Luxury Trade Research Articles

Textile Mobilities across Medieval Afro-Eurasia

Textiles counted among the most precious and prized categories of material culture in the medieval world: made with care in specialized workshops, handed down over generations as part of family wealth, repurposed until threadbare for use as dress and furnishings, serving as diplomatic gifts and luxury trade goods, cloth played a major cultural role across premodern societies. Such importance stands in contrast to how fabrics are often viewed by students today, as cheaply-made, disposal material outsourced from distant factories for mass consumption. The disjuncture between premodern attitudes toward cloth and prevailing views today offers a compelling entry point for students to contemplate historical continuities and difference through the lens of a universally familiar medium of textiles.
 This pedagogical file considers textiles’ mobilities across premodern Afro-Eurasia to explore medieval global networks through a focus on exchanges evidenced in material culture. The presented examples focus on textiles in European and North American museum collections, thus layering in also more recent mobilities of these objects as artworks with modern collecting histories.

Composition of trace residues from the contents of 11th-12th century sphero-conical vessels from Jerusalem.

The residues from the internal surface of four archaeological ceramic sherds, excavated from the Armenian Gardens, Jerusalem were analysed to characterise the contents of the original vessel. The sherds derive from four small, thick-walled, sphero-conical vessels recovered from a destruction layer, dating between the 11th and 12th century, Jerusalem. The residue has been analysed using light microscopy, biochemical characterisation, gas chromatography mass spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy and cold vapour atomic fluorescence spectrometry. This analysis established the presence of various compounds including fatty acids and notable levels of mercury, sulphur, aluminium, potassium, magnesium, nitrates and phosphorous. The contents and probable functions of the four vessels were characterised from the residues on these sherds as different from each other, reflecting their different decoration, manufacture and ceramic typologies. One of these vessels contains residue that indicate the vessel held oils. The residue of the second vessel is consistent with either scented materials or medicinal contents, while a third probably contained medicinal material. The unique fourth sherd is from a stoneware sphero-conical vessel with very thick walls, no decoration and the residue supports the possibility it was used for the storage of chemicals or may have held the chemical ingredients for an explosive device, consistent with a medieval grenade. This residue analysis of Mamluk sphero-conical vessels provides insight into luxury items, medicines, technology and trade in medieval Jerusalem.

Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London

Research on eighteenth-century female entrepreneurs has not been widely acknowledged beyond specialists, despite repeated calls in the literature on business for more attention to the family and to women. This article employs a new source – trade or business cards, which were themselves new in the eighteenth century – together with a range of other sources, to create biographical sketches of wealthy businesswomen in luxury trades, in order to examine the relationship between business, marriage, and succession for women in highly skilled, highly capitalised trades. Despite legal restrictions on married women, marriage did not mark a hiatus in the careers of these women, who appear to have maintained their businesses regardless of marital status. As widows, they maintained proprietorship decades beyond their sons’ majority. The normality of eighteenth-century women in business has implications for the history of women, of business, and of work more broadly.

Challenging Porous Frontiers: Atlantic merchants and the potential of the Indian Ocean, 1640–1650

An imagined divide existed between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean since the earliest days of European transoceanic discovery. The separation was reflected in the charters granted to England’s major trading companies which limited access for private merchants to eastern markets. The Indian Ocean was covered by the charter held by the East India Company and centered on bilateral luxury trade. The trade and activity in Atlantic, by contrast, quickly focused around colonization, agricultural production and trade. However, certain Atlantic merchants saw the potential of applying methods of economic expansion from the Atlantic, more specifically the early American colonies, to new colonization projects in the Indian Ocean. This article considers one such prominent Atlantic merchant, Maurice Thomson. Though his plans did not reach fruition he left a tangible impact on the eic in his attempts to introduce Atlantic methods to the East- thus underlining the porous frontier that separated them.

Principios territoriales ordenadores y desequilibrio ecológico en la perife-ria de Puebla: fraccionamiento Lomas de Angelópolis

In Mexico the evolution of the periurban is the result of the industrial urban expansion of the 20th century, as excluding forms of the city, but it is at the beginning of the 21st century when environmental qualities, fast roads and the decentralization of services and equipment of quality, are the principles of urban planning that begin to revolve around the beauty and safety that closed subdivisions and luxury trade offer, with the objective of attracting investment and making the city more competitive through an economy of agglomeration. However, the objective of this research is to show the ecological, social and economic impact and imbalance generated by the closed Lomas de Angelopolis fractionation as a new centrality in the periphery, by describing its effects over a decade in Puebla, with guaranteed actions by different administrations, to satisfy a housing demand that favors speculation and changes in land use.

The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer

Reviewed by: The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience by Sharon Farmer Daryl M. Hafter (bio) The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience. By Sharon Farmer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 368. Handcover $69.95. This splendid book is a model of history and technical writing. Its author, a highly respected historian and scholar of textile technologies, seeks to verify the long-surmised existence of a silk industry in medieval Paris. The extreme lack of documentation has kept historians from learning about silk making in medieval Paris before now. But samples of woven and embroidered silk in museums and notes in royal archives labeled "silk of Paris" kept alive the idea that a silk industry had existed. Farmer has used the Livre de métiers, tax rolls from the twelfth-fifteenth centuries, royal and aristocratic budget books, as well as examples of luxury silk products to reconstruct a vivid portrait of this industry. In addition, she has supplemented her archival research with a thorough study of the period. Farmer's intent is not only to show that twelfth-fifteenth century Paris had a flourishing silk industry, but that it was fostered by immigrants from Italy and other countries, some of whom became thoroughly integrated into French society. In the course of doing so, she paints a broad picture of silk in Western Europe, the consumption patterns of wealthy individuals, and the unusual opportunities for women working in the Paris silk trade. To help readers who are not familiar with its technology, Farmer gives the clearest and most helpful description of the trajectory of silk from cocoon to woven cloth that I have seen. She leaves us with an understanding of the hierarchy of mercers selling the textile, to highly skilled weavers of soie de Paris and velvet, to female throwsters (spinners) preparing the thread for bobbins. What is most extraordinary about her work is her ability to extrapolate economic relations and lived experience from the small clues in the sources. Though there are only traces, the author suggests that some mercers established their own workshops. From the tax rolls, she recreates neighborhoods of various kinds of silk workers, moneylenders, and mercers who sold the cloth. From guild statutes she concludes that spinners stole from the silk yarn they processed, and pawned it to pay for daily necessities. Since these thread makers lived closest to the Jewish lenders, it was natural to use them. Besides, the Jewish lenders were mostly women who imposed easier terms than the Lombard lenders. From a few records of [End Page 475] throwsters impregnated by Lombard lenders, Farmer deduces that women were more likely to borrow from the Jewish women because while Lombards (accused of half the rapes in Paris) left wives at home, the Jews lived in families. Not only were Jewish women able to participate in the economy, Farmer estimates that there were 1,400 other women manufacturing silk. Of the 241 women listed on tax rolls with their profession, 26 percent were in silk. Even though most were spinners with incomes too low to appear on tax rolls, in general female silk workers' incomes were higher than those of other women working at textiles in northern France and the Lowlands. Chapter 1 sets the stage by showing medieval Paris as a highly cosmopolitan center of royal residence and administrative officials who stimulated silk and other luxury trades. Chapter 2 details the manufacture of silk, and the important role of Lombard merchants in providing raw silk. The mostly female makers of prestigious "narrow goods" and the less-prestigious all-female guild weaving veils together constituted some forty-five weavers. Chapters 3 and 4 show that many mercers came from Italy, a few from Germany and the South of France. Their entrance to Paris is important because it helps to substantiate Farmer's claim that the technology was imported into Paris. As Chapter 5 indicates, silk industries through time have always been founded by skilled workers migrating. The mercers coming to France presumably brought such workers from northern Italy, enabling mercers to establish their own ateliers. Aware that her method of...

Arquitectura comercial de la ciudad de Roma. Una aproximación a la definición de las avenidas de carácter suntuario: de la vía Sacra a la Quinta Avenida

The present work aims, firstly, to analyze the changes in the commercial topography of the city of Rome in classical times and second to discuss surroundings of the emergence of new avenues of luxury character. The Roman expansion by the Mediterranean and the Atlantic during the republican period allowed to reaffirm Rome over the rest of the cities. War booties, new colonized territories, and a more globalized economy fostered the interests of an increasingly rich section of the population. Traditional elites and newcomers competed for the most unique and unique products of the known world. With the change of era, the craftsman specialized in the elaboration and subsequent sale of luxury products in Rome was acquiring the control of the premises closest to the political-administrative center of the Urbs. Thus, to the important historical value of the area was added a concentration of diverse specialized trades vertebrates by the sacra via, varying the commercial character of the urban center, transforming itself from an agricultural commerce to a luxurious one. In order to know what the interests of the urban elites of the ss. I-III A.D. I studied the different commercial sectors highlighted in the epigraphy of the characters involved in the luxury trade in Rome. In a second section, I compared this information with the current one to verify if it is possible to determine a pattern of similarity, first, in the taste for the sumptuary and second, in knowing what type of businesses turn out to be the most notorious in sumptuous avenues. To do, I examined the five most important commercial avenues of the years 2015/16 according to the ranking prepared by the real estate consultants Cushman and Wakefield in the publication Main Streets Across The World.

On display: Henrietta Maria and the materials of magnificence at the Stuart court

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated display-their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book follows Henrietta Maria through and beyond the Bourbon and Stuart courts to chart her patronage and engagement with the visual arts, building works, and the luxury trade. It develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen's directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display. Her cultural patronage in particular emphasized her family honor, dynastic clout, Catholic piety, feminine virtue, and discerning taste.Erin Griffey analyzes the full spectacle of the queen's represented image, not only through the well-known portraits by Sir Anthony van Dyck but also through her rich bed ensembles, tapestries, jewelry, clothing, and devotional goods-the objects that embodied and conveyed her royal power.

“In a Galaxy Far, Far Away . . .”

Disruptive luxury is a recent addition to the lexicon of luxury. Understood as both a practical and philosophical antidote to luxury’s entrenched patterns of production and consumption, the term disruptive is proving to be as indeterminate as the word luxury itself, with its complex historical and cultural formations. This article will briefly explore some of the possible meanings of disruptive luxury, before focusing on new technology, especially rapid prototyping or 3-D printing, as a possible route to luxury’s disruption. Utilizing a fashion spread from American Vogue of 1977 to bring into focus the traditional alliance between the luxury trades and new technology, the article will then explore the cultural, economic, and aesthetic similarities between the current “gilded age” of luxury consumption and the art nouveau designers and clientele of the belle epoque and ask whether established luxury will even notice, let alone “feel the force” of, the disruption.

Behind Enemy Lines: The German Connection in the Middle English Sir Degrevant

This paper explores the cultural and economic context of the references to German luxury trade goods, German legend, and German political power in the late fourteenth-century/early fifteenth-century Middle English poem Sir Degrevant. All of the German references in the poem pertain to the Rhineland, which formed the western branch of Hanseatic trade throughout this period, the branch that conducted trade with England and Scotland. I argue that these German references form part of a pattern, seen throughout the poem, whereby the northern English poet recreates the international politics surrounding the Scottish Wars of Independence, which dominated northern English life throughout the fourteenth century, and in which German merchants played a controversial role. All of the poem’s references to German goods and culture center in the enemy earl’s household exclusively, casting the aggressive earl of the poem as a Scottish-style Border lord.

La venta de perlas en la ciudad de Roma durante el Alto Imperio = Selling Pearls in the City of Rome during the Roman Empire

Pearl trade in Rome is attested in the early imperial period. For distribution in the capital was required extensive sales network able to extract these pearls from places like India, the Red Sea, etc. The sellers of pearls or margaritarii were responsible for the luxury trade. For a better understanding of these characters we have made a study of lapidary inscriptions concerning them.

The elegant plume: ostrich feathers, African commercial networks, and European capitalism

Ostrich feathers have long been an important export from Africa to different European markets. The ostrich plume was a key part of the luxury trade across Mediterranean shores for centuries. The main source of ostrich feathers was from wild ostriches especially from North and West Africa. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the rising economic value of ostrich plumes triggered colonial French and British competition over this luxury commodity, leading to the establishment of domesticated ostrich farms by the French in North and West Africa and by the British in South Africa. This article uses an economic historical framework to understand colonial ostrich feather trade and its impact on French and British relations during the nineteenth century in Africa. We examine the ostrich feather commercial networks that began to emerge particularly by the middle of nineteenth century, and focus on the sources of ostrich feathers and the local practices for hunting and raising ostriches. We argue that by looking at the need for ostrich plumes in European markets and the rise in public consumption of fashion goods based on the ostrich plume, nineteenth-century European capitalism destroyed not only the wild African ostriches, but also local African livelihoods based on wild ostriches.

Muscovy’s Conquest of Kazan

Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671. xiii + 297 pp., maps, illus. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0299285142. $29.95. Non-Orthodox and non-Slavic populations initially predominated in certain of the territories annexed to the Grand Duchy and Tsardom of Moscow over the 14th through 16th centuries. Fully integrating them into the Muscovite state as tax-bearing subjects under the authority of Muscovite law and the Orthodox Church was a long process requiring their dilution through Russian colonization and their subjection to Russifying institutions and policies. Just how Russian colonization and administration engaged and transformed the original native culture and economy varied. The mix of non-Orthodox and non-Slavic peoples brought under Tsar Ivan IV's sovereignty with the of the Kazan Khanate in 1552 could be considered as already more prepared for life as imperial subjects. Kazan's population consisted of Finno-Ugric peoples, some hunters and gatherers but others agriculturalists, living under the hegemony of a Muslim Tatar ruling class holding service-conditional land grants from a khan legitimated as a Chingisid; the Muslim religion of the ruling class was articulated by a literate ulema, and Kazan's economy was already well integrated into the Asian luxury trade. (1) Matthew Romaniello's The Elusive Empire deals with the incorporation of the former Kazan Khanate into the Muscovite state over the period 1552-1671 --Tsar Ivan IV's of the Kazan Khanate in 1552 is traditionally considered one of the great achievements of his reign and a mark of Muscovy's emergence as a multinational empire. It has also been recognized as an important event in world history, for by annexing Kazan and the neighboring Astrakhan Khanate (1556), Muscovy took control of the entire course of the Volga and drove a wedge between the Ottomans and their Sunni co-religionists beyond the Caspian. From this point on, Orthodox Christian Russia began in earnest the campaign of rolling back Muslim Turkic nomad power from the Inner Eurasian steppe. The Kazan region later played an important role in Russian history as the theater of the 1671 Razin Revolt. Matthew Romaniello therefore takes 1552-1671 as the time frame for his study of the incorporation and final pacification of the Kazan territory-the bookends of the story of Muscovy's absorption of the Middle Volga Region (5). Military conflict between the Grand Principality of Moscow and the Khanate of Kazan began soon after the khanate's founding in 1438 by Ulug Muhammad. Kazan was politically brittle, in that there were cultural and religious divisions between its Finno-Ugric rural population (Chuvash, Mordvin, Cheremis, Votiaks) and its Muslim Tatar nobility, as well as factional polarizations within the latter. This allowed the Moscow grand princes to place puppet rulers on Kazan's throne three times (Muhammad-amin and Shah Ali, in 1487, 1518, 1521) and to claim Kazan as their protectorate. But protectorate or direct sovereignty over Kazan was also sought by the Girei khans of Crimea, and the danger to Moscow from Kazan increased significantly in 1532-51, when Crimean Khan Sahib Girei established a closer alliance with the Ottoman sultan and consolidated his nephew Safa Girei's hold on the Kazan throne. Kazan forces undertook major campaigns against Muscovy in 1536-37 and 1545, convincing Tsar Ivan IV to find a lasting resolution of the Kazan problem. (2) The tsar's resumed efforts to place Shah Ali, the tsarevich of Kasimov, on Kazan's throne provoked a civil war between Kazan's pro-Moscow and pro-Crimean noble factions, and this was followed by the dispatch of a large Muscovite army to the Middle Volga in 1552. Romaniello treats the Muscovite of Kazan as an incremental process occurring over four decades. In contrast to the preceding Muscovite campaigns against Kazan, Ivan IV's campaign of conquest in 1552 brought quick and decisive victory in the sense that the military overthrow of the Kazan Khanate was achieved in just a few weeks, the noble faction supporting Girei candidates for the Kazan throne was soundly defeated, and the tsar's sovereignty was politically cemented as well as symbolically asserted by the installation of a Muscovite vicegerent. …

Textiles as Money on the Silk Road?

The abstract concept of “the Silk Road” linking east and west shapes many popular narrative histories, encouraging readers to think dreamily of dazzling silks carried as luxury trade items on the backs of camels over sun-scorched sand dunes, and conveniently skirting more complex issues such as political, military, religious and cultural barriers. The actual mechanics of how any trading and other financial or economic transactions took place are seldom addressed, and references to money are few and far between.

The Traffic in Glands

AbstractThe story that beavers self-castrate when cornered by hunters appears in a range of Roman sources, both poetry and prose, from the end of the Republic onward. This myth is a product of the rôle that ‘beaver testicles’ played in Roman luxury trade and medicine. At the same time, it serves as a literary figure for the fraught relations between Rome and the provinces from which these, and other, luxury goods were imported.

Forging an English Bohemia

Forging an English Bohemia Tracy C. Davis (bio) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870. By Jacky Bratton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. 230. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in late Victorian Britain. By Nicholas Freeman. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011; pp. 248. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter. By Marty Gould. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2011; pp. 262. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. By Sadiah Qureshi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; pp. 392. Misapprehensions that the Victorian period was quaint may arise through erroneous contrasts with our own time. We think of the twenty-first century as an age of rapid global communication, yet in the 1890s a telegraph could travel from Manchester in the north of England to the west coast of Canada then back to Manchester in ninety seconds (Freeman 77–78). That may be quicker than e-mails can travel on a dial-up connection or just as speedy as a text message can be sent and returned, even when cell-phone towers are well-placed. The rapid circulation of same-day news brought an unprecedented level of cohesion within the empire by the mid-Victorian period. In 1854, the transmission of William Russell’s Crimean dispatches to the London Times transformed Britons from patriotic nationalists into anxious war skeptics, demoralized by news of battles commanded by aging, out-of-touch generals, hospitals clogged with diseased (not merely wounded) soldiers, [End Page 287] and near-starvation conditions suffered during an unanticipated frigid winter campaign. When the debacle was brought home by telegraph, the world seemed to shrink. Even Tennyson’s galloping lines “Into the valley of the shadow of death / Rode the six hundred,” published in The Examiner six weeks after the charge of the Light Brigade, memorialized the seeming immediacy of the events and ubiquity of their impact: “When can their glory fade? / O the wild charge they made! / All the world wondered.” Flows of information as well as peoples contributed to a growing sense of access, immediacy, and contact. Entertainment was integral to this effect. Whether through the visits of cricketers, the exhibition of natives from Cape province, or melodramas depicting the Victoria gold rush, the imperial periphery was brought to London, making it the quintessential contact zone. Imperialism was both economic and governmental, but it was also reinforced through the cheap daily press, genteel exhibition halls, and thriving theatres of the West End. Jacky Bratton calls the West End “a portal on to a world of pleasure” (5), replete with the finest in shopping, especially for those in search of the luxury trades, and retreats for the most debauched sensualists and inveterate gamblers, as well as performance venues for the newly emergent middle classes. Others have chronicled the process of making the West End1—building infrastructure, developing the interdependent service industries, and gradually sharpening incipient boundaries around St. James’s plush townhouses in the west, the shopping paradise of Oxford Street in the north, journalists’ offices and law courts in the east, and the traffic-clogged Strand along the southern periphery—but Bratton takes it up anew as a topic in theatre history. The consolidation of the West End between 1840 and 1870 was commensurate with the expansion of telegraphic networks, the building and buttressing of national and metropolitan rail networks, and the emergence of a professional class of artists and managers who kept the pump primed with entertainments. This, she argues, in tandem with the serialization of realist novels, shaped Victorian expectations of the scope of British dominion over self and other, gentility and baser instincts, masculinity and femininity. For Nicholas Freeman, the West End is where Oscar Wilde’s dramas—and trials—played out. Whereas Bratton geographically maps London, first from the perspective of a pleasure-seeking woman then as a journalist, Freeman affectively maps social preoccupations from September 1894 to December 1895, contrasting the excruciating privations of those suffering from a severe winter, influenza, and diphtheria outbreaks with the exhilarating self-destructive spree that marked Wilde’s last months...

Understanding Luxury Branding

abstractThe origin of luxury goes back to the ancient times. People indulge in luxurious products to satisfy their intrinsic and extrinsic needs. The sales of luxury goods in 2010 are expected to grow by four percent to 158 billion Euros. The better spending by the aspirational and young buyers, and the increase in middle class disposable income have given rise to luxury goods trade. However, the consumption of luxurious goods varies with consumers’ taste and choices. They define and express luxury brands in different notations depending on their profile and fundamental values. Moreover, consumers changing preferences are reshaping the luxury meaning. This paper figures out the multi-dimensional attributes of luxury and identifies the changing perception of consumers in today’s times. The paper builds a conceptual framework that can help the marketers in forming the luxury brands communication strategies with which they can construct groundbreaking rules for their brand.

Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster's Aesthetics of Inclusion

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For an overview of the choral or “sight-singing” movement, see Scholes 11–17; for the board schools, see Cox 19–21, 116–20, 162, and also Board of Education 254–55. For the lower-middle- and working-class makeup of the Promenades' audiences, see Langley 44–45. After the Queen's Hall was destroyed in World War II the Promenades moved to the Royal Albert Hall where they still take place today. I find Stone's argument convincing: “[s]ince nearly all of Forster's writings on art appeared after his last published novel, they are inevitably a comment (at least in part) on his own practice” (104). Trilling, too, found Forster's literary criticism and his novels to be of a similar intellectual “temper” (2). The theory of musical fiction in itself is not new. André Gide in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) and Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1928) overtly theorized musical novels in their own work, while, more recently, critics such as Calvin Brown (1948 Brown , Calvin. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts . Athens : The University of Georgia Press , 1948 . Print. [Google Scholar]) and Werner Wolf (1999 Weatherhead , Andrea K. “Howards End: Beethoven's Fifth.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 31.2–3 ( 1985 ): 247 – 64 . Print. [Google Scholar]) have explored musical fiction across a variety of literary genres. All of these writers, however, tend to de-emphasize the social implications of musical novels. Talking and moving during performances were prevalent, if often frowned upon, behaviors even until the late-nineteenth century, see Scholes 223–225. Though in 1910 individuals, such as Sir Henry Wood, were changing the elitist contexts of classical music through endeavors such as the Queen's Hall Promenades, most modernists continued to view classical music as part of what Thomas Burke once called a “luxury trade” intended for the rich (17). Cyril Ehrlich notes that though decent pianos could be rented by the late nineteenth century, “some hire purchased instruments were so shoddy that they became worthless before payment was completed” (98). I sympathize, for my playing has had similar effects. Rose discusses how many working-class individuals did engage with classical music and literature despite difficult living conditions, though he notes that many working-class parents associated education with effeminacy and indolence and discouraged their children from such pursuits, see Rose 179–80. For the formulation of the abstract power of absolute music in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus 6–7. See also W. A. Schlegel's interest in the interconnected nature of music and literature in his Lectures, translated and published in England in 1846, see W. A. Schlegel 43–44. Pater's Imaginary Portraits and Plato and Platonism actually examine the political and social benefits of music in the Platonic tradition. Critics, however, typically place Pater within the tradition of abstract “absolute” music due to his more famous comments in “The School of Giorgione” in The Renaissance, see, for instance, Herzog 125. See Brown 101, 211, 269–271 and Wolf 75–76, 83–85. On Howards End as a recreation of Beethoven's symphony see Foata and Weatherhead. Forster once observed that there was often an “awkward moment of transition” when moving “from the orchestral to the vocal” (“Word-Making and Sound-Taking” 104). Forster did not, in other contexts, abandon his interest in affordable classical music being provided for the masses, see his radio broadcast “New Year's Greeting” 218. See Hoffman and Ter Haar 46, 52–53. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid DeutschDavid Deutsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where he is working on his dissertation entitled “The Epitome of the Arts: Historicizing Classical Music and Literary Modernism.”

Uma ponte para a especulação: ou a arte da renda na montagem de uma "cidade global"

Este artigo analisa conflitos e articulações por trás da transformação de uma antiga área alagadiça, as várzeas do rio Pinheiros, em uma das regiões mais valorizadas de São Paulo e, atualmente, sua fachada globalizada. O texto discute, particularmente, os nexos que se constituem, nas últimas décadas, entre a financeirização global da economia e os arranjos específicos que se configuram em São Paulo; entre mecanismos supostamente avançados - como operações urbanas, Cepacs e fundos de investimento imobiliário - e formas típicas de acumulação primitiva, nas quais força, fraude, opressão e pilhagem são exibidas de modo recorrente; entre "a cidade própria" das elites e a cidade dita clandestina, que ocupa beiras de córrego, encostas de morros, margens de represas. Tomo como referência três ícones dessa paisagem urbana: uma ponte estaiada, imagem-síntese da cenografia da "nova cidade"; um gigantesco emprendimento murado, que mescla residência, comércio de luxo e escritórios; e um complexo empresarial com torres de escritório e hotel, interligados por um shopping subterrâneo.

Out of the East: spices and the medieval imagination

The demand for spices in medieval Europe was extravagant and was reflected in the pursuit of fashion, the formation of taste, and the growth of luxury trade. It inspired geographical and commercial exploration ,as traders pursued such common spices as pepper and cinnamon and rarer aromatic products, including ambergris and musk. Ultimately, the spice quest led to imperial missions that were to change world history. This engaging book explores the demand for spices: why were they so popular, and why so expensive? Paul Freedman surveys the history, geography, economics, and culinary tastes of the Middle Ages to uncover the surprisingly varied ways that spices were put to use--in elaborate medieval cuisine, in the treatment of disease, for the promotion of well-being, and to perfume important ceremonies of the Church. Spices became symbols of beauty, affluence, taste, and grace, Freedman shows, and their expense and fragrance drove the engines of commerce and conquest at the dawn of the modern era.