Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks. Edited by Lauren R. Cannady and Jennifer Ferng

Abstract

This wide-ranging volume of essays brings together ten substantial pieces of research on the realm of the ‘artisanal’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Several pieces focus on France, but each is paired with another examination and these pairings take in the Ottoman Empire, India, Spanish-colonial Mexico, China, colonial Virginia, and the goldfields of Australia. The editors have made a strong effort to order the materials in terms of fruitful juxtapositions and parallels; each of five pairs of pieces also has a reflective essay by a further noted scholar (although, as is sometimes the case with such endeavours, some of these are in practice little more than summaries of the preceding substantive pieces). The editors’ Introduction lays out some of the practical and theoretical challenges of engaging with the ‘artisanal’ in a historical and transnational context: the slippery nature, then and now, of the status of craft versus art, of rational reflection versus (imagined) static tradition; and the implicit and explicit Eurocentric biases of narratives around the movement between these conceptions. The essays themselves are the real strength of the collection, and it is pleasing to see them well illustrated, with seventy-six plates overall, most in full colour, allowing for a visual grasp of the objects under discussion. A short review cannot effectively summarize the wide range of topics on display, but there is much here to appreciate. The French chapters are perhaps among the most academically conventional, largely focusing on prestige projects (the language of sovereignty in the gardens of Versailles; interior design in speculative building; the social and cultural aspirations of the early Enlightenment Société des arts), although Valérie Nègre’s contribution on the subversively ‘useless’ writings of an eighteenth-century artisan carpenter is an intriguing sidelight on such approaches (p. 328). A piece on Ottoman urban festivals is particularly lavishly illustrated, and relates the participation of craft guilds in official processions to the methods of representing them in visual records of such events, and to the stylistic shifts of Ottoman art at an East–West crossroads. A piece on Mughal jasmine bowers and artisanal horticulture offers intriguing (though, due to the book’s organization, only implicit) contrasts and parallels with the consideration of Versailles. Dorothy Ko’s chapter on the near-thousand-year history of porcelain production at Jingdezhen, and the incorporation of material production techniques into folkloric stories amongst the different artisanal communities there, is remarkable. Dennis Carr’s piece introduces a particularly striking object, a Mexican eighteenth-century bookcase-desk that is both a metaphorical map of the bringing together of European and Asian decorative techniques, and a literal map of the estate for which it was made. Neil Kamil offers a tour de force over almost fifty pages that takes us from the mention of cane chairs in the journal of a Huguenot exile in 1715 to a global history of the rattan that formed such objects, interwoven with almost dizzying insights into the cultural worlds of exiles, traders, and workers who made, sold, and valued them.