Integrating the Image: Conference Report.

Organizing a conference is exhausting and exhilarating. You spend the days hoping that nothing will go wrong. Will the catering arrive? Have I remembered to book the porters? Will the rooms be OK? Will the panels gel? And will everyone have a good time? It is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Thankfully, running ‘Integrating the Image: Visual Culture, Material Culture, and Early Modern British History’ at Newcastle University last month (8-9 January) caused me far more exhilaration than it did exhaustion. I owe a big ‘thank-you’ to the speakers for this. They delivered excellent papers, supported one another throughout, and ensured that conversations were stimulating and friendly. It was wonderful to see so many historians thinking about how we might use images. My enthusiasm wasn’t even dampened when the AV broke. Or when it broke again. The third time the screen went blank did nearly break me, however.

I can’t write a report on the whole conference. Wearing my Organizer’s Hat (and that fact that we had to run parallel sessions) meant that I did not see all the papers (I have yet to master being in two places at once). What follows, then, are some highlights as I saw them.

The biggest joy of any conference is being introduced to worlds that you did not know existed. Jane Whittle, Laura Sangha, and Emily Vine (Exeter) showed us what historians can do with objects by exploring what those objects meant to their owners. Their Leverhulme-funded project – ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790’ – is using a traditional source (wills) in a new way, exploring the stuff that early modern people left behind as a guide to how they had lived. We heard fascinating vignettes about rings, hats, and textiles, human details of the objects that personalised ordinary lives. Theirs is a significant project: watch this space.

I learned much about two women whose name rang a bell, but no more: Elizabeth Blackwell and Celia Fiennes. Janet Stiles Tyson’s paper on Blackwell, an eighteenth-century herbalist, was an invigorating introduction to a fascinating (and under-heralded) figure. Stiles Tyson showed that Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1739, with subsequent editions in 1751 and 1782) set knew standards for the visual representation of plants in print, exploring how its 500 pages of heavily illustrated text using images to convey knowledge in a sophisticated way. We were treated to a discussion of how Blackwell’s images moved from watercolour to engravings, how illustrations were coloured in some editions to enhance the appeal of the herbal, and how woodcuts combined art and information in precise and delicate ways. Leah Knight’s paper on the travel journals of Ceila Fiennes (1662-1741) was equally captivating. In addition to telling us about Fiennes’ fascinating journeys around England (a treasure trove of detail for eighteenth-century life), Knight also showed us how we might make early modern sources live for broader audiences. Her project aims to produce an open access version of the journals, using visual sources drawn from modern media (maps, photographs, and so on) to translate Fiennes’s experiences from the page to the eye. I gained much from the results. I can only imagine that undergraduate students would, too.

I also learnt a lot about how historians can use images to tell us knew things about early modern culture. Nikki Clarke (Birkbeck) explored the role of images in seventeenth-century news. Why did publishers add to the expense pamphlets and broadsheets, and the complication of printing them, by adding images? Clarke argued that images enhanced the appeal of the news. In a wide-ranging paper that explored trials, fake news, fires, plague, prodigies, and the weather, Clarke showed that images-laden newsheets were bought by the owners of coffee houses to amuse their customers, or (in the case of fire and plague) helped readers outside London to understand the effect of events in the capital. Images, Clarke showed, helped to transform print in to ‘news you could use’. Angela McShane (Warwick) also considered how ‘lowly’ visual sources can be vital to historians exploring opinion, showing us how the ‘bastard art’ of the woodcut has been dismissed and misunderstood in equal measure. Were woodcut illustrations on ballads ‘crude’? Perhaps. But McShane argued that we must use images to understand early modern attitudes, not meeting Art Historical standards. Her paper showed us how much thought went into the illustration of ballads, how playful and polemical images could be. We were treated to examples of seditious woodcuts, of new images made from old ones, and shown, in fascinating detail, how image, text, and tune worked together to make ballads – ahem – sing. We were left in no doubt that ‘crude’ woodcuts had a political wallop. 

Other papers showed us how visual sources can open bigger questions about a culture. Claudine van Hensbergen (Northumbria) introduced us to her forthcoming study of monument making in early modern England.  Her paper considered the construction of memory of English poets at the turn of the eighteenth century, comparing the sculpted busts in St Paul’s Cathedral with the paper ‘sculptures’ engraved in the works of Abraham Cowley. Her paper raised questions about the relationship between fiction and national identity, the manufacturing of tradition, and the connection between national and literary memories. Visual culture is a way into how a people conceive of their own past. Van Hensbergen urged us to remember the materiality of images. She reminded us that for early modern people engraving was a form of sculpture, and showed how printed busts of poets emulated the grander sculptures on the page, being set in niches or on plinths. We see print as ephemeral, but they did not. Images have much to tell us about the practice of commemoration.

If Van Hensbergen showed us what images can tell us about early modern attitudes to memory, Isabelle Baudino (Lyon) explored what visual sources reveal about their approach to History. Baudino considered the development of illustrated history books during the eighteenth century, tracing their development and stressing the importance of the commercial market in ensuring their popularity. She asked what this tells us about English attitudes to the national past. Her paper showed that there was a stable corpus of around 150 key scenes from English history that were routinely illustrated, and that their repetition was crucial to informing historical knowledge and aesthetic taste. Images gave the English a sense of their past. This was the period that elevated the History painting (which had not really been established in England at the Restoration). But the availability of printed images, and their repetition, had a far more significant effect on national identity than any ‘Great’ painting because so many more people saw them. Here visual culture was a way into how a people understood itself.   

There were lots of other highlights. Michael Partington (Aberdeen) showed us how much there is to say about the seventeenth-century engraver John Ogilby, whose illustrated editions of Aesop and the Bible deserve much more attention. In a fascinating paper on paintings of the Great Fire of London, Elsa Perrymen-Owens (UCL) showed how visual sources can be a way into the histories of trauma and emotion. And in a consideration of how black people were depicted in eighteenth century pottery, Amber Burbidge (European University Institute) demonstrated how representation can be insidious, exploring how images of an imagined blackness in everyday objects helped to normalise negative attitudes to black people.

It is right that I end with some thank-yous. My colleagues Rachel Hammersley and Katie East gave up their time to chair sessions. In a world where our workloads are ever-growing, that is an act of considerable kindness. I hope they know how much I appreciate it. Thanks also to our two plenaries – Tara Hamling (Birmingham) and Joseph Monteyne (British Columbia) – who gave excellent papers which showed just what we can do with images. In a paper featuring enough material for a book, Hamling showed us how early modern images that do not sit in the Art Historical canon (woodcuts, household decorations) are too easily dismissed as ‘lesser’ sources. She made a strong case for how tracing the circulation of images between media and places can unlock the cultural history of our period in a paper that read like a manifesto for the image. Those familiar with Monteyne’s books on early modern visual culture will not be surprised that his paper was innovative. He introduced us to eco-critical approaches to images, exploring how they can reveal much about to early modern attitudes to the natural world. His paper was provocative and wide-ranging. But it was also human. Monteyne showed us early modern people learning to swim, proof that visual culture can take us to the everyday aspects of a society. That was the point of the conference – the speakers showed us that visual sources can tell us things about early modern people we did not previously know. They can even do this when the AV breaks.