Emblemata: The emblem books of Andrea Alciato

A study of the life and works of the legal scholar and humanist, Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), the originator of the emblem book. The nature of the emblem is elucidated and placed in its historical, intellectual and artistic contexts, with special attention paid to the many and varied published manifestations of Alciato???s emblems from 1531 to 1621.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Animated Pages: The Virtual (R)Evolution of the Book

Movement through space, time, and materiality are the prime underpinnings of the artists book form. Elements of structure, sequencing and position, whether hidden or overt, shape an experience – an imagined, created space that can be at once “read” and felt. The fictional animated pages seen in every Harry Potter movie become a metaphor for  the myth of created space-time.  They epitomize the absorbing effects of created experience. They combine our embedded “knowledge” of the printed page with progressive temporal and spatial development and technological adventure. These combinations invoke diverse contemporary forms as the book leaves its material skin, combining immateriality and memory with invented experience. The videos of the 2004 Indonesia-based collective Tromarama use the page-like sequentiality of stop-motion animation, combining techniques such as woodcut, photocopy, collage, embroidery, etching, and drawing to the sound of trash metal bands. The prints of Edward Bernstein become the visual framework in an imaginary video dance. The paper figures of William Kentridge assume living characters. The videos of Patricia Villalobos Echeverria embed themselves into her artists books. The flow of images into time is also reversed, in the conversation between moving media and woodcut in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, as journeys through time become halted by the woodcut print.   My interest in such transformations is through my practice in prints, books, and eventually through the immersive medium of virtual reality. In these VR works, book-like components of structure, sequencing and position, whether seen or unseen combine active real-time participation with the discovery of ancient images from archeology, historical texts, and proto-verbal markings. Visitors connect with each other in its environment, by creating their own gestural tracery within its sphere

‘Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England’, in special section on ‘Loyalties and Allegiances in Early Modern England’ in Journal of British Studies Vol. 48: 4 (October, 2009)

This article investigates how and where the emotive relations between subject and state were forged and how these ideas were manifested in early modern England. McShane describes an affective economy of loyalty, embodied in cheap and accessible political commodities: decorated objects made of clay, metals, and paper, on which precious household resources of time, money and emotion were spent. She argues that by engendering, inculcating and insinuating codes of political love into people’s ‘emotional, sensual, representational, and communicative’ lives, ‘loyal’ goods acted as vehicles and texts for what Victoria Kahn describes as ‘the supplementary role of the passions’ in ‘forging political obligation’ and the reformulation of ‘the duty to love’ of both subject and king in 17th-century England. McShane’s research contributes to a growing theme in scholarship, namely the active consumption of politically significant goods. This essay extends the range of objects under examination to include quotidian household items, shedding light on the dissemination and construction of early modern loyalty across a much wider social scale. The research draws on an extensive survey of collections held at the V&A, the Museum of London, Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and Burrell Collection. Importantly, by putting illustrated print products back together with other political commodities in the early modern home, creating a broad archive of objects and text-objects where each informs the other, McShane’s approach challenges the typical social historical methodology, which uses material culture as merely illustrative of textual sources. This article was part of a special section on loyalty and allegiance in early modern England, co-edited by McShane with Dr Ted Vallance for one of the leading scholarly journals in the field. The material was drawn from a workshop on the topic held at the University of Liverpool funded by the British Academy, University of Liverpool and the Scouloudi Foundation (2007)

Research and resources in North American studies : plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose ; sixth scientific symposium Frankfurt – 6. Wissenschaftliches Symposium Frankfurt, Saturday, 7 October 2006, panel 4, 9:45 – 11:00 a.m.

Large American research libraries have been acquiring - by purchase and by lease - huge multi-disciplinary electronic collections of primary and secondary source materials. For example, the Digital Evans and Canadian Poetry easily make available to scholars primary materials that once were scattered in libraries across North America and Europe. The American State Papers, 1789 – 1838 collection allows easier searching of fragile rare materials. Collections made by libraries digitizing their own holdings, such the Archive of Early American Images from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, make research materials more discoverable and usable. Yet recent scholarship in American Studies by American and European scholars makes relatively little use of these new materials. Both disparities and congruities in what scholars use and what research libraries collect are apparent. Some simple reasons explain the dissonance. Furthermore, conversations with scholars suggest that materials and collections alone will not suffice to support research. Librarians’ skills and actions will increase the value of the new research materials

A Curator's Perspective: Communities in Communication, July-December 2014

As with any exhibition, intellectual and practical concerns combined to shape Communities in Communication: Languages and Cultures in the Low Countries, 1450-1530. In practical terms, I was keen to showcase the substantial holdings of the John Rylands Library from and about this dynamic culture. The corpus has been built up over more than a century: one manuscript, French MS 144, was acquired as recently as 1997.1 Yet libraries and users worldwide can easily underestimate how much material relates to the Low Countries. Catalogues invariably classify documents by language and/or medium; a practice exemplified by the very shelfmark of French MS 144, and which obscures the connections between the cultural products of a region where books were produced in Dutch, French, English, and Latin, and in both manuscript and print.2 Communities in Communication was conceived partly to counter this tendency towards fragmentation

Remixing Remix Remixed

Remix culture plays an important role in the expression and communication of visual art. It is a discourse by which I strive to directly engage culture by cutting and pasting together already existing visual information. By doing so, I strive to promote an exchange of ideas and feelings between juxtaposed pieces. In this age of post-digital era collage, I am interested in the meaning and propaganda associated with collage and assemblage and the modes of disseminating messages via cut-and-paste. By juxtaposing images that differ in style, content, and meaning, I am able to build panoramas of fractured identities that manifest themselves as overlays-on-overlays of distorted caricatures. Taking inspiration from sources as diverse as prehistoric cave paintings and street art mark-making, my work is a free association landscape that draws comparisons between unlikely references. With a single work, I attempt to say everything and nothing simultaneously. This denies permanence in meaning and celebrates the bizarre unknown. My thesis work Reference Complex (2014) is a large-scale mural that investigates my own reference impulse – my compulsion to combine and redefine imagery via appropriation and collage. The work aims to create a shift from traditional perspective. By recycling unrelated segments of visual information, I have created a landscape of divergent space and alternative culture. The mural is used as a strategy to explore the potential of remix culture and the exploration of free culture that allows visual representations for a new system of social culture and art making

The Afterlife of Ludolph of Saxony\u27s Vita Christi

Spreadsheet of printed editions of Ludolph of Saxony\u27s Vita Christi down to 1660