a crew of “Sectarian Raga-muffin Souldiers” to forcibly enter his house.  They then “wounded the poore man in foure or five places, cut his books to pieces and tooke what they lik’t of his goods away with them” (3H2r).

The poor bookbinder and the intruding soldiers show us something of a text’s tangibility; sheets of paper become “books,” which are in turn reduced to “pieces” – and both sit alongside Mumford’s “goods,” his material possessions.  Books, perhaps most acutely during the Civil War, are more than just “text.”  In detailing the destruction of the binder’s house and materials, Mercurius Pragmaticus, with its explicit ideological agenda, emphasises the forms of creation and labour required in disseminating texts, possibly commenting on its own precarious production.

The short anecdote about Mumford is in this instance rather sad, but it nevertheless affirms the risky romance of the royalist book trade during the Civil War and the Interregnum.  Loyalist book production was a tricky business; the violent treatment of the bookbinder Mumford indicates that all areas of non-conformist book production were potentially dangerous, complicated, or criminal.

It is in this atmosphere that William Marshall, signed variously as Will: Marshall, W.M., W. Marshall, and, perhaps tellingly, Guil: Marshall, worked the final years of his trade as an engraver and illustrator of books.  The most prominent English engraver of his generation, Marshall decorated many significant texts with frontispieces and author-portraits, from the mountainous edifice that so upset the author of Emblemes, George Wither, to what was apparently too accurate a portrait of John Milton.  Yet, it is his curious change of signature, moving from the vernacular “Will.” or “William” to the Latinised “Guil:”, for Guilelmus, that drew my attention when I began to work on his frontispieces last year, and I have been thinking about it further in recent weeks.  It seems to me that the Latin frontispieces are part of a self-conscious move towards explicitly political engraving on Marshall’s behalf and they make an impressive claim for images as an important, if not central, tool in royalist resistance, making texts into political things.

***

The Latinised form of Marshall’s first name first appears in a portrait of John Fletcher in 1647, and, amongst extant works, he signs himself ‘Guil’ or a variant seven times:

All these publishers have royalist connections, and all date from the late 1640s or, the last, from 1650.  Three are explicit royalist texts - Eikon, Royal charter, and Letters which passed at Nevv-castle – and they are the three frontispieces.

Pictures were certainly associated with royalist propaganda.  The production of images contributed to the arrests and fines of Marshall’s printers and booksellers.  Royston (the main royalist publisher), as we shall see, was charged for the frontispiece of the Henderson papers.  John Williams, too, was arrested “to the Gatehouse, for printing and publishing scandalous and seditious pamphlets” on Christmas Day 1649 (Calendar of State Papers 453).  Following the “Act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets,” passed on the 20^th September 1649, charges almost always include a warning against seditious “pictures” and in October that year, Ratcliffe and Mottershead were subject to “recognizances” with the charge “not to print any seditious or unlicensed books, pamphlets, or pictures, nor suffer his presses to be used for any such purpose” (Calendar 523).  It is perhaps no coincidence that it was around this year Marshall’s Latinised signature appears and he produces a number of powerful royalist images.  The concern over the printing of pictures testifies to the increasing recognition of their subversive potential and their importance to the royalist book trade. The anxiety surrounding images, as much as bookbinding, suggests that for a mid-seventeenth century book-buyer, there is indeed something outside the text.

With regards to Marshall’s frontispieces, without doubt the most famous (possibly the most well-known of the entire period) is Eikon Basilike, which contains signs and symbols instantly recognisable to royalist readers and is characteristic of Marshall’s native and plain style:

Eikon Basilike appeared somewhere early in 1649, as suggested by correspondence between Dr Hammond and Dr Sheldon regarding

 …y^e sight of those fruits

Of his retirements which Royston sent

Mee down with y^e sad narratiues’

(BM MS Harleian 6942, ff.84)

Much ink has been exchanged regarding the nature of the printing of Eikon Basilike and its true genesis, but with regards to the frontispiece, it appears that the papers were sent to publisher Richard Royston, bearing “a Crowne’ with ‘^their wreaths of thornes.” Before printing, though, “his M^tie  sent an Other figure” to be “ingraven in Copper,” according to the evidence of William Levett, former page to King Charles (and many thanks to the Haszard family, of Milford Hall, Staffordshire, for allowing me to view and transcribe the Levett material in person). Levett’s evidence includes a statement from Richard Royston that Levett later set down by hand on 18^th November 1684.  It contains a blank space, presumably for an engraver’s name.  In the margin of this letter is written the precise instructions for the image, to be “ingraven in Copper…and annexled to the Booke which I haue by mee.”  The letter, in this light, suggests that the frontispiece was central to printing the first copy.  

Indeed, the precise instructions of Dr Hammond, in a letter to Sheldon on 20 May, testify to the significance of visually adorning the King’s writings: 

…Those

papers haue been done this weeke, but

are yet in expectation of a frontispiece…

(BM MS Harleian 6942 ff. 14)

Continuing the letter vertically, Hammond notes the importance of the frontispiece to the text as an object, central to its final condition.  He reveals that the frontispiece, integral to the book production,

 delayes their coming out till next weeke & becaus I suppose you desire to

haue them perfect, I send you them not till y^e next.

It is the image that makes the text “perfect.” Marshall’s work suggests, at least for the mid-seventeenth century, that the frontispiece is much more than just “an elaborate allegorical and emblematic visual introduction to the book” (Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown 6) – it is essential to its form and meaning, as central a part of composition and reception as the work of Mumford the binder.

It is probable that Hammond’s letter refers not to the Eikon, however, but to The Papers which passed at Nevv-castle, also known as the Henderson papers.  Hammond was involved both in the Eikon, as noted above in his reference to “those fruits,” and more actively in the publication of the Henderson papers.  The latter appeared from Royston’s press later in 1649, it seems likely that Hammond is referring to this publication in his expectation of a frontispiece (see BM MS Harleian 6942 ff. 100 for discussion over the papers).

Indeed, the publisher Royston was apprehended for the publication of The Papers which passed at Nevv-castle.  Francis Madan conjectures that the papers were “intended to accompany his own current edition of the Eikon“ (2) and indeed Hammond’s correspondence also suggests that the papers be “Ioyned to anther edition” of the Eikon (BM MS Harleian 6942 ff. 100).  Significantly, when it was finally printed, William Marshall provided the frontispiece – probably the engraving that Hammond and Sheldon were waiting for on May 20:

Frontispiece, BM

Again, it is most notably the frontispiece of the text that offended the authorities, and not its textual content.  The eighteenth entry in the State Papers on 31 May 1649 records that

Aldermen Pennington and Atkins were to send for the author of the book called ‘The papers which passed at Newcastle’, examine him concerning the frontispiece, and proceed against him. (Calendar 167)

Indeed, the image itself draws a visual comparison with the Eikon and the Latin inscription reads “Non enim te spreverunt Solum, sed me spreverunt, ne Regnem super ipsos,” ‘‘for they have not rejected you alone, but rejected me, not to rule over them.’  The royalist connection of Charles with martyrdom and with the true religion is already familiar.  The angelic figures at the top of the engraving, surrounding the sun, suggest a figurative play on “Solum,” but also present the image of a King who has exchanged, as Dr Juxon reportedly said, “a Temporal” for “an eternal Crown, a good exchange” (“A Perfect Diurnal…” 1744).

The third frontispiece that Marshall signed Guil: is Thomas Bayly’s The royal charter granted unto kings. Bayly’s text is itself founded upon visual imagery, dependant upon both emotional and political pictures.  He writes that “Kings are lively representations, living statues, or pictures, drawn to the life of the great deity” (C4r), drawing on a familiar royalist platform for propaganda.  It is a sentiment that pervades the printing practices of the London royalists, present in Dr Hammond’s esteem of the frontispiece in his correspondence and in the vividness of Charles’s prose in the Eikon.  It may also go some way to explaining the visual “parallels” between God and the King in Marshall’s frontispieces.  Bayly even makes a direct comparison with the “carver or engraver,” who can erase his image if he “mislike” it (C3v).  The engraver was clearly an important part of the royalists’ literal and metaphorical image-making.

Royal charter, frontispiece, BM

The hand extending from the clouds is commonplace in all early modern iconography, and Marshall is particularly fond of it.  In this instance, Bayly’s text itself provides some justification for the image, as he notes that “Emperours used to stamp their coyne with a hand coming out of the clouds, holding a crown, and placing it upon their head; we have no such Hieroglyphicks in our Coyne, as a hand coming out of a cloud…” (D3 recto). The gesture, in this light, takes on some rather provocative political overtones, aligning the monarch with an emperor, and harking back to the glorious Roman empire – the homeland of learned Latin alluded to here by the newly Latinate Guil.  Indeed, the Latin draws together the three Guil frontispieces, here stating that Charles’s flowers and lyre/lute are seen as lions (tuere leones), in comparison to the Tree of Jesse (Flos Jesse) and the Lion of Judah (Iudaeq. Leo).  The Tree of Jesse is known to be a symbol of growth and birth, often compared to Jesus, and the Lion of Judah also represents Christ.  Both images are related to the “Root of David” (Revelations 5:5).  Tellingly, it is the cult of King David that is central to Caroline iconography, and in Eikon, Charles writes: ‘I come far short of Davids piety; yet since I may equall Davids affections, give me also the comforts and the sure mercies of David’ (P6 recto).  The Latin on all three frontispieces clearly engages with the body of writing surrounding Charles’s “martyrdome.”

***

If Mumford’s ordeal in March 1649 suggests that books are not simply text, that all aspects of creating the object of a book – from printing to binding – are politically sensitive, then Guil: Marshall‘s three Latin frontispieces show the importance of picture-making.  It is the images that riled the authorities and that still catch our attention, as much as the words inside those dangerously bound covers. Perhaps (if possible in this incredibly brief survey of Marshall’s later work) they also affirm the interrelatedness of Civil War writing, tasking us to see not only the “collaborative, multimedia text” (Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler 111), but the text as a composite political object, with all the “scandalous and seditious” material of bindings, covers, books, and pictures.

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Appendix: An up-to-date table (20 March 2013) showing state of the frontispiece and known whereabouts of the first issue of the first edition of Eikon Basilike, due to the absence of accurate information elsewhere (including the ESTC).

Works Cited:

Pecke, Samuel. “No. 288, Tuesday, January 30.” A Perfect Diurnal of Some Passage in Parliament.  1649. The Norton of English Literature Volume B.  Ed. George M. Logan et al.  London: Norton, 2006.  1741-1744. Print.

Bayly, Thomas.  The royal charter granted unto kings, by God himself.  London: 1649. Print.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1649-1650.  Ed Mary Anne Everett Green. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd, 1965. Print.

Charles I and John Gauden.  Eikon Basilike.  London: R. Royston, 1649. Print.

Corbett, Margery and Roger Lightbown.  The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550-1600.  London: Routledge, 1979. Print.

Hammond, Henry.  Letters.  BM. MS. Harleian 6942, ff.84, 100, 114.  British Library, London.

Madan, Francis.  A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. Print.

Nedham, Marchamont et al.  Mercurius pragmaticus: communicating intelligence from all parts, touching all affairs, designes, humours, and conditions throughout the Kingdome…Part 2 Num. 45 (March 5 to March 12, 1649).  Print.

Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth.  “Authorship and Authority: John Milton, William Marshall, and the Two Frontispieces of Poems 1645.”  Milton Quarterly 33.4 (1999): 105-114.  Project Muse.  Web.  12 Mar. 2013.

Cun Zi Yi – Chongqing, China

The project’s author, Italian photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, sees this study as anthropological in nature and he argues that children’s  relationships to their toys can throw light on both universalities and differences in the experience of childhood. For example, children are all the same in that they essentially want to play,

But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country. Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys and that it took time before they allowed him to play with them (which is what he would do pre-shoot before arranging the toys), whereas in poorer countries he found it much easier to quickly interact, even if there were just two or three toys between them.

The photos are very effective at conveying at a glance all sorts of information about the lives of these kids, including contrasts in living conditions, income levels and the gendering of childhood. There is also something quite intimate about the shots of the kids with their favourite loot which also helps to convey that stuff is never “just stuff” but an integral part of how we make, and are made by, our material worlds.

But as well as intimacy the essay is also testimony to the ubiquity of capitalism. All the kids display stuff that was made in factories, even Chiwa from Malawi, in one of the more poignant images, standing among the mosquito nets in what appears to be a very basic brick hut, showing off a couple of stuffed kitties and a plastic dinosaur. It might seem like an obvious point, but all these kids are making their intimate worlds with objects that begin their lives as mass-produced and anonymous commodities. I wonder if it’s this fact which cause the photos, even those showing kids in relatively affluent contexts, to evoke a certain pathos in me?

Chiwa from Malawi.

Barely remember even starting to make these last night. I finished designing my printmaking book around 4 AM and was semi-wired and started playing with my CMCS posters again. I wanted the image to the the focus – the object the most important aspect of the design.

Was the background taking away from my message or was it functioning as an enhancement of my concept? What would happen if I re-shot on white?

It was semi-killing me in my last design that I didn’t do much with the bottom type. Thought this new iteration would give me more freedom. May still be working out some of the details, but some rather quick mockups of something that will be re-shot this weekend. (I literally cut out the background with the magic wand last night…)

Would love some feedback on the imagery/composition side of things. (These are all done on the same poster, but the same idea can be accomplished across the designs of the ones I was working with earlier yesterday. For that post, click here.)

Until next time…

Been working on CMCS all day! I think I am finally getting somewhere. Before last critique I was feeling a little lost, but I’ve gathered my thoughts and taken the constructive criticism to approach this poster project a little differently. For where I was last class, click here.

I am still playing along with the same concept: humans interact with different materials depending on the environment these materials are presented in.

I started playing with organic materials: things like dirt, leaves, dead flowers, etc. to make up my “recipe” for the cupcake. (Now imagine me scavenging my front lawn for plant debris while people were walking to class…) How would people interact with a cupcake if, well, it was made of dirt? Where does the discussion go?

For my experiments I went along the same lines of the type functioning as image. I want it to be my focal point; I want my imagery and object to be the most important part of the poster. Yes, the symposium is what the poster is advertising, but material culture is about the objects and how human interact with them. I hope to grab people’s attention with my imagery and upon closer inspection he or she would find out just what it is all about.

In the end, I chose to focus on the iterations that hinted at the cupcake rather than having everything being spoon-fed to the viewer. 1+1 =3, right? I think a more interesting discussion can be made by making people think a little…

I played a bit with sparkles as I felt at times that the setting of my dirt cupcake almost felt too natural of an environment for the materials despite its obvious juxtaposition. I was drawn to the artificiality of them in comparison to the very organic elements.

Here’s a look at my process/progress.

Feedback fully appreciated and encouraged. :O) These are due Tuesday along with D&AD. It’s going to be a long weekend!

Now to work on my recipe book for printmaking…

Jennifer Leigh

And yes, midway through creating the type I sneezed and it went everywhere. Not sure what is worse: having sugar all over my floor or dirt.