John Macarthur presents the eighteenth century idea of the picturesque – when it was a risky term concerned with a refined taste for everyday things, such as the hovels of the labouring poor – in the light of its reception and effects in modern culture.
The Dooar (or Duār) War of 1864-65 began as an attempt by the authorities in British India to annex from Bhutan the territory known as Duārs in order to stop what they claimed were incursions into India from Bhutan. David Field Rennie, who participated in the conflict as a military surgeon, wrote this book on his four-month voyage back to England. Bhutan, which is located at the eastern end of the Himalaya mountain range, was at that time one of the world's most isolated countries. Rennie's intention was to make Bhutan and its people better known in Europe. His work contains an account of the war and observations on the geography, history, people, and languages of the country. As a consequence of the war, Bhutan was forced to cede Duārs to British India. Duārs now constitutes a portion of the states of Assam and West Bengal in India. The book contains a large-scale foldout map of Bhutan.
Comfort, both physical and affective, is a key aspect in our conceptualization of the home as a place of emotional attachment, yet its study remains under-developed in the context of the European house. In this volume, Jon Stobart has assembled an international cast of contributors to discuss the ways in which architectural and spatial innovations coupled with the emotional assemblage of objects to create comfortable homes in early modern Europe. The book features a two-section structure focusing on the historiography of architectural and spatial innovations and material culture in the early modern home. It also includes 10 case studies which draw on specific examples, from water closets in Georgian Dublin to wallpapers in 19th-century Cambridge, to illustrate how people made use of and responded to the technological improvements and the emotional assemblage of objects which made the home comfortable. In addition, it explores the role of memory and memorialisation in the domestic space, and the extent to which home comforts could be carried about by travellers or reproduced in places far removed from the home. The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 offers a fresh contribution to the study of comfort in the early modern home and will be vital reading for academics and students interested in early modern history, material culture and the history of interior architecture.
Since the modern period, the field of biblical studies has relied upon libraries, museums, and archives for its evidentiary and credentialing needs. Yet, absent in biblical scholarship is a thorough and critical examination of the instrumentality of the discipline’s master archives for elite power structures. Addressing this gap in biblical scholarship lies central to this book. Interrogated here is a premier repository or master archive of the discipline: the British Museum. Using an assemblage of critical theories from archival discourse to postcolonial studies, space theory to governmentality studies, the focal point of this book is at the intersections of the Museum’s rise to scientific prominence, the British Empire, and the conferring of scientific authority to modern biblical critics in the nineteenth century. Gregory L. Cuéllar initiates a season of historicization of the master archives of biblical studies and archival criticism.