Objects and Possessions: Material Goods in a Changing World 1200‒1800
Programme
Monday 3 April 2017
Lunch
Keynote 1:
Dr Chris Briggs, University of Cambridge
The possessions of late medieval English felons, fugitives and outlaws
Tea/coffee break
Panel 1a Importing Addictions: Coffee, Tea and Tobacco in British-Russian Relations
Clare Griffin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
A Failure of Exchange: Coffee on Paper but not in Practice in Moscow c.1660
Matthew Romaniello, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Stimulating the Market: The British Tobacco Factory in Moscow, 1705
Audra Yoder, Independent Scholar
Importing Luxury, Displaying Power: English Tea Silver in Russia, 1700-1800
Tuesday 4 April 2017
Panel 2a People and possessions in late medieval and early modern Ireland
Margaret Murphy, Carlow College
‘Thirty-three furs and eleven pairs of silken shoes’ ‒ possessions of the elite in late-medieval Ireland
Susan Flavin, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Contested Commodities? The Meaning of Things in Sixteenth-Century Ireland
Rachel Tracey, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, QUB
People, Plantation & Things: Material Culture & Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ulster
Panel 2b Objects and identities
Gerhard Jaritz, Central European University, Budapest
The Perception of ‘New’ in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture
Anu Mänd, Tallinn University, School of Humanities, Institute of History, Archaeology and Art History
From a popinjay to the deer-feet: the silver collection of the Brotherhood of the Black Heads in Tallinn
Mark J.R. Dennis, Curator, Museum of Freemasonry, London
Objects of Belonging – identity and legend in the material culture of fraternity
Tea/coffee break
Keynote 2:
Professor Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick
Britain’s material transition: innovation and everyday life in the early modern British world
Lunch
Panel 3a The circulation of fashionable goods in early modern Europe
Juliet Claxton, King’s College, London
‘His wife was the rich china-woman that the courtiers visited so often’ (Ben Jonson: Epicene, [1.4] 1609): A taste for china in early modern London.
Natasha Awais-Dean, King’s College, London
‘It is an honour ‘longing to our house, Bequeathed down from many ancestors’: inheriting jewels in early modern England
Jola Pellumbi, King’s College, London
From Constantinople to Venice: The Dissemination of Ottoman-Style Clothing
Panel 3b Renaissance and early modern Europe
Beverly Tjerngren, Uppsala University, Department of History
Carefully Considered Consumption: the Swedish Clergy’s Strategic Use of Material Culture
Pia Rudolph, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich
A Delightful Combination: Books and Bonbons
Elizabeth Gemmill, Kellogg College, Oxford
Dead men’s treasures: Aberdeen burgess inventories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
Tea/coffee break
Panel 4a The material universe of some Iberian queens and princesses (14th‒16th century)
Adriana Almeida, University of Lisbon
Disposing of goods for the sake of one’s soul at the age of the Black Death
Maria Barreto Dávila, Nova University of Lisbon
The earthly possessions of Beatriz, infante of Portugal (c.1430-1506)
Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, University of Lisbon
From treasure to collection: the luxurious objects of the queens of Portugal (15th‒16th centuries)
Panel 4b Domesticity and objects at home
Craig Cessford, Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge:
Assemblage biographies of household clearance deposits in England, 1200–1800
Sophie Cope, History Department, University of Birmingham
Furnishing time: dated chairs and familial identity in seventeenth-century England
Catherine Richardson, University of Kent
‘A fringe of yellow and blue silk and venis gold’: colouring the early modern provincial house
Fontini Kondyli, University of Virginia, and Florence Liard, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Sgraffito tablewares at the city of Thebes. Unforeseen Italian connections in late medieval Greece
Wednesday 5 April 2017
Panel 5a The Tentative Process of Possessing Things
Kate Smith, University of Birmingham
Lost Property and the Significance of Dispossession in Eighteenth-Century London
Elin Jones, University of Edinburgh
Naval Seamen, Irrational Consumption and Masculinity, 1756‒1815
Sara Pennell, University of Greenwich
Dismantling Possession in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England
Panel 5b Renaissance and early modern Europe
Julie De Groot, University of Antwerp
A Site for Exchanging Culture? The Material culture of Spanish Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Bruges
Tânia Manuel Casimiro, (IAP/IHC – NOVA University of Lisbon)
The possession and consumption of faience in Portuguese domestic environments (1550‒1800)
Trevor Dean, Roehampton University
Jews, Christians and disputes over objects in fifteenth-century Italy
Tea/coffee break
Keynote 3:
Dr Christer Petley, University of Southampton
People as Objects and Possessions: Slaveholders and Enslaved People in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
Lunch
Panel 6a Clothing, fashion and the connections of goods
Astrid Pajur, Department of History, Uppsala University
Costume and Social Practices in Seventeenth-century Estonian Probate Inventories
Sarah A. Bendall, Department of History, University of Sydney
‘Our Countrey girles are a kin to your London Courtiers’: The Dissemination of Structural Undergarments and the Changing Hierarchy of Appearances in Seventeenth-Century England
Margareth Lanzinger, Vienna, and Janine Maegraith, Cambridge/Vienna
Objects as proxy for social and economic values, capabilities and relations
Panel 6b Europe and Beyond Europe
Chris Evans, University of South Wales, and Göran Rydén, Uppsala University
Producer goods in the Atlantic slave trade: European metals and their African uses
Ingrid Matschinegg, University of Salzburg / Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, Krems
Bridging Distances: ‘Exotic’ Objects as Social Markers in Late Medieval and Early Modern Inventories
Kate Hill, University of Glasgow
The Form Adorned: Ormolu Mounts for Chinese Monochrome Porcelains
Tea/coffee break
Panel 7a Clothing, footwear and material culture
Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton
Boots, material culture and Georgian masculinities
Sadie Harrison, University College London
Collecting Fashion, Collecting Nature: Consumer Culture and Botanical Embroidery, 1700-1800
Elizabeth Spencer, University of York
‘Paid sister Mellish [what] she Laid out for me at London’: Clothing in the accounts of the Mellish family, 1705‒1718
Panel 7b Things medieval
Alex Sapoznik, Department of History, King’s College London
Religious symbolism and the trade and consumption of wax in medieval England
Eleanor Standley, Associate Professor and Curator of Medieval Archaeology, University of Oxford
The Archaeology of Medieval Possessions
Katherine Anne Wilson, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Chester
Choice, Concealment and Settings: The chest in medieval residences.
Tom Johnson, History, University of York
Forfeitures, Fines, and Dues during the ‘Golden Age’ of the English Peasantry, c.1350-1500
Helen Watt, University of York
In the hands of the servants of the Lord: Evidence for material culture in the York Chancery Probate Registers [End of day demonstration]
Thursday 6 April 2017
Panel 8: Bodies as possessions
Jane Campbell, Department of History, University of Exeter
Objects and possessions: noble display, liveried servants and the politics of power
Giulia Mari, King’s College London
Having a body/Owning a body: early modern dissections and the purchase of human anatomical specimens
Tea/coffee break
Panel 9: Gift-giving
Murray Andrews, Murray, University College London
Gold, goblets and geese: gift-giving and aristocratic baptisms in fifteenth-century England and Wales
Jesse J. Hysell, History, Syracuse University
The Role of Gifts in the Venetian Consulates of Mamluk Egypt (1480-1517)
Keynote 4:
Professor Chris Woolgar, University of Southampton
Southampton’s people and their goods, 1200‒1500
Lunch and depart
Image credit: Cartoon for tapestry, Francis Cleyn the elder, probably 1630s: University of Southampton Library, Special Collections.