Seminar 41

Sophie Vasset

11 February 2025 17h CET

Sophie Vasset specializes in eighteenth-century studies, at the intersection of literature and the history of health. She is a professor at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, and member of the IRCL. From 2007 to 2021, she was an Assistant Professor at Université Paris-Cité. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century British literature (The Physics of Language, PUF, 2010), eighteenth-century history of medicine (Décrire, Prescrire, Guérir, Hermann, 2011; Bellies Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century with S. Kleiman-Lafon & R. Barr, MUP, 2017). Her last book, Murky Waters  (MUP 2022), deals with the cultural history of mineral waters in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe. She has been part of several projects in the Health Humanities. From 2014 to 2022, she was a member of the steering committee of “The Person in Medicine Institute” at the Université de Paris. In the spring 2022, she was a visiting scholar at Northeastern University, Boston. 

Oak Galls, Pigeons and Brandy: Discovery Narratives of Mineral Springs in Eighteenth-Century Britain

From Bladud's pigs rolling in the warm Bath waters to pigeons pecking the salts of Cheltenham waters, each spa has its own original tale of discovery which, between factual details and cultural references stages the serendipitous detection of mineral waters through the senses. As many narratives stage women or people from the lower classes at the origin of the discovery, they also channel inclusive ideas about the sharing of medical expertise between local communities and medical doctors. The microgenre of spa discoveries is an interesting observatory of the ways in which vernacular folk myths, local legends or mundane observations blend in with medical discoveries.

As I have been working on British mineral waters in eighteenth-century medicine and literature, I have come across many such narratives of discovery in medical texts revolving around the notion of serendipity, re-emergence, miracles, or the wonders of nature. I would like to offer a comparative overview of this microgenre. The discovery of a spring of mineral water inevitably brings hope for better days of healing and prosperity. These narratives stand at the crossroads of medicine, natural history and literature, offering insights into the cultural and material relationship of eighteenth-century British people and mineral waters.

Seminar 39

Matt Rarey

14 May 2025 / 16.00 BST

Matt Rarey researches and teach the art history of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on connections between West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. These interests coalesce in his book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). The book traces the accumulative history of bolsas de mandinga: pouch-form amulets of transcultural origins that took on new forms and histories as Africans purveyed them in the south Atlantic between 1660 and 1835. Insignificant Things garnered multiple major prizes, including a 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. He is now at work on a second book project about maps of maroon communities and Black diasporic landscapes in South America and the Caribbean, and the afterlives of these maps in the work of contemporary Black artists and land rights activists.

Objecting (to) the Fetish: Debating African Art History in Lisbon, 1731

Since its deployment in the context of Europeans’ and Africans’ disagreements over the value of objects and lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa, the discourse “fetishism” has played a critical role in delimiting the material and conceptual contours of “African” art history. But, in response to a dearth of scholarship regarding Africans’ opinions on the material culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, this talk asks how Africans’ responses to Europeans’ accusations of fetishism re-map the concept’s entanglements with art history’s early development in eighteenth-century Europe. My sources are the testimonies of José Francisco Pereira and José Francisco Pedroso, two enslaved men born in present-day Benin, who appeared on trial before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in the summer of 1731. The pair was accused of feitiçaria (translated here as “fetishism” or “sorcery”) stemming from their manufacture of African-associated apotropaic objects and amulets for physical protection. And they objected to or explained away the accusation by re-classifying the objects using terms like “Mandinga” and “Relic Pouch.” I suggest the accused did not deploy these names as a kind of corrective to Europeans’ mislabeling, but rather to interrogate Inquisitors’ conceptions of their objects’ genealogies and valuations. If we are to understand, in Delinda Collier’s words, art history’s early formation as a “pidgin language in the theater of conquest,” what might Pereira and Pedroso have been saying to their European interrogators by defining their objects in this way? And given that these debates over objects took place in the Portuguese Inquisition, how might these terms impact our historical framing of not only African art history’s institutional origins, but its concomitant racializing mechanisms?