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What was the process by which an antiquity found on the streets of Rome became the subject of a Renaissance engraving? How did engraving preserve the memory of such antiquities as they vanished into the homes of private collectors, were plundered or destroyed? This article focuses on Marcantonio Raimondis Lion Hunt to explore the relationship between ancient sculpture and the medium of print in Raphaels Rome.
This article and checklist present the contents of the Spencer Album of Marcantonio Raimondi prints, long considered to be lost. By examining its composition and tracing its provenance from the Spencer collection at Althorp House to the John Rylands Library, Manchester, we offer new insight into how attitudes toward Marcantonio Raimondi‘s work evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Great Britain. Our article also explores Victorian collecting practices and the importance of the graphic arts for Mrs Rylands‘s vision for the Library to be dedicated to her late husband‘s memory.
In living memory, Manchester was black from air pollution caused by burning coal. Today only fragments of that blackness remain, although its former presence can be inferred from precautions taken at the time to protect buildings from soot. At Canal Street in Miles Platting the colouring caused by consuming coal was blue, the result of contamination with a by-product of the purification of coal-gas. It is argued that because the blue street can be seen as beautiful then so can the black walls, which should be treated as an authentic part of the city. The most significant remains are 22 Lever Street and the inner courtyards of the Town Hall, which ought to be preserved in their dirty state.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
On 25 July 1968, Pope Paul VI shook the world. His encyclical letter Humanae Vitae rejected widespread calls to permit use of the contraceptive pill and deemed artificial contraception ‘intrinsically evil’. The Catholic Church is now commonly identified as the antagonist in a story of sixties sexual revolution – a stubborn stone resisting the stream of sex-positive modernity. There has been little consideration of how Catholic women themselves experienced this period of cultural upheaval. This book is about the sexual and religious lives of Catholic women in post-war England. It uses original oral history material to uncover the way Catholic women negotiated spiritual and sexual demands at a moment when the two increasingly seemed at odds with one another. The book also examines the public pronouncements and secretive internal documents of the central Catholic Church, offering a ground-breaking new explanation of the Pope’s decision to prohibit the pill. The materials gathered here provide a fresh perspective on the idea that ‘sex killed God’, reframing dominant approaches to the histories of sex, religion and modernity. The memories of Catholic women help us understand why religious belief does not structure the lives of most English men and women today in the way it did at the close of the Second World War, why sex holds a place of such significance in our modern culture, and crucially, how these two developments related to one another. The book will be essential reading for not only scholars of sexuality, religion, gender and oral history, but anyone interested in post-war social change.
at her dining-room table describing the intimate details of her sex life to a young, male researcher. After recalling the limited sexual education she received in her youth, she went on to speak of her marriage to fellow Catholic John in 1954. Her most abiding memory was of a ‘life-changing’ shift in her contraceptive behaviour. In the first ten years of her marriage, Margaret had dutifully obeyed
almost immediately turned to her own sexual naivety and the Church’s culpability for this. She did not start to practice NFP until after the birth of her third child, over five years after this incident. The interviewees’ overriding memory of early marriage was of their sexual interests being denied or frustrated by their Catholic beliefs in one way or another. We have seen that for many of the interviewees, later
construct what Penny Summerfield would label a ‘false dichotomy’ between discourse and experience, but to start from the moment of recollection which is inescapably linguistic, and then move to consider which elements of experience these memories can elucidate. 6 The overriding story of the interviews was one of sex replacing religion as the primary constituent of personal subjectivity, a narrative which fits neatly with Brown’s and
. Girlhoods, memory, and Irish history It is not exclusively the rough-and-tumble urban childhoods of boys such as Frank McCourt that have so enthralled Irish readers in recent decades: To School Through the Fields, Alice Taylor’s account of her rural early twentieth-century upbringing, has been a bestseller in modern Ireland.4 Some scholars who have studied Irish childhoods too quickly dismiss the texts of Taylor and other women as advocating a false ‘rural simplicity’, turning instead to an analysis of what they view as the more complex life-writings of well-known men
Gender, belief and memory If accessing personal experiences in the past is a difficult task in general, then getting at the sexual and religious experiences of Catholic women is a particularly perilous pursuit. Both religious belief and sexual behaviour are widely considered to be private, intimate aspects of personhood. This may have been the case for matters of sex for