Early Modern Migrations

Friday, April 25, 430-6pm, Kellogg College

Early Modern Migrations: Objects, Texts, People

 

Impression by Dr. Leah R. Clark, Gareth Ridley-DeMonick, Caroline Hewitt

 

This interdisciplinary conversation was a collaboration between the Centre for Early Modern Studies and Kellogg College. Four speakers addressed the question of early modern migrations in their respective disciplines, that spoke to larger interdisciplinary questions of what it meant to move in the early modern world.

 

The conversation began with Leah Clark who looked at the mobility of ceramics and the translation of motifs as well as artisanal knowledge across the early modern world, from Jingdezhen, China to Naples, Italy to Puebla, Mexico. Imogen Choi then examined the way writers thematised migration and mobility and how this shifted from the 16th-17th centuries, looking at both the transcendental/religious as well as the practical/political elements of migration. Viviana Tagliaferri then discussed the range of ‘foreigners’ in London and how they brought with them levels of expertise, from technological knowledge to specialisms in particular trades. Finally, Nandini Das returned to ceramics, pursuing the idea of ‘object memory’ in cross-cultural encounters, particularly in the first English embassy to the Mughal court in 1616/17, considering encounter as process rather than a one-off event.

 

Earthware apothecary jar in blue and white, patterned with a floral design

Earthware Apothecary Jar, Mexican, ca. 1700. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.87.9)

 

The conversation and roundtable addressed the following questions:

 

- How did objects, images, ideas, people, and texts migrate across the early modern globe?

- To what extent were these migrations productive and destructive?

- How were cities sites of cosmopolitanism, exchange, and encounter?

- How did objects circulate, bringing with them new technologies and artisanal knowledge?

- To what extent does the focus on mobility, migration and circulation have methodological implications?

 

Plain Yellow dish, inscribed (not pictured) with the name of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir

Porcelain dish, covered with yellow enamel, except on the base. On the back, diamond-engraved inscription in Persian, Jahangir Shah-e Akbar Shah 1021 (1612-13 AD), meaning that it was owned by the Mughal emperor Jahangir, son of, and successor to, Akbar. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London (551-1878)

 

Two graduate students who attended the event, provided their own impressions:

 

“Dr Leah Clark (Kellogg College) introduced some extraordinary examples of albarelli (apothecary jars) from both sides of the Atlantic, most memorably 16th-century jars from Puebla, Mexico. This invited many interesting questions concerning the cultural memories of objects, the genealogy of design and cross-continental relationships shaped by both European colonial expansion, and handicraft. Professor Nandini Das (Exeter College) also introduced pottery, albeit from the Mughal courts, which further stimulated questions about ceramics, global networks of trade and cross-cultural contact in the early modern period.”

- Gareth Ridley-DeMonick, second year student on the MSt in Literature and Arts

 

 

 

“In thinking about objects moving from one place to another and the changes that occur during the migration, I thought about the parallels with the research I am doing at present.

 

My research looks at how language and image translate from one culture to another and how – in the absence of a familiar ‘vocabulary’ - artists and writers communicate the concept of the alien.   The event’s theme of migration and exchange made me re-think the process and progress of an object (or in my case, a text and a visual image) moving from one culture and ending up in another very dissimilar space - and the implications that this has on the relationship the final work has with the original.  The point that many of the speaker's made about how the beginning and end of a migration are often considered ... but it is what happens in the 'in-between' periods that are often the most interesting and telling.”

 

-Caroline Hewett, second year student on the MSt in Literature and Arts

 

 

Pencil and wash drawing. A family group of masked figures. A man in a tall hat, carrying a small child in a basket on his back, pushes a barrow in which sits a woman holding a baby. Two young children accompany them; a boy, left, holds a jug, and a second

Itinerant Commedia dell'Arte performers, probably Italian. Pencil and wash drawing, 18th century. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London (S.726-1997)