The Afterlife of Used Things

The Afterlife of Used Things PDF Author: Ariane Fennetaux
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.

The Afterlife of Used Things

The Afterlife of Used Things PDF Author: Ariane Fennetaux
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.

Artists' Things

Artists' Things PDF Author: Katie Scott
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606068636
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Histories of artists’ personal possessions shed new light on the lives of their owners. Artists are makers of things. Yet, it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday items they own. This innovative book looks at objects that once belonged to artists, revealing not only the fabric of the eighteenth-century art world in France but also unfamiliar—and sometimes unexpected—insights into the individuals who populated it, including Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun. From the curious to the mundane, from the useful to the symbolic, these items have one thing in common: they have all been eclipsed from historical view. Some of the objects still exist, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s color box and Jacques-Louis David’s table. Others survive only in paintings, such as JeanSiméon Chardin’s cistern in his Copper Drinking Fountain, or in documents, like François Lemoyne’s sword, the instrument of his suicide. Several were literally lost, including pastelist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s pencil case. In this fascinating book, the authors engage with fundamental historical debates about production, consumption, and sociability through the lens of material goods owned by artists. The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/artists-things/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

Thrifty Science

Thrifty Science PDF Author: Simon Werrett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661039X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Ilja Van Damme
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350278513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. The 'consumer revolution' of the 18th century has been the subject of much debate among historians but it seems clear there was also a 'retail revolution': a period of unprecedented growth in material goods was accompanied by a proliferation of retail spaces and techniques which brought new fashions and imported commodities to the homes of consumers. Governments responded to a growing culture of polite and civilized behavior across society by stimulating urban renewal for leisure and shopping: new pavements, street lighting, green promenades, theatres, coffee houses, and adjacent shopping streets were laid-out everywhere in Europe. As the 18th century drew to its close, 'shopping' had become a publicly accepted and celebrated leisure pursuit, gaining its proper meaning in multiple languages. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe

The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Daniel Bellingradt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004424008
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This book attends to the most essential, lucrative, and overlooked business activity of early modern Europe: the trade of paper. Despite the well-known fact that paper was crucial to the success of printing and record-keeping alike, paper remains one of the least studied areas of early modern history. Organised into three sections – ‘Hotspots and Trade Routes’, ‘Usual Dealings’, and ‘Recycling Economies’ – the chapters in this collection shed light on the practices, materials, and networks of the paper trade. Altogether, the collection uncovers the actors involved in the networks of paper production, transportation, purchase, and reuse, between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries and across the central and peripheral papermaking regions of Europe. Contributors: Renaud Adam, Daniel Bellingradt, Frank Birkenholz, Simon Burrows, Orietta Da Rold, Michael Falk, Anna Gialdini, Rachel Hendery, Silvia Hufnagel, Jean-Benoît Krumenacker, Katherine McDonough, Krisztina Rábai, Anna Reynolds, Benito Rial Costas, Tapio Salminen, Helen Smith, Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, Andreas Weber, and Megan Williams.

The Purchase of the Past

The Purchase of the Past PDF Author: Tom Stammers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108807224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

The Pocket

The Pocket PDF Author: Barbara Burman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300253745
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A New York Times Best Art Book of 2019 “A riveting book . . . few stones are left unturned.”—Roberta Smith’s “Top Art Books of 2019,” The New York Times This fascinating and enlightening study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women’s everyday lives—from duchesses and country gentry to prostitutes and washerwomen—and to explore their consumption practices, sociability, mobility, privacy, and identity. A wealth of evidence reveals unexpected facets of the past, bringing women’s stories into intimate focus. “What particularly interests Burman and Fennetaux is the way in which women of all classes have historically used these tie-on pockets as a supplementary body part to help them negotiate their way through a world that was not built to suit them.”—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian “A brilliant book.”—Ulinka Rublack, Times Literary Supplement

Material Lives

Material Lives PDF Author: Serena Dyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350127000
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

Global Perspectives on Changing Secondhand Economies

Global Perspectives on Changing Secondhand Economies PDF Author: Karen Tranberg Hansen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000545024
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Providing interdisciplinary and global perspectives, this book examines historical and contemporary changes in secondhand economies, including the emergence and specialization of secondhand venues, the materials involved, as well as the cultural significance of secondhand things and the professions associated with them. The objects in focus range from used clothing, scrap and waste materials, to antiquities and used cars, thrift stores and circular economies. Growing concerns with sustainability in the West have helped bring about the ‘rediscovery’ of practices of clothing re-use, re-purposing and re-cycling at the same time as major high-street retailers are establishing programs to return used clothing to their stores for re-sale or recycling. As the contributions to this edited volume demonstrate, recent concerns with the fast pace and adverse effects of global commodity flows have increased the scholarly attention to secondhand economies, both in terms of their history and their significance for livelihoods and sustainability. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Business History.

Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England

Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Elizabeth Spencer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837650349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Uncovers sources from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy in the long eighteenth century.Descriptions of women's clothing increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England. This book explores the significance of these descriptions across a range of sources including wills, newspapers, accounts, court records, and the records of the old poor law.Attention has rested on women literate and wealthy enough to leave behind textual or material traces, but this book ranges from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider descriptive languages, rhetorical strategies, and relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy. It explores how women described their own clothing, but also looks at how it was described by overseers, family members, retailers, and even strangers. It shows that we must look beyond isolated descriptions to how, why, and who was describing clothing to understand its role. Chapters uncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.