But She’s Wearing It Backwards: Understanding and Misunderstanding an Eighteenth-Century Mexican Court Gown
February 3 at 12:15pm
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James Middleton explores the history of a late eighteenth-century Mexican gown since its donation to Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Historia in 1900. The opulent, deep green silk-velvet and ivory satin dress with lavish silver embroidery has long been recognized as one of the most elaborate garments surviving from the colonial Americas, but has only recently been identified as a traje de corte—a court gown, one of four extant New Spanish garments to be so identified—made according to the etiquette requirements of the Spanish royal court.

Next Week:

Cécile Fromont (Yale University) analyzes the overlooked visual corpus of “practical guides,” full-page paintings composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries, to demonstrate how such visual creations, though European in form and craftsmanship, did not emerge from a single perspective but rather were and should be read as the products of cross-cultural interaction. With this intervention, she aims to model a way to think anew about images created at the crux of cultures, bringing to the fore the formative role that encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation.

The King’s Rollodex
February 9 at 12:15 pm
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Focusing on a recent acquisition made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a manuscript genealogy of King Edward IV that is both roll and codex—Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) examines the political significance of codicological diversity during the Wars of the Roses. Nearly one hundred genealogical rolls survive from fifteenth-century England, across which scribes and illuminators fashioned remarkably experimental approaches to the narration of genealogical history, approaches that defy our own genealogical narrative of the history of the book.

Sugar, Silver and the Bourbon Sucriers: Sweetening Slavery in Eighteenth-Century France
February 10 at 12:15 pm
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Sarah R. Cohen (University at Albany, SUNY) will explore the diverse implications of the sucriers within the context of international trade; the physical and cultural interconnections of sugar and slavery; and elite French practices of dining and festive entertainment in the early eighteenth century.