Artifacts

Lake, Crystal B.

doi:10.1353/book.72365

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…50 However, the later report on the exhumation of King John proceeded in the opposite direction, from the body outward to the coffin. 51 Imagining the body from within its outer shell was a form of virtual habitation practiced by antiquarians unwilling to lift the sudarium and cerecloth enveloping the dead.…”

Section: Practical Antiquarymentioning

confidence: 99%

William Blake’s “Fourfold Vision”: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the “Couches of the Dead”

Calè

2022

Modern Philology

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This essay argues that the artisanal problems of the "practical antiquary" shaped William Blake's physiological aesthetics and his experience of "fourfold vision." As a draftsman and engraver, Blake captured three-dimensional sepulchral monuments on the flat surface of the page, offering different perspectives on the sculptural object from changing points of view-from above, from the side, in horizontal or vertical orientations. In his time as an apprentice to James Basire, Blake produced drawings of the disinterment of Edward I (1774) and funerary monuments at Westminster for Richard Gough's Sepulchral Monuments (1786) and Vetusta Monumenta (II, 1789). Building on Abigail Zitin's and Ruth Mack's work on practical aesthetics, I will trace how the technical gaze of the draftsman resurfaces in Blake's writings, from the "couches of the dead" seen through the "eternal gates" of The Book of Thel (1789) to the visionary contemplations around the death couches in The Four Zoas (ca. 1796Zoas (ca. -1807 and Milton (1804-11). As an engraver-poet who invented a medium for selfpublication, Blake sidestepped the division of labor between the empirical field worker and the gentleman author that Noah Heringman finds among the knowledge workers of antiquity. Yet the technical ways of seeing that Blake practiced during his antiquarian apprenticeship can be traced through his visionary contemplations. Thinking through technique, Blake crossed the threshold between engraver and poet and embraced a prophetic physiological aesthetics of "fourfold" vision.He was employed in making drawings from old buildings and monuments, and occasionally, especially in winter, in engraving from those drawings. This occupation led him to an acquaintance with those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments. There he found a treasure, which he knew how to value. He saw the simple and plain road to the style of art at which he aimed, unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice. The monuments of Kings and Queens in Westminster Abbey, which surround the chapel of Edward the Confessor, particularly that of King Henry the Third, the beautiful monument and figure of Queen Elinor, Queen Philippa, King Edward the Third, King Richard the Second and his Queen, were among his first studies.

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Section: Practical Antiquarymentioning

confidence: 99%

William Blake’s “Fourfold Vision”: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the “Couches of the Dead”

Calè

2022

Modern Philology

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“…5 Don Saltero's housed over 10,000 artefacts and specimens, which visitors could inspect when they dropped by for refreshments, a haircut or even dental work. 6 Sir Ashton Lever (1729-88) brought his collection of around 27,000 objects from Alkrington Hall in Lancashire to Leicester Fields (later Leicester Square) in London in 1775, charging a fee of five shillings and three pence for entry. 7 Later in the period, William Bullock (c. 1773-1849) moved a 32,000 object collection from Liverpool to Piccadilly, London, including natural history, archaeology and ethnography.…”

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confidence: 99%

4 Collecting

Hannan

2023

A Culture of Curiosity

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is a common enough human instinct, although the scope to indulge varies widely. For those with the least in the eighteenth-century British world, the ability to collect might extend as far as a locked box or even just a pocket. For others, large households with room upon room were the compass of their material accretion. When domestic accumulation is termed 'collecting', it takes on rather grand connotations -imperial trade, global travel and the big names of Britain's earliest museums: Tradescant and Sloane. 1 Moreover, the term 'collecting' implies a highly conscious approach with a view to developing and sharing personal curiosity or furthering knowledge. Nonetheless, collecting things at home was an activity that anyone with a little disposable income could do, and many did. Some people styled household accumulations of one variety or another as a conscious 'collection'; others just amassed according to their own interest, use or desire. Whilst eighteenthcentury readers of the periodical press may have marvelled at the findings of naturalists, imperialists and voyagers, they would not have been surprised to hear about the methods they used. These methods -record-keeping, letter-writing, journal-keeping, collecting, drawing and annotating -were wholly familiar.In this period, the mind itself was often characterised as a collection of accumulated artefacts. As Sean Silver has discussed, the view of the imagination as a creative force was the product of a later age and, in the eighteenth century, the mind was much more likely to be conceptualised as a storehouse of objects, ordered and assessed through wit and reason. 2 The analogy of the collection was pervasive and also found expression in print culture, most especially in the periodical press. Even the word 'magazine' was understood 3 Collecting

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Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Hanlon

2022

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This Element examines the eighteenth-century novel's contributions to empirical knowledge. Realism has been the conventional framework for treating this subject within literary studies. This Element identifies the limitations of the realism framework for addressing the question of knowledge in the eighteenth-century novel. Moving beyond the familiar focus in the study of novelistic realism on problems of perception and representation, this Element focuses instead on how the eighteenth-century novel staged problems of inductive reasoning. It argues that we should understand the novel's contributions to empirical knowledge primarily in terms of what the novel offered as training ground for methods of reasoning, rather than what it offered in terms of formal innovations for representing knowledge. We learn from such a shift that the eighteenth-century novel was not a failed experiment in realism, or in representing things as they are, but a valuable system for reasoning and thought experiment.

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Artifacts

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

William Blake’s “Fourfold Vision”: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the “Couches of the Dead”

William Blake’s “Fourfold Vision”: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the “Couches of the Dead”

4 Collecting

Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

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