Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s e…
Canada in the Frame explores a photographic collection held at the British Library that offers a unique view of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Canada. The collection, which contains in excess of 4,500 images, taken between 1895 and 1923, covers a dynamic period in Canada’s national history and provides a variety of views of its landscapes, developing urban areas and peopl…
The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short intr…
An investigation of music videos as a form, a practice, and a literacy. Music videos were once something broadcast by MTV and received on our TV screens. Today, music videos are searched for, downloaded, and viewed on our computer screens—or produced in our living rooms and uploaded to social media. In We Used to Wait, Rebecca Kinskey examines this shift. She investigates music video as a for…
These are the papers from the 2012 Cambridge Tax Law History Conference revised and reviewed for publication. The papers include new studies of: income tax law rewrite projects 1914–1956; law and administration in capital allowances 1878– 1950; the 'full amount' in income tax legislation; Sir Josiah Stamp and double income tax; early German income tax treaties and laws concerned with double…
Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity, it is the one most explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, and more precisely it can be understood as that which decrees what is visible and what is not, through its normative gaze. However, if la…
The main focus of this study is a methodological analysis of private letters written by Spanish emigrants from the Americas to their relatives and friends back in Europe, with an intensive discussion about the interaction and blurring between the public and the private spheres in private correspondences, kept and preserved in a public space (the archive). Questions of source criticism and a det…
The spectacle of the wounded body figured prominently in the Middle Ages, from images of Christ’s wounds on the cross, to the ripped and torn bodies of tortured saints who miraculously heal through divine intervention, to graphic accounts of battlefield and tournament wounds—evidence of which survives in the archaeological record—and literary episodes of fatal (or not so fatal) wounds. Th…
This book-length study is concerned with the various - vicarious and delegative - devices pertaining to rhetorical ventriloquism (sermocinatio, ethopoeia, prosopopoeia, etc.) - including their technical, conceptual, and applicative history in European and Western literatures, from Ancient to (Early) Modern times. It is published as an Online Supplement (.pdf) to (the article "Rhetorical Ventril…
A critical anthology on the widespread use and influence of photography From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver s…