Jeudi 11 mai à 17h (Serpente, salle D421)

Sally Holloway, ‘Food, Family & Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England’

It is well established that the navigation of courtship in Georgian England was shaped by a range of romantic gifts including ribbons, rings, garters, gloves, and portrait miniatures, which helped to generate feelings of love and shepherd courting couples toward the altar. Yet these were not the only items which couples had at their disposal: in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), it is the humble walnut which enables the farmer Robert Martin to express his admiration for the heroine’s protégée Harriet Smith, while in Pride & Prejudice (1813) it is the beautiful pyramids of hothouse fruits and hospitality at Pemberley which first lead Elizabeth Bennet to realise her love for Mr Darcy. Such edible offerings are largely absent from scholarship on courtship in Georgian England, though they were likely among the most common material objects routinely exchanged by and shared between couples.

This paper sets out how courting couples orchestrated their relationships using a breath of edible gifts from cakes and sweetmeats to apricots, peaches, pineapples, melons, duck, pork, venison, turbot, oysters, and sturgeon. These sweet treats, fruits, meats, and fish could variously be deployed as a means of flirtation, to gauge early romantic interest, underscore the status and generosity of the giver, show investment in the bodily health of the recipient as a future spouse, and bind two families together before matrimony. Together, they add a crucial dimension to our understanding of the widely recognised ‘gift mode’ during courtship, illuminate the mechanics of courtship as rooted in family homes and gardens, and the new spaces of the metropolitan public sphere, and demonstrate how natural or perishable items such as food could operate as powerful vehicles for emotional meaning.

Dr Sally Holloway is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History and History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in histories of emotions, gender, and visual and material culture in Britain over the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the co-editor of Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018), and the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture (Oxford, 2019) which has recently been released in paperback (2022). 

Jeudi 13 octobre 2022 à 17h (salle D421 à Serpente) :

Bénédicte Miyamoto, “Satire & art market practices: the auction as visual trope in the eighteenth-century”

As auctions burst on the London scene, they became convenient shortcuts for satirists. Increasingly familiar with these urban spectacles, their actors and ‘props’, the public perceived auctions as highly volatile events rooted in consumer manipulation. Prints reverting to the tropes of the auction tended to satirize contracts between unequal parties and with power or information imbalance – from scandalous marriages to corrupt political representation. In turn, this reinforced the distrust towards connoisseurship, the collecting impulse, and the burgeoning art market.

Drawing from the collection of the British Museum and the Lewis Walpole Library, episodes of intense satire production (1730s, 1760s, and 1790s) can be identified, revealing the anxieties of the early modern to modern market transition, the intersections of the modern state and the marketplace, and the public disquiet at shifting valuations of taste and arbitration.

However, by confronting reputation to praxis, and investigating itemized bills and annotated catalogues, we gain insight into the art world’s business practices, explaining the increasing commercial success of auctions in the face of their enduring public disrepute.

Bénédicte MIYAMOTO (PhD, Université Paris Diderot) is an Associate Professor in British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and a scholar of the eighteenth-century British art market and artistic professions. She has published her research in Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images De Marchi and Raux, Brepols, 2014; Marketing Art in the British Isles, Gould and Mesplède, Ashgate, 2016; Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, Baetens and Lyna, Brill, 2019, and London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, Huemer and Avery-Quash, Getty 2019, Art Markets, Agents and Collectors, Turpin and Bracken, 2021. She has co-edited Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge (LWW, Brill 2020) and Art & Migration (MUP, 2021).

Jeudi 24 mars 2022, 17h-18h30
Maison de la recherche
28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, salle D421


Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)

Globalizing the Highland Tour: Ossian, Earth History, and ‘Fingal’s Cave’.

In this paper I reflect on themes connected with the 18th century Highland Tour, notably Ossianic enthusiasm, global networks, geology, and the dawn of the carbon age. I will discuss two illustrated travel accounts, both the work of naturalists and Ossian enthusiasts, that established ‘Fingal’s Cave’ as the ultimate destination of the romantic tour. The first is English naturalist Joseph Bank’s journal account of his ‘discovery’ of Staffa on the course of his voyage to Iceland in 1772, published in Thomas Pennant’s Voyage to the Hebrides (1774). The second is French vulcanologist Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Hebrides (1797) narrating his tour to Staffa a decade after Banks in 1784, and exploring some of the transformations wrought on his narrative by geological and political revolutions.

Nigel Leask occupe la Regius Chair of English Language and Literature à l’université de Glasgow.  Il travaille sur de nombreux thèmes comme la figure de Robert Burns, l’orientalisme romantique, les récits de voyage et l’empire ou encore la littérature anglo-indienne de la période romantique. On lui doit notamment Old Ways, New Roads, Travels in Scotland 1720-1832 (Birlinn, 2020), Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2010), Curiosity and the aesthetics of travel writing, 1770-1840: from an antique land (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Contact: jean-francois.dunyach@sorbonne-universite.fr