Integrating the Image: Conference Programme
Integrating the Image: visual culture, material culture, and Early Modern British History.
Newcastle University, 8-9 January 2025.
To register, please email: adam.morton@ncl.ac.uk
This conference will build on the recent growth in research into the visual and material culture of Early Modern Britain. The material turn has revealed much about everyday lives and social status in the early modern period, uncovering domestic spaces and places, exploring gender identities, emotions, morality and behaviour, and telling us much about the practice of piety and the experience of life as part of a religious minority.
The conference considers what visual sources add to our knowledge of early modern Britain. Do they complement our understanding of the period, or challenge it? Do they ask us to reframe existing questions and debates? And what challenges (practical and intellectual) do we face in using them? The conference will interrogate these questions. It is ultimately concerned with how images and objects should be used by scholars of the Early Modern period.
Provisional Programme
8 January
9-9.30: Arrival & Welcome.
9.30-11.00: Panel 1: Images in News, Ballads, and Books in Stuart England.
- Angela McShane (Warwick): “Restoration politics and the ‘bastard art’ of the woodcut”.
- Nikki Clarke (Birkbeck): “Images of News – Purpose and Meaning 1679 – 1683”.
- Michael Partington (Aberdeen): “‘Ogilby’s Bible’ and the political and religious culture in Restoration Britain”.
11.00-11.15: Break.
11.15-12.30: Joseph Monteyne (University of British Columbia): 'Unstable Surfaces: Water and the Mobility of Print in Early Modern England'.
12.30-13.30: Lunch.
13.30-15.00: Parallel Sessions.
Panel 2: Images & Satire.
- Meredith Hale (Exeter): “The role of visual satire in the Glorious Revolution”.
- Malcolm Jones (Independent): “A lost English print-book? Van Hulsen's marital satires (London, 1628) and the album amicorum”.
- John Marshall (John Hopkins): "Prints, Anti-racism, racism and Anti-slavery c.1787-c.1808".
- Deepali Yadav (Banaras Hindu University): “The personal and the private of East India Company: The Indo-British encounters in graphic satires of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century”.
Panel 3: Images, Catholics, and Jacobites.
- Adyan Sharda (St. Andrews): “The politicisation of English Catholic material culture by Protestant polemicists in post-Reformation England”.
- Sarah Johanesen (Warwick): “John, Lord Lumley: Intersecting identities and the politics of Catholic collecting”.
- Andrew Simpson (St. Andrews): “The Sword and the Fan: Portrayals of Jacobite Women in Printed Media Following the ‘45”.
- Anna Fielding (Manchester Metropolitan): “The Visual and Material Culture of Catholic Dining and Food Spaces”.
15.00-15.30: Break.
15.30-17.00: Panel 4: Books & Images.
- Janet Stiles Tyson (Independent): “Elizabeth Blackwell’s telling prints of plants: Material turns in Georgian culture”.
- Holly Day (York): “Riding about the World in Everybody’s Pocket: The Visual Culture of Eighteenth-Century Ladies’ Memorandum Books”.
- Zhiyu Chen (Cambridge): “A Book of One’s Own: Printing and Consuming Edward Sherburne’s The Sphere of Marcus Manilius Made an English Poem (1675)”.
17.15-18.00: The British Printed Image Project. Michael Hunter & Adam Morton.
9 January
9.00-11.00:
Panel 5: Masculinity, Femininity, and Honour.
- Anna Roberts (John Hopkins): “The Recovery of a Symbol: The Role of Snuffboxes in British Histories of Gender and Sexuality, 1660-1840”.
- Marlo Avidon (Cambridge): ““Pendants, Collers, Fans and Peticoats, and the rest of those pretty impediments”: Visualising Elite Women’s Dress in Late-Seventeenth-Century England”.
- Alex Booth (Liverpool Hope): “How gender is presented in court visual culture 1625 – 1639”.
- Jane MacRae Campbell (IHR): “Altered Images and Imaginary Hats: Envisioning Honour in Early Modern Britain”.
Panel 6: Images, Memory, and Dynasty.
- Claudine van Hensbergen (Northumbria): ““Cowley’s Dust”: Thomas Sprat’s Textual, Visual and Material Monuments for Abraham Cowley, 1667-68”.
- Charlotte Samways (Southampton): “A Phial for Teardrops: Visualising Maternity and Loss in Early Modern England and Scotland”.
- Alexander Ryland (Aberdeen): “‘Our Naturall Sonne’: Dynastic images of illegitimate heirs as a transgressive display of royal fatherhood, 1660-85”.
- Conor Byrne (Southampton): “Visual Representations of the Executions of British Queens in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Sources”.
11.00-11.30: Break.
11.30-13.00: Panel 7: Approaching Material Culture with Wills.
- Laura Sangha (Exeter): “The uses and meanings of rings in early modern England”.
- Emily Vine (Exeter): “'Hats and hatmakers in early modern London: the evidence from wills”.
- Jane Whittle (Exeter): “Exploring lost early modern textiles with wills and visual evidence”.
13.00-14.00: Lunch.
14.00-15.15: Tara Hamling (Birmingham): Creative copying: the meanings, malleability and mutations of printed images in the wild.
15.15-15.45: Break.
15.45-17.15: Panel 8: Visual culture, experience, and mental worlds.
- Amber Burbidge (European University Institute): “Race making and Gender in Early Modern Material Culture: an intersectional exploration of racialised representations in British porcelain”.
- Leah Knight (Brock University): ““Nothing could limit the eye”: Re-seeing Britain with Celia Fiennes”.
- Elsa Perryman-Owens (UCL): “Witnessing Catastrophe in the Great Fire of London”.