Organic Supplements
From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.
- Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of LettersA significant and engaging collection that addresses in different and often fascinating ways the blurred and shifting edge terrains of concepts, categories, objects, and processes in early modern Europe.
- Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean StageA sophisticated and original volume, Organic Supplements distinguishes itself from other recent collections on material objects by an emphasis on organic things—things that have their origins in once-living organisms. The interdisciplinarity of the essays—encompassing music, literature, medicine, art, and the history of science—is exceptional, and the scholarly excellence of its contributors is uniformly impressive.
Organic Supplements is often as imaginative, energetic, and sensuously material as the bodies and things that it carefully and elaborately interrogates; as a contribution to studies operating at the meeting points of a rigorously contextualized new materialism and ecocriticism, and of art, science, and history, it offers insights that reveal exciting ways forward.- James Metcalf · Eighteenth-Century Studies
Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England.
Julie Park is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow at the Special Collections Center of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, and author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England.
Introduction: Process and Connection / Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park
Part I. Inscription and Incorporation
Feather, Flourish and Flow: Handwriting's Organic Technology / Julie Park
The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality / Rebecca Laroche
The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion's Kiss / Kevin Lambert
Part II. Interface and Merger
Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne / Jessica Wolfe
Things with Kid Gloves / Lynn Festa
Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry / Miriam Jacobson
Part III. Vitality and Decay
Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints / Michael Yonan
Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration / Diane Purkiss
Milton’s Hair / Jayne Lewis
Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement / Julia Reinhard Lupton
Notes on Contributors
Index
