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“Do Not Touch”: Academics in the Museum
By Carys Brown @HistoryCarys Museums are wonderful yet bizarre places. A treasure trove of pieces of the past. Hundreds of objects, rare, fragile, ordinary, extraordinary, arranged in glass cases, beautifully isolated from their original surroundings. This perhaps slightly sterile environment allows us to appreciate the beauty and ingenuity of objects. But is this really how…
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Bagging a bargain in the Renaissance: questions surrounding the ethics of shopping and consumption
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell) In recent rhetoric, the ‘rise’ of consumerism has been challenged. Our throw-away culture has led to a multitude of problems for the environment, as well as issues surrounding body-image, debt and over-corporatisation. In a recent article, George Monbiot, for example, argued that ‘regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of…
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Critiquing cultural spaces: an interview with Alice Procter of the Uncomfortable Art Tours
By Alice Procter (@aaprocter) and Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) Alice Procter is a historian of material culture based at UCL. She has six years of tour guiding experience at heritage sites and galleries and runs Uncomfortable Art Tours, podcasts and writes under the umbrella of The Exhibitionist. I had the chance to interview you her about her work…
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2. A Renaissance Mirror
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell) In an age before electrical lighting, in cramped cities with few sources of natural light, mirrors acted as a tool to bring light into homes. They were also decorative, placed alongside paintings to accentuate the splendour of ordinary domestic environments.[1] Venice, and particularly Murano, became the centre of European mirror production during the…
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5. Victorian Hair Jewellery
By Maggie Kalenak Either encased under glass in brooches, lockets and hair accessories or woven with wire to create three-dimensional ornaments and chains, the use of hair in sentimental jewellery was a fixture of British fashion from the 17th century through the end of the 19th, reaching its height in popularity between 1810 and 1850.…
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