Past events

British representations of the battle of valenciennes.

Image relates to: Picturing Valenciennes: Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and the Emotional Regulation of British Military Art in the 1790s

Past Events

Monday 15 May 2017
Dr Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

The Theatricality of the Bassville Murder in Rome (1793)

On January 13, 1793, an infuriated crowd marched through the streets of Rome looking for French revolutionary sympathizers. They managed to stop a carriage and lynched the French Jacobin emissary to Rome, Jean Hugon de Bassville, who died from his wounds the next day. The attack was immediately taken up by the French Convention, not as evidence of actual popular indignation, but as a puppeteer act staged by the Papal city. For its part, opponents of the Revolution seemed to regard the incident as fair punishment for the French crime of regicide, completed just days later.

The punishment of republican politics in Rome had, in fact, been a motive for Bassville, a journalist, to start his ‘diplomatic work’ in the Papal City. As of 1791, the Papal police had actively surveyed and imprisoned two French artists under charges of blasphemy and public subversion. Bassville’s ‘provocations’ appeared intended to counteract the legal fate suffered by these artists who were the other targets of the violent parade in 1793.

This talk takes a look at the visual and literary devices employed in the aftermath of the lynching that make of the Bassville murder a moral witnessing with the shades of Bassville and of those of the French art students imagined within a Dantesque tour of hell, their souls damned over complicity in Louis XVI’s decapitation.

Monday 06 March 2017
Dr Leticia Villamediana González (University of Warwick)

Entre filias y fobias: Adapting the British Enlightenment in 18th-Century Spanish Press

Since the 1713 Utrecht Pact, England excited the political and cultural imagination of vast sectors of the Spanish intelligentsia. In this talk, Dr Leticia Villamediana González will unravel the different means by which they adapted and adopted British cultural and scientific products. Moreover, the paper will shed light on some of the political debates stirred by the imperial rivalry that transpired in the Spanish press of most of the eighteenth century.

Monday 06 February 2017
Convenor: Richard Bellis (University of Leeds)

Postgraduate Presentations. Theme: The Positioning of the Marginal

‘The Art of Talking with the Fingers’: Deaf Education at the edge of Marginalisation. Coreen McGuire (PRHS, University of Leeds) ‘My life I owe to the laws of my country, and I will pay the debt’: Honour, Duty, and Voluntary Death in Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness. Rachel Sulich (English, University of Leeds)

Marginalised Roles and Marginalised Sources: Charles Blagden as secretary to the Royal Society, 1784-1797. Hannah Wills (STS, University College London)

Monday 28 November 2016
Professor Philip Shaw (University of Leicester)

Picturing Valenciennes: Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and the Emotional Regulation of British Military Art in the 1790s

This paper discusses British artistic representations of the Battle of Valenciennes, fought on 25 July, 1793, with a particular focus on Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s large-scale battle painting The Grand Attack on Valenciennes (1793) and on associated works by the graphic satirist James Gillray. In drawing attention to the collaborative relations between members of the British royal family, painters and print-makers and the establishment press, the paper will show how British military art in the 1790s sought to regulate the emotional responses of civilians to visual representations of the Allied war against revolutionary France.

Monday 07 November 2016
Dr Mark Jenner (University of York)

Polite and Excremental Labour? London’s Nightmen c. 1650-1840

Monday 10 October 2016
Professor John Chartres (University of Leeds)