18thc – Page 3 – Women's Studies Group 1558

Review: WSG Seminar 6 February 2025

The WSG seminar on the 6 February featured presentations by Pilar Botías Domínguez and Charlotte MacKenzie. The scheduled paper by Amy Solomons and Elizabeth Ingham has been postponed until the 2025–2026 seminar season.

Pilar offered an analysis of Aphra Behn’s play The Rover (1677) through the lens of the masquerade. She suggested that Behn uses the masquerade not only as a dramatic device, but also as a means to explore women’s right of self-determination. The paper was rich in quotation and citation providing contextual depth to the analysis of the play and its internal dynamics. For example, employing Bakhtin’s (1984) idea of carnival time – as being “subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom” – Pilar illustrated how the immersive, carnivalesque setting of the play enables female defiance and transgression.

The use of masks and crossdressing in The Rover highlight the limited social mobility that is usually available for women. In the play, by wearing masks, women are able to defy patriarchy and adopt a new identity while the carnival takes place, as their own identity is disabled for a moment. For example, Hellena can dress as a gypsy, permitting her to act differently than her social station would normally allow. The paper explored the actions and words of Behn’s two very different women – Hellena and Florinda – and their acts of defiance and ultimate compliance. Additionally, Pilar demonstrated how the male characters of the novel were the targets of female wit and satire.

Charlotte MacKenzie offered an analysis of women in Georgian Cornwall and how their learning was facilitated by local knowledge making communities. Charlotte explored three categories of female learning set against the backdrop of Cornwall as a county of technological and scientific discovery. Each of the three categories featured detailed case studies of Cornish women drawn from local manuscript sources, alongside material from women visitors such as Hester Piozzi and the writer Eliza Fenwick.

The first category featured women as household managers, which included running finances and healthcare. Examples were provided of female friendly societies that enabled women to set aside money for financial security, and the role of women in providing rural healthcare. The second category included women as readers, writers, and theatre-goers, exploring (among other things) the role of the Penzance theatre, book clubs and circulating libraries. The third example focused on women and their involvement in natural history. This paper demonstrated the wide range of women’s intellectual involvement in the sharing of knowledge: from friendly female societies to meetings on antiquities to participants in Cornwall’s mining community.

To close the session, there was a lively discussion about both presentations. Pilar was able to explicate that, as The Rover takes place outside of England, the Naples setting heightens the sense of freedom and strangeness, allowing for the presentation of topics not always suitable for the English stage. The conversation also turned to the more sinister and dangerous connotations of the masquerade and how masks could hide pock marks, decay, and signs of venereal disease. Charlotte gave greater detail of the types of society meetings women were attending in Cornwall, such as those related to mining and geology, and there was further discussion of the Penzance book club. Charlotte astutely concluded that women did not have to be literate to make or share knowledge; knowledge could be passed on orally or via demonstration. Both presentations were extremely well-received.

By Louise Duckling and Valerie Schutte

The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities. By Laura Engel. Review by Victoria Joule

The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities. By Laura Engel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024. Pp 78. £17.00 paperback), ISBN 9781108977906.

The cover image of Laura Engel’s The Art of the Actress is not of an eighteenth-century actress, but instead features the moody tones of Donato Creti’s Astronomical Observations: Comet (1711). Although not discussed within the book – indeed, Engel may not have chosen the image – the significance is clear. Set against darkening skies, the glowing comet shines out much like the actresses discussed in the text; their dazzling images and performances are moments in history that artists and actress-artists alike attempted to capture in solid form for posterity. In this book, Engel offers the reader a visually and intellectually stimulating insight into the literary, cultural and material legacy of the actress. The Art of the Actress is part of Cambridge Elements: an extensive collection of shorter academic works covering a wide range of disciplines. Engel’s work is published within the Eighteenth-Century Connections series that explores ‘connections between verbal and visual texts and the people, networks, cultures and places’ with attention to ‘oral, written and visual media’. Cambridge Elements can be purchased as affordable print or electronic editions, and some are also open access.

The paperback version of Engel’s book is about the size of a journal but lighter and softer to handle, and the cover image is beautifully reproduced. The text is divided into four parts: part one concentrates on the use of pearls in portraiture; part two is on the relationship between artist and actress; part three focuses on another material object – a muff; and part four cleverly reads the style of ‘unfinished’ art against the in/ability to capture the actress’s image. Engel effectively selects specific material objects and specific actresses to provide ‘a visual exhibition highlighting the representations, creative works, collaborations, and experiences of both well-established and lesser-known performers’ (3) in the eighteenth century. In Engel’s terms, ‘The “art” of the actress thus refers to the actress represented in art, as well as the actress’s labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects’ (2). Throughout the study, Engel highlights the fascinating web of theatrical connections between artists and actresses, demonstrating how ‘women fashioned their identities on- and offstage, as well as how audiences perceived women in the public sphere through theatrical lenses’ (3–4).

Part one immediately establishes Engel’s aims using a piece of jewellery to observe the complex history it brings to different visual portrayals. A string of pearls can tell a story about the actress and her infiltration into the higher echelons of society, but it also conveys the pearls’ murky history in terms of slavery; furthermore, ideas about beauty and competing metaphors of virginity and sexuality show the actress’s ‘[occupation of a] precarious and significant place in the early modern world’ (18). The section concludes with a concise but fascinating examination of pearls as stage accessory in portraits of actresses, providing links between the parts they and others played.

Part two develops the concept of the actress as artist/artist as actress. With a focus on Anne Damer (amateur actress and sculptor) and Angelica Kauffman (artist), Engel demonstrates how involvement in acting had an impact on their representations of women. Engel provides an expansive backstory to a selection of portraits showing how Damer and Kauffman’s private and public lives, as well as public theatre and private theatricals – and even specific performances, costumes and contemporary fashions – fed into their artistic creations. Damer, present in the public eye as an actress, sculptor, and quite a character with her ‘dazzling, over-the-top costumes’ (38), was inevitably subject to satiric attacks. Engel provides an empowering reading of the ongoing presence of these women’s work in museums and galleries as testimony to their valuable contributions to the arts.

The penultimate section focusses on one figure and an emblematic object: Mary Anne Clarke and her strategically held muff. Clarke appeared with a huge white muff at the scandalous court case concerning her selling of army commissions to fund decoration of the house given to her by her lover, the Duke of York. Taking theory and knowledge of actresses’ self-fashioning and their contemporary reception and portrayal, Engel reads the subsequent images of Clarke in comparable ways: ‘Although Clarke was not an actress on the stage, her theatrical maneuvering and publicity stunts established her as a performer to be reckoned with’ (48). The validity of this approach is reinforced by the section on Thomas Rowlandson’s collection of prints featuring Clarke and actress Dorothy Jordan, in which Engel persuasively highlights connections between the satirical portrayals of the two women. Engel concludes with a more uplifting comment on Clarke’s later attempt to control her image through neo-classical sculpture.

To conclude, Engel effectively examines the transitory nature of performance by turning to ‘unfinished’ artwork. Engel uses a selection of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s unfinished portraits to show how they ‘are inextricably tied to the theater, an art form that is by definition fleeting, ephemeral, and open-ended’ (63). Again, Engel reveals the intricate web of theatrical connections behind and feeding into artistic works. The unfinished portraits are of the actress and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald, and of Lady Cahir who performed with Lawrence in one of Inchbald’s plays at a private theatrical. Engel extends the reading of theatrical influences on portraiture to a brief analysis of other portraits. One is ‘almost too finished’ (68) compared to the others: ‘these portraits are alive because they are not done yet’ (65).

One lasting impression this condensed book gives is just how theatrically infused culture was in the eighteenth century. Because of the impressive scope of Engel’s work in exploring the connections and conversations between artists and actresses, visual art, performances and more, there is less space at times to delve into detailed analysis and deepening of concepts, such as how the eighteenth-century actress ‘is central to understanding unfolding anxieties about nation, race, gender and heteronormativity’ (4). For example, the ‘unexpected analogy’ between an enslaved (female) child and duchess (in Duchess of Portsmouth with an Unknown Female Attendant) could be developed further using broader post-colonial studies, particularly in relation to the subsequent portrait of Nell Gwyn (with black male slave) which Engel presents as an echo (17). Sometimes the cruder, more explicit aspects of the material are left unsaid: for example, we can consider exactly how Gwyn is (erotically) ‘making’ (or stuffing or washing?) sausages and how Clarke’s muff (like Sophia Western’s in Tom Jones)is representative of female genitalia. These kinds of questions, however, also point to the effectiveness of Engel’s style, which encourages an interactive engagement. Engel often poses questions or makes references to online reproductions of portraits for readers to follow up in addition to the extensive range she discusses. I found myself setting up another device to look at these images while reading this book. I can imagine students and scholars alike being inspired to pursue new research projects. As a kind of condensed monograph, in an age when time seems to be as short as ever and new research is published rapidly, this easy-to-read book serves as a model and inspiration for future study.

Victoria Joule is an independent scholar based in Wales. Victoria has published on women’s writing of the long eighteenth century with particular attention to self-representation and literary forms. She co-edited and contributed to the essay collection with Emrys D. Jones, Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain. By Peter Radford. Review by Carolyn D. Williams

They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain. By Peter Radford. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 2023. Pp 296. £31.79 (paperback), ISBN 9780813947938.

Readers of Peter Radford’s previous work, including his chapter entitled ‘Better than the Men’ in Exploring the Lives of Women (2018), a collection of essays by members of the Women’s Studies Group 1558–1887, will expect great things from his latest publication. They will not be disappointed.

This fascinating and wide-ranging study of women’s past achievements in sports and athletics, as well as other forms of physical activity demanding various combinations of strength, skill, courage and endurance, incorporates a forceful defence of their ability and right to participate in these activities today. We are currently emerging from a period when women’s participation in sport was restricted on the grounds that strenuous exertion would threaten their capacity for motherhood or even their physical survival. Radford has unearthed evidence of ‘a kind of cultural amnesia’ (208) that seems to have been fostered by nineteenth-century masculine anxieties, obliterating awareness of traditional female sports. The chapter headed ‘Moral Meddling, Cant, and Sheer Humbug: 1825 Onward’ gives a painfully eloquent account of this turning point. As he shows elsewhere in his book, the participants were often subjected to various forms of misogynistic prejudice, but at least the existence of these events was acknowledged.

As in previous work, Radford counters this great forgetting. After producing evidence for women’s robustness in the Neolithic period, and their versatile athleticism in Ancient Greece, he provides detailed studies of events involving female runners, and occasionally walkers, concentrating on the period 1638–1850. A theme that should inspire interest in other feminist historians is the rise and fall of the smock race, and its connections with skimmington rides. He then discusses women’s involvement in football, cricket, prize-fighting (with swords and fists), equestrianism and tennis: women in the last two categories beat the best male professionals.

Some of the book’s findings cast new light on established disciplines. Analyses of the pictures of sporting activities included in the illustrations use information about eighteenth-century practices to distinguish the works of eye-witnesses from copies and products of the artists’ imagination. For example, familiarity with the structure and placement of wickets, knowledge of the rules of best-of-three races, and awareness of what running women actually look like provide tools for art historians seeking to establish the authenticity of sporting pictures. John Collett emerges as a reliable and well-informed creator of original images of female runners and cricketers, which were copied inaccurately by Thomas Rowlandson.

Frances Burney scholars should brace themselves for an outright denial that anything like the twenty-yard race between two enfeebled octagenarian women in Evelina (1778) was ever reported in the eighteenth century: Radford sees it as ‘a product of her fertile imagination’ (31), possibly sparked by a reference in Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753) to two aristocratic gamblers running their grandmothers together, i.e. seeing which would live longer. In actuality, age presented fewer barriers to demonstrations of physical prowess: ninety-year-old Mary Wilkinson walked the 290 miles from York to London ‘in five days and three hours with “a keg of gin, and a quantity of provisions on her back”’ (125), while an eighteen-month-old girl ‘walked the length of the Mall (half a mile) in twenty-three minutes’ (90).

Precisely because this work is the result of carefully planned and scrupulously detailed research, it abounds in unexpected discoveries, sometimes appearing initially random: they are the rewards for the author’s determination to follow the evidence. Three examples must suffice. Firstly, everybody acquainted with early modern childbirth customs must have come across references to a ‘groaning cheese’, but how many know exactly what it was? Radford has unearthed a reference to a specimen weighing a hundred pounds that was the first prize for a race between ‘six heavily pregnant brewers’ wives’ who were to run a mile ‘to the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh’; he then cites ‘an old English tradition in which the father of a newborn baby brought a very large, flat, round cheese for the baby’s christening’: slices would be cut from the centre, and the baby passed through the resulting hole ‘for luck’ (56). Secondly, the importance of accurate time-keeping, especially when wagers were involved, have led the author, after thorough investigation, to conclude that ‘watches were high-status, finely-crafted objects in the eighteenth century, and they recorded time very accurately; cheap and unreliable watches were still sometime in the future’ (118). More directly relevant to the book’s subject, but even more startling, is the discovery that ‘the first example of a football match played on grass, with teams of a fixed number, and played for the benefit and amusement of a crowd’ (179) was a six-a-side women’s event that took place on a bowling green in Bath, probably arranged by Beau Nash, in 1726.

There are a few minor errors in expression and presentation. In the transcription of the motto of the Amateur Athletic Assocation, taken from lines 95 and 96 of Pindar’s 9^th Olympian Ode, ποδῶν and ἀκμαί have been run together when they should have space between them, and ideally […] to indicate the omission of an intervening word (115). In the useful appendix, explaining the technicalities of distance measurement, currency and gambling in early modern Britain, the author apparently makes a slip when describing the kind of wager known as a match against time: ‘In the example above, a timekeeper would stand at the finishing line and call “Time” precisely one hour after the start’ (245). Unfortunately, the hypothetical example requires the contestants to run ‘one mile (e.g. from the tavern door to the church door)’ (245) which seems far too short a distance for the time allowed, especially when we reflect that ‘a fifteen-year-old girl from Wrotham ran it in 5 minutes 28 seconds on Saturday July 11, 1795, a record unbeaten in Britain until 20 August 1932’ (119). Perhaps the chosen course should be taken into consideration: how long would the contestants stay in the tavern before they reached its door?

As well as applying extensive and meticulous scholarship to his study of human physical activity in general and sport in particular, the author deploys the practical experience acquired during an athletic career that earned him a world record, two Commonwealth gold medals and two Olympic bronze medals. He can flesh out the briefest account of an event with considerations of how it would have been organized and publicised, how the expenses would be covered, how many heats were involved, or the conditions in which it took place: for example, in 1822, when girls ran races ‘on a wet Wednesday in August’ on Gander Down, to the east of Winchester, ‘it must have been difficult for them on the wet grass, though these were chalk downs and would have drained quickly’ (205).

Professor Radford has yet more to say about the history of women’s physical achievements: on Saturday, October 7, 2023, at the opening seminar of the Women’s Studies Group 2023–24 season, at London’s Foundling Museum, he will present a paper entitled ‘Strong Women in Early Modern Europe: A Counter Narrative’. To readers of this book, this is very good news.

Carolyn D. Williams

Women, Collecting, and Cultures beyond Europe. Arlene Leis. Review by Valeria Viola

Women, Collecting, and Cultures beyond Europe. Arlene Leis. New York and London, Routledge. 2023. 282 pages, 21 Colour & 33 B/W Illustrations. £120.00, ISBN 978-1-032-13546-5

Arlene Leis makes the aim of this essay collection explicit in the book title. The 17 chapters intersect and consolidate two fields of research: Women and Collecting. The topic itself is not new, but research in this field is still very much alive. In 1985, in response to the provocative question ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ raised by Joan Kelly-Gadol (1977), David Herlihy pinpointed that, even when pushed to marginal positions, women could find other routes to social influence in a world of men. Since then, scholars have demonstrated that one of these routes was collecting. An increasingly extensive approach has brought to light many women who commissioned buildings or collected artworks, so that the assumption of uniquely male-gendered patronage has become no longer sustainable (Reiss 2013). This extensive approach has at times risked dismissing the female social performance as inevitable (Hills 2003). Yet, research has been energized again by the exploration of the dynamics between the two sexes, who used art to negotiate their own spaces (e.g., Maurer 2019). This exploration has generated new questions about the influence of gender on the motivations and practices of collecting, and on the opportunity to use the same methodology to explore women’s and men’s collections. Arlene Leis herself addressed these issues in Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2021), co-edited with Kacie L. Wills, and they also appear, here and there, in this new book, proving that her research interest fits well into this burgeoning trajectory.

The key aspect of Leis’ new publication, however, lies in the last words of its title, Cultures beyond Europe, which signal how the work is sensitive to the increasingly pressing question of decolonizing research. The view of Europe from China, with which the book opens, is significant in this sense. While most of the essays are by English-speaking authors, their perspectives and approaches vary and extend to less-investigated areas and peoples around the globe, and to a greater extent than other recent publications on similar topics (e.g., Bellion and Smentek 2023). The broad chronological framework of the book, from the end of the seventeenth century to almost the present day, could be daunting, but it allows the reader to engage with case studies spanning long periods and to gain a glimpse into secular changes in collecting practices.

Understandably, this wide perspective is not meant to be all-encompassing. A global methodology can deal with temporary connections and fragmented narratives without aiming for comprehensive knowledge of a phenomenon (Adamson, Riello, and Teasly 2011). The tempting effort to “fill the gap” is quickly set aside by Leis, who – more wisely – nudges us towards a comparative reading of the different narratives, by suggesting that we either follow the structure of the five themed sections or make our own connections. Since documentation is often poor in relation to women’s collections, these narratives stem from the collectables themselves, which bear their own information and knowledge. The problematic paucity of sources on women’s possessions, compared to their male counterparts, emerges as a transversal issue, from the poor goods of the women from San Fernando de Béxar, which have been traced through their wills by Amy M. Porter, to the Chinese imperial collections investigated by Chih-En Chen. In this regard, Chen has circumvented the problem by using a cross-source methodology that has proved useful for capturing the interactions between everyday practices, objects, and spaces.

Albeit to varying degrees, the individual chapters show us that collected items are neither neutral nor passive but can implement change. In this sense, the book can be framed within the scholarship on materiality, where the term ‘materiality’ refers to the capacity of things to actively affect people’s attitudes and behaviours. Through a rigorous exploration of the eighteenth-century collections in the Chinese Imperial harem, Chih-En Chen argues that trompe l’oeil porcelain satisfied Qing women’s curiosity about European art, giving them a fictive freedom from their golden cage. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Gwendolyn Collaço argues that a dowry, prepared by a woman for another woman, could affect both the receiver’s and the donor’s social status. In Laura Garcia-Vedrenne and Martha Sandoval-Villegas’s case study, four court dresses demonstrate the wealth of an unidentified woman living in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. In Lisa Hellman’s study, the complexity of an entire collection is viewed through the lens of a single dress that bears witness to the travels and encounters of a Swedish woman. For its part, this dress caused her misfortunes and successes, according to the different perceptions of the stories it related. Perception, acceptance, and reciprocity can serve as the reading keys to the essay by Maria Antonietta Spadaro dealing with the Japanese artist, O’Tama Kiyohara, who moved to Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. While O’Tama assimilated the European way of painting, her oriental culture was met with mixed acclaim.

In a period of voyages, long-distance trade, and transcultural encounters, materiality intersects with questions of power and domination. Knowledge as intellectual appropriation is central to the naturalistic classifications that Europeans carried out in their colonies. As the contribution of women has often been thwarted and long gone unrecognized, many questions remain about their role in the colonization process. The botanist Jeanne Baret, discussed by Glynis Ridley, was forced to disguise herself as a man to travel with the French expedition to circumnavigate the world. Unsurprisingly, her work has remained somewhat overshadowed by that of the men she worked with. In this regard, however, the question that emerges as more urgent is not whether women indexed samples differently from men, but to what extent their scientific interest determined their political complicity. Thoroughly delving into the multi-faceted relationship between British colonialism and the scientific illustrations of Indian flora and fauna, Apurba Chatterjee argues that an aristocratic woman, Lady Mary Impey, participated in the colonial enterprise by collecting images of birds drawn by Indian artists. If the inclusion of specimens in the Linnaean taxonomy already implied their extraction from their native environments, a further degree of appropriation was their transfer to European soil. Additionally, the crossing of borders provided these samples with new values and potential. For instance, the pineapple plant successfully replanted in Amsterdam gave fame to Agnes Block, the amateur botanist investigated by Catherine Powell-Warren. Not much differently, the display of dwarves from the Portuguese colonies emphasized the colonial power of the Lisbon court. This case study by Agnieszka Anna Ficek underscores the extent to which curiosity for the exotic intersected with discourses of race, exploitation, and slavery.

While gaining knowledge of others was both the cause and the result of transcultural encounters, the documentation and exhibitions of objects became a further step to perpetuate, promote, and spread this acquired knowledge. The crucial point was and remains the degree of cultural interference that an external (mostly Western) perspective can impose on the heritage of others. This point holds true even when these actions are implemented with the best intentions. Cynthia Sugars explores the case of a British botanist, Catharine Parr Traill, who, while laying the foundations for Canada’s natural history, misunderstood and bypassed Indigenous knowledge of nature because of her moralistic and imperialist view. In their laudable efforts to preserve and promote artists from Santa Fe, the five Pennsylvania women investigated by Nancy Owen Lewis could not avoid imposing their idea of art on indigenous works. As Martha Sandoval-Villegas argues in her study of Mesoamerican huipils, the objects may come from communities that gave collecting practices different purposes.

When exhibited, objects push people to take a stand with respect to the stories, knowledge, and meanings that the same objects bring with them. For Angela Fey and Maureen Matthews, for example, the collection of Métis embroidered clothing enabled women from Manitoba to face and acknowledge their indigenous heritage. Yet, when collectors themselves are unaware of what lies behind their collections, they prevent any other observer from reaching a critical awareness. Brandt Zipp suggests this reflection to us when he tells us about a group of white women who, between the 1920s and 1930s, recovered forgotten examples of eighteenth-century American pottery, but not the Afro-American identity of their ceramicist. Working against this attitude, Toby Upson proposes an adjacency approach which aims for the viewers to understand the object without alienating it from themselves. According to this approach, institutional and non-institutional collectors should not only display or explain otherness but also help observers to find a critically aware position with respect to the same otherness. Louise Hamby seems to suggest a very personal approach, but one that is equally open to the cultural implications of the object. As an artist, she has collected Aboriginal fibre objects from Arnhem Land in Australia with the aim of learning and collaborating with local artists.

To conclude, the global perspective of this book allows the reader to perceive differences and similarities between very varied contexts, thus responding to the expectations created by its title. However, it also opens questions that are useful for the development of its lively field of research. For this reason, scholars dealing with the fields of women, materiality, and collecting will find it very useful. Furthermore, the book makes a very rich contribution to the niche field of the relationship between art, science, and gender. However, the text could also be of interest to all those who aspire to a decolonizing vision of history. Amongst these, I would certainly include the teachers who try to provide their students with this vision every day.

Valeria Viola

Valeria Viola (Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture in 2020) is an Art teacher with experience in both architectural practice and research. At the moment, she is engaged in integrating gender and decolonial perspectives into teaching. You can find her publications here: https://york.academia.edu/ValeriaViola

Cited works.

Adamson, Glenn, Giorgio Riello, and Sara Teasly (eds.). “Introduction”. In Global Design History, 1–10. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Bellion, Wendy and Kristel Smentek (eds.). Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century. Art, Mobility, and Change. London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023.

Herlihy, David. “Did Women have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration.” Medievalia et Humanistica 13 (1985): 1-22.

Hills, Helen (ed.). “Theorizing the Relationship between Architecture and Gender in Early Modern Europe.” In Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3–36. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003.

Maurer, Maria F. Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court. Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.Reiss, Sheryl E. “Beyond Isabella and Beyond: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Early Modern Europe.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, edited by Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, 445–467. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons. Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland. Review by Cheryll Duncan.

Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons. By Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp 244. 11 B/W Illustrations. £130.00 (hardback) £29.24 (ebook), ISBN 9780367443375.

The Italian castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810) spent some 36 years in Britain, where he made a significant contribution to the musical and cultural life of the nation. His multi-faceted career was chronicled in Paul F. Rice’s monograph Venanzio Rauzzini in Britain: Castrato, Composer, and Cultural Leader (2015), which concluded that Rauzzini’s most enduring legacy was ‘his teaching of a generation of leading soloists and his development of the Bath concerts’ (p. 285). While his activities as a concert director account for a generous proportion of the book, however, little attention is given to Rauzzini’s achievements as an educator. Robertson-Kirkland’s study fills this gap in the literature by examining the singer’s influence through the lens of his teaching, probing the pedagogical methods and socio-historic contexts that contributed to his producing some of the finest singers of the period. It unpacks the loyal network of relationships that Rauzzini built with his students, revealing how he cultivated a respectable public image in order to navigate the culture of suspicion that surrounded music masters generally, and castrati in particular.

After an opening ‘Prelude’ that sets out the book’s novel agenda, chapter one provides an overview of British music education in the eighteenth century, pointing up the distinction between the rigorous training that Rauzzini received in Italy and the unregulated system of apprenticeships and private tuition that prevailed in Britain. Arriving in London in 1774 to take up the role of primo uomo at the King’s Theatre, Rauzzini brought with him a wealth of knowledge of Italian music pedagogy at a time when Italian opera and vocal methods were highly respected. Having already established himself as an operatic star and singing master on the continent, the timing was opportune for Rauzzini to hone his skills in Britain. He was also well placed to use his celebrity status to promote his own students on the London stage, and chapter two explores the mixed reception given to two such individuals. Caterina Schindlerin failed to make a lasting impression and prompted Charles Burney to grumble about ‘the number of Italian singers who insisted their inferior students perform with them in the opera’ (p. 43). Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace was only ten when Rauzzini assigned her a minor role in his opera Le ali d’Amore in 1776 (Storace’s performances 1773–1778 are listed in Appendix 1). After completing her training in Italy, she went on to enjoy considerable success, not least as Mozart’s first Susanna in Le nozze de Figaro.

Rauzzini’s activity as a teacher was closely linked to the musical and cultural life of Bath, where from 1780 his own prestigious concert series provided a public platform for his growing network of associates. Chapter three compares the vocal techniques and careers of Gertrud Mara and Elizabeth Billington, both leading sopranos who regularly sang at these concerts. Claims that they were formally trained by Rauzzini are shown to be unlikely, however, although both women were certainly part of the musical circle that promoted his reputation. The next chapter unpacks why Rauzzini was dubbed ‘the father of a new style in English singing’, contrasting English and Italian vocal techniques and explaining how the two melded to create a ‘new style’. Although unable to father children of his own, Rauzzini spawned a generation of celebrity British-born singers through his teaching of Italian vocal technique. Chapter five explores this method through a detailed account of Rauzzini’s Twelve Solfeggi (1808), a treatise aimed at the advanced student and which sealed his pedagogical legacy. The concepts and history of the solfeggi tradition are lucidly explained and shown to be a versatile training tool that was fundamental to musical literacy and vocal flexibility. Rauzzini’s exemplary musicianship can be attributed to his own study of solfeggi, which was the standard method taught in the Italian conservatories and continues to inform vocal pedagogy today.

Chapters six and seven engage with the ‘scandalous lessons’ of the book’s subtitle, amusingly reflected in the caricature by Thomas Rowlandson chosen for its cover. During his early years in Bath, Rauzzini’s pupils included wealthy young women for whom musical skill was an expected accomplishment, and in which context his renowned good looks and geniality made him susceptible to slander. In 1779 he was publicly accused by William Gooch of a romantic involvement with his wife Elizabeth while she was Rauzzini’s pupil. The assumptions underlying this incident provide a platform for exploring fictional narratives that played into contemporary attitudes concerning music masters, particularly foreign ones. George Colman the elder’s comic afterpiece The Musical Lady (1762) satirised the British infatuation with Italian music and musicians through its portrayal of Sophy, a young woman whose moral judgement was swayed by ‘an unhealthy attachment to music and Italians’ (p. 132).

Although Rauzzini emerged from the Gooch incident relatively unscathed, other singers in his circle were less fortunate, and those whose careers were harmed by their involvement in scandal are discussed in chapter seven. Gertrud Mara’s liaison with Charles Florio prompted Joseph Haydn to declare her behaviour to be ‘despicable to the whole nation’ (p. 155), while Nancy Storace’s affair with John Braham, another of Rauzzini’s students, elicited considerable opprobrium in the press. Framing these case studies is an anecdote concerning a romantic entanglement immediately prior to Rauzzini’s arrival in England, recounted years later by the tenor Michael Kelly in his Reminiscences (1826, I, p.10). The story was unsubstantiated and received scant notice at the time, but it has recently been appropriated by a media keen to exploit public curiosity around castrati, particularly their perceived gender and sexual function. Thus an article in The Guardian in 2010 headlined Rauzzini as ‘the bedhopping singing star of the 1700s’, describing him as ‘a ladies’ man, a kind of castrato Casanova, sleeping his way round Europe’.

Intriguingly entitled ‘The Eighteenth Century in the Twenty-First Century’, the Postlude opens with an admission that we know very little about what Rauzzini’s singing lessons actually entailed, because of the intrinsically private nature of the teaching space. The one-to-one lesson is still the primary model for vocal and instrumental instruction today, and Robertson-Kirkland does not shy away from drawing parallels between potential hazards of the teacher-pupil relationship 350 years ago and those in the present. Reference to recent abusive behaviour and sexual grooming at a specialist music school in the UK makes uncomfortable reading but is effective in highlighting the timeliness and relevance of this study.

Overall, this is a fascinating investigation of teaching in relation to the education of professional and amateur singers in Georgian Britain, set in its wider cultural and social context. The writing is clear and engaging, and the scholarship lightly worn while underpinned by meticulous archival work of an interdisciplinary nature. There is a useful appendix containing short biographies of 47 singers advertised as Rauzzini’s pupils, the majority of whom are women. Comprehensive end notes for each chapter are supplemented by a detailed bibliography of manuscripts and published sources, and the excellent index will ensure the book’s usefulness as a reference tool. As a study that places teaching at the centre of the socio-historical narrative, it is a welcome addition to Routledge’s Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies series and deserves a wide readership.

Cheryll Duncan

Cheryll Duncan is Emeritus Professor of Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK. She publishes on professional music culture in Britain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on records of the equity and common-law courts.