What can artists learn from theatre scholars when it comes to performing historical works on stage today? What can theatre scholars learn from today’s artists when it comes to understanding the works ...and practices of the past? How is the experience of modern spectators affected by attending performances in historic theatres? And how, aesthetically, do we experience the reconstruction of productions from the remote past? This collection of essays covers the findings of the research project ‘Performing Premodernity’: an international group of theatre scholars whose work centred on the Drottningholm theatre from 1766: just outside Stockholm, this famous theatre has authentic stage sets and machinery preserved almost in their original eighteenth-century state. Behind all the essays is a mixture of fascination and dissatisfaction with today’s performances of drama and opera classics, particularly those that take place in historic theatres, and those operating within the so-called Historically Informed Performance movement. Moreover, they reflect a desire to develop and expand the methods traditionally used by theatre historians. And they present a variety of angles on today’s performances in historic theatres and on today’s attempts to revive theatrical practices of the past. The authors combine academic and artistic research as a way of deepening and nuancing our understanding of eighteenth-century theatre practices. The historical research is set in dialogue with the dramaturgical insights and aesthetic experiences the historians gained from their practical doing in historic spaces. Experimentation with lighting, costumes, stage movement, vocal and instrumental practices, and the flow of energy between performers and spectators led to the investigation of topics that theatre historians otherwise tend to ignore. In turn, this has led the researchers to challenge long-held views of the sites, repertoires, and performance practices of eighteenth-century theatre. Performing Premodernity’s experimental, practice-based approach accords with the view of the late Enlightenment as what Vincenzo Ferrone has called ‘a real and still unexplored laboratory of modernity’. The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of both wide-ranging artistic innovation and earth-shaking political revolutions; it was a period when ideal and practice, philosophy and art influenced and guided each other to an unprecedented degree. The essays start from the conviction that any attempt at a holistic understanding of the theatrical practices of the time must take these exchanges into account. And that a strictly antiquarian approach that merely tries to establish ‘how it really was’, without considering the utopian dimension of the reforms of people like Rousseau, Gluck, and Mozart, will fail to grasp the impetus and the dynamic, communicative aspect of eighteenth-century theatre. Therefore, several of the essays revolve around the group’s historically informed production of a true ‘avantgarde’ work of the eighteenth century: Pygmalion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s scène lyrique from 1762. Performing Premodernity’s research-based production premiered at Český Krumlov Castle Theatre in 2015. The present anthology is essential reading for theatre scholars and musicologists studying eighteenth-century performance as well as for theatre and opera artists concerned with period performance practice.
This collection centers on the remarkable life and career of the writer and actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), active in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the example of ...Inchbald’s biographer, Annibel Jenkins (1918–2013), the contributors explore the broad historical and cultural context around Inchbald’s life and work, with essays ranging from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Ranging from visual culture, theater history, literary analyses and to historical investigations, the essays not only present a fuller picture of cultural life in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century, but also reflect a range of disciplinary perspectives. The collection concludes with the final scholarly presentation of the late Professor Jenkins, a study of the eighteenth-century English newspaper The World (1753-1756).
Review(s) of: Sino-French trade at Canton, 1698-1842, by Susan Schopp, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020, xii + 193 pages. ISBN 978-988- 8528-50-9, HK$570.
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In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this ...fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery.Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.
ABSTRACT
In this essay, which introduces the History and Theory forum on Multiple Temporalities, I want to discuss how the existence of a plurality or a multiplicity of times has been conceptualized ...in the historiographical tradition, partly by entering into a dialogue with recent writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, partly by returning to the eighteenth century, to the origin of “the modern regime of historicity” (Hartog). In these theoretical and historical investigations I aim to do two things: on the one hand, to explore and discuss different ways of conceptualizing multiple times, in terms of nonsynchronicities, layers of time, or natural and historical times; on the other hand, to trace how these multiple times have been compared, unified, and adapted by means of elaborate conceptual and material practices that I here call “practices of synchronization.” From the eighteenth century onward, these synchronizing practices, inspired by, but by no means reducible to, chronology have given rise to homogeneous, linear, and teleological time, often identified as modern time per se, or simply referred to as “progress.” In focusing on the practices of synchronization, however, I want to show how this regime of temporality during its entire existence, but especially at the moment of its emergence in the eighteenth century and at the present moment of its possible collapse, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on.
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La Roma ottocentesca, lungi dall’essere condizionata esclusivamente da censura e moralismo ecclesiastico, si presenta come vivace teatro culturale, luogo in cui prolificano scuole, università, ...accademie, caffè e circoli privati. Prendendo in esame l’attività di un docente e letterato quale Luigi Maria Rezzi (1785-1857), che frequenta e influenza molti dei succitati luoghi d’erudizione, si analizzano anche le memorie e le epistole lasciate dal circolo di giovani romani che costituiva la sua scuola. Quegli stessi giovani confluiranno, in buona parte, all’interno dell’élite letteraria, cittadina e non solo, del xix secolo e della prima parte del successivo. Attraverso le lettere scritte e ricevute dal docente, l’analisi dei legami e dei molteplici ruoli da lui ricoperti, si può ricostruire, così, una fitta rete di rapporti, un insieme di dati biografici che permettono di aggiungere nuovi elementi al quadro della Roma pontificia di quegli anni.
The Book as Archive Hidalgo, Alex
The American historical review,
04/2022, Volume:
127, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
The article centers on a handwritten account of the stillbirth of conjoined twins in eighteenth-century Mexico stitched into a book about natural history. Finding things in books as part of ...an accidental process of discovery in the present does not equal random acts by users in the past. Inserting documents and prints of various kinds into books represented for historical actors a distinct kind of archival practice that combined careful observation, deliberation, and a certain measure of dexterity to manipulate the physicality of a book. Examples of records and objects found in other titles from the same time period and region help to contextualize the way people used books and how they stored memories, as well as what we as researchers can learn when critically analyzing the materiality of print.
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The text is a guided itinerary in the knowledge and interpretations now critically acquired, but also in those in need of further investigation, dedicated to the Sardinian eighteenth century, one of ...the most significant centuries of the confrontation between tradition and innovation, between preservation and reformism, that Sardinian history can number. This is the first volume in the "Sardiniae memoria" series, a series of textbooks on Sardinia, designed to be usable by both university students and high school seniors.
