The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
In his mid-sixteenth-century work A Play called the Four PP, the writer John Heywood introduces the figure of the pedlar who, in turn, provides the audience with some detail about the goods he has to sell. Among gloves, purses, ribbons, and knives, the pedlar is also able to offer up items of jewellery – ‘Pomanders, hooks, and lasses knotted / Broches, rynges …’. That the itinerant figure of the pedlar saw fit to sell jewels among his wares suggests that he had a supply of willing buyers from among those more ordinary men and women living away from urban centres in England. Equally, records of seizures of sub-standard wares sold at the various fairs and markets across England in the sixteenth century allude to just how ubiquitous the wearing of small items of goldsmiths’ wares was. Until relatively recently, these types of goods were not commonplace in museum displays, which tend to favour the elite consumption of jewels. Moreover, contemporary portraiture is often biased towards wealthier or courtly figures. However, the implementation in the UK of the Treasure Act (1996) brought to light new jewels, ones that were more likely to be worn by non-elite citizens, made of silver and sometimes gilded, alongside the gold and gem-encrusted jewels with which we are most familiar. Base metal finds from the Portable Antiquities Scheme contribute further to our understanding of what jewellery ordinary men and women might have owned and worn. This chapter builds upon earlier research into men’s engagement with their jewels, to provide a deeper understanding of the types of jewels an ordinary man in early modern England might have owned and worn.
Previously, the early modern period has been characterised as a period of inertia, persistent social inequality and deep-rooted ideas about the appropriate relationship between a person’s social standing and their appearance. More recently, however, historians have also shown it to be a period of significant material change with an intensified consumer demand and interest in fashion. This chapter will re-examine the relationship between clothes and social order as expressed primarily through the dress of urban artisans in seventeenth-century Tallinn. While early modern sumptuary laws undoubtedly influenced sartorial expression, the clothing culture of the middling ranks of people was much more complex than examination of the laws might suggest, and evidence from inventories concretely demonstrates just how varied the clothing resources of this seemingly uniform middling group were. As the boundaries between categories of people, based on ownership of clothes, rarely followed the same lines that were prescribed by the sumptuary norms, household inventories of early modern artisans are excellent for highlighting the grey areas in early modern hierarchical thinking, for allowing us to shift focus away from the role of clothes as social signifiers and for showing the importance of individual strategies, tastes and available means.
Seeking to “rewire” scholarly possibilities for the history of feminism in Iran, Azadeh Fatehrad develops an original visual narrative forged of image and text, as she meditates on the fold as temporal and spatial form, weaving together embodied encounters with imagery of the veil in photographic archive and in memory.
Chapter 5 continues the focus on the inner city and uses the Market Street (Arndale) and Market Place CDAs to explore the rise in consumerism and its effects on the urban landscape. The chapter moves from the generic to the specific, from the wide arena of political space to the delineated boundaries of a fixed geographic site. It shows the agency of more than thirty years of decision making acting upon architectural form and demonstrates the making of architecture as intrinsically bound to the models of planners and the ideas of politicians. The use of the CDA as a planning device is explored and the birth of conservation culture is highlighted in a perverse situation attached to the preservation of a medieval public house. This chapter builds directly on preceding chapters and continues to elucidate the agency of legislation, its interpretation and the mediation required to achieve material form – central government policy filtered through a local lens. Geographically, a portion of the ring-road (the subject of Chapter 6) is introduced and the multi-level, mode separated cityscape, typical of 1960s inner-urban development, is explored through the sketches, models and drawings of the planning department. The contradictory nature of the ‘simultaneously … brutal and redemptive’ qualities of inner-urban visions such as these is understood within the context of the public–private partnerships essential to renewal. This chapter develops existing research on the specifics of the renewal cities and the close relationships between planning and architecture.
By thinking with the historical origins of cliché as a term, Daisy Lafarge proposes that cliché be reconsidered as a mobile gesture, full of aural repetitions, shared speech patterns, and communal micro-environments which can offer refuge.
This chapter examines prevailing stereotypes regarding the clothing of countrywomen (contadine), with particular focus on Tuscany. Their appearance came under increasing scrutiny in sixteenth-century Italy, regulated by sumptuary laws and depicted in a range of imagery. Written and visual sources convey contrasting attitudes towards the social role of contadine. Representations in costume books, for example, tend to emphasise the modest and neat appearance of these women, as proof of their industriousness and youthful femininity. However, their visibility in the marketplace as sellers of produce was also a cause for concern, leading to characterisations of them as untrustworthy and seductive. To counteract these outsider perspectives, the second part of the chapter concentrates on the apron, a simple accessory owned and made by many countrywomen. It uses a reconstruction methodology to explore the costs, processes and skills involved in making and embroidering aprons. The findings of this experimental approach are used to reassess the visual evidence and to re-evaluate the social and material significance clothing held for the women themselves.
One of the earliest computers was developed in Manchester by a group of mathematicians, scientists and engineers. Many had worked in military research during the war. They came together in Manchester due to a coordinated attempt to re-arm Britain. The nuclear bomb was being developed using former Royal Ordnance factories, based in the north-west of England and the proximity of major chemical and engineering companies made the region into the atomic hub of Britain. Computers were required to calculate rocket trajectories. In this chapter, the world’s first building for the computer, a missile factory, a computer factory and the National Computing Centre are used to explore the relationships between the Ministry of Works, University of Manchester, Ferranti, UK Atomic Energy Authority and the Ministry of Technology. As this chapter is bound with the histories of technologies, it draws on several existing theories including Hecht’s ‘techno-politics’, Bud’s ‘British problem’ and a number of existing historical narratives about the birth of the computer industry, the Industrial Reorganisation Committee and the ‘warfare state’. The architecture of technology in Britain is contrasted against the ‘organizational complex’ of the United States. Each building has its own situation to disclose in the context of its relationship to the state and to planning system and each building is explored as materially representative of political decision making.
The conclusion draws attention to the complexity of researching the development of post-war renewal cities. It focuses upon the extensive influence of the state across all sectors of construction and the ways in which this altered after the Local Government Act of 1974. The motion towards regional planning mirrored this change in governance and was paralleled by the expansion of the European Project.
Fatema Abdoolcarim’s article develops an interdisciplinary methodology of multiple voices (historical, art historical, poetic, fictional, and personal) to speak to the specific practice of khatna within the wider discourse of female genital cutting. By looking closely at an Indian miniature painting of the past that depicts a group of women cutting themselves – cutting into that painting with the abstracted voice of lived experience – Abdoolcarim reassesses the nuanced complexities of the practice, of female community, of desire, of sexual and aesthetic pleasure. Cutting is hereby reimagined as a reparative gesture.
Through a deep dive into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inventories, this chapter sheds light on the characteristics of the clothing and materials that craftspeople used to create colourful and rich outfits. Weaving together the insights of previous research with novel findings from the Refashioning the Renaissance project, the chapter offers a journey through Florence, Siena and Venice to discover the composition of artisans’ wardrobes and how they leveraged local, regional and international production and trade systems. From tracing the trends in materials, styles and colours that defined the era to analysing the intricacies of post-mortem inventories and the institutions involved in their production, the chapter provides an insight in the fashion choices of Renaissance Italian artisans.