Theses by Philippe Halbert, PhD
This dissertation draws first and foremost from the private correspondence of the Montreal-born M... more This dissertation draws first and foremost from the private correspondence of the Montreal-born Marie-Élisabeth Rocbert de La Morandière (1696-1755), better known as Madame Bégon. Between 1748 and 1753, Madame Bégon addressed a series of collated letter-diaries or journals and over five-dozen individual letters to her widowed French son-in-law after he left Montreal to assume an administrative post in New Orleans. A widow herself, she continued writing to him after moving with the rest of her family to Rochefort, where she died on the eve of the Seven Years’ War. Madame Bégon’s sensitive, witty, and at times trenchant pen chronicles a kind of reverse diaspora wherein she evoked and negotiated memories of her colonial past and struggled with the uncertainties of a future in France. From the dressing table to the dance floor, “Letters of a Canadian Woman” considers moments in her writings that foreground interconnected themes of self-fashioning and the body; creolization and empire; and the enslavement and racialization of the subaltern. A cross-section of related archival materials, images, literature, and material culture informs interpretation of this revealing epistolary exchange and the myriad forces that shaped Madame Bégon’s trans-Atlantic world and identity.
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In New France, public buildings were imbued with powerful symbolism both inside and out. The use ... more In New France, public buildings were imbued with powerful symbolism both inside and out. The use of terms such as castle (château), palace (palais), and private townhouse (hôtel or hôtel particulier) to designate structures built for colonial notables underscored their rank within the socio-political framework of the French Ancien Régime. Inside stately colonial residences built at royal expense, material manifestations of power and fashion converged to create microcosms of monarchical absolutism and aristocratic sociability an ocean away from the metropole. Like their counterparts in France, colonial governors, intendants, bishops, and others made full use of physical objects and spaces to legitimize authority, articulate elite identity, and arbitrate good taste. Imported furniture, tapestries, mirrors, and other items allowed these individuals to live according to courtly etiquette and style launched at Versailles in addition to trends for comfort refined in Paris.
Through the lens of archival records, architecture, and decorative arts, this study draws connections between the ownership of such commodities in New France and the development and entrenchment of elite cultural practice there. An approach combining Atlantic world history, biography, material culture theory, and social history specifically targets expressions of authority through material display, unpacking efforts by colonial officials to adhere to an established set of values and standards that were thoroughly French. Considering their experiences in both France and in French colonies stretching from Canada to Louisiana, this thesis further contextualizes the nearly vanished material worlds of political elites in New France. The interpretive period spans the 1660s, the decade in which French North America was made a royal province, through the 1760s, when it was lost to Great Britain and Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War.
The size of the document, including appendices of transcribed and translated documents, precludes it from being uploaded here in its entirety.
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Since Antiquity, monsters and monstrosities have served as vehicles for cultural, philosophical, ... more Since Antiquity, monsters and monstrosities have served as vehicles for cultural, philosophical, and scientific debates. In effect, they represent more than a fleeting fascination or simple repugnance for the horrible or misshapen "other," but rather deeper-rooted cultural conflicts and tensions. This is especially true in early modern France, where medieval and Renaissance traditions came face to face with new scientific discoveries and enlightened theories supported by reason and a renewed interest in nature. Inspiring and subsequently shaped by visual culture such as engravings and etchings, artists, craftsmen, fashion merchants, playwrights, naturalists, and social critics alike appropriated and exploited the metaphorical power of the monster.
This thesis takes as its focus the "harpies" of 1784, fantastic hybrid creatures that made their first appearance in popular broadsides and pamphlets. The harpy speaks to numerous concerns and issues as a symbolic monster in the eighteenth-century French imaginary. Inspiring fears and sensations of disorder and sterility as well as fascination and humor, the harpy manifested itself across multiple spheres of French society in the decade that would explode in revolution.
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Web Presence and Online Publications by Philippe Halbert, PhD
In a commitment to fostering nuanced interpretations of early American objects and meaningful dia... more In a commitment to fostering nuanced interpretations of early American objects and meaningful dialogue on historical constructions of race and their legacies, Materializing Race was created in spring 2020 to share and discuss scholarship on the intersections of identity and material culture in #VastEarlyAmerica.
Through participant-driven, virtual “un-conferences,” object-centered scholarship, and a desire to explore other forms of interrogation and connection, Materializing Race privileges new and emerging voices that are committed to furthering this type of research and conversation.
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A selection of blog posts on early American art and material culture, interviews with public hist... more A selection of blog posts on early American art and material culture, interviews with public historians and museum professionals, and exhibition reviews. Posts include:
- Early American Women Unmasked
- Q&A: Kate Egner Gruber, Curator of “Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia”
- New Orleans at 300: A Year in Review and a Look to the Future
- Creole Comforts and French Connections: A Case Study in Caribbean Dress
- “A curious font of porphyry”
- Q&A: Erin M. Greenwald, PhD, author of New Orleans, the Founding Era
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A selection of articles on decorative arts, museum practice, and public engagement, written for T... more A selection of articles on decorative arts, museum practice, and public engagement, written for The Getty Iris, the J. Paul Getty Museum's Online Magazine
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Papers by Philippe Halbert, PhD
Appropriation and Invention: Three Centuries of Art in Spanish America, 2022
A catalogue essay on Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial ceramic culture in present-day Mexico, dra... more A catalogue essay on Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial ceramic culture in present-day Mexico, drawn from the collection of the Denver Art Museum. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, for Hirmer Publishers.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo184795135.html
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Proceedings of the 59th Annual Seminar on Glass, Corning Museum of Glass, 2022
Bound up in behaviors and modes of consumption that theoretically distinguished them as elite in ... more Bound up in behaviors and modes of consumption that theoretically distinguished them as elite in the first place, assorted rituals of the toilette were a means by which aspiring French colonial subjects might craft and
quite literally embody a kind of refined civility. Corporeal concerns were far from trivial, and goods like mirrors and cosmetics helped broker imperial ambitions and French connections an ocean away from the metropole.
Focusing on Louisiana and the Caribbean Basin before 1800, this paper considers the historical context and cultural stakes of the dressing table and related material culture across a wider French Atlantic world. Informed by a cross-section of objects and archival sources, it casts the art and artifice of the toilette as integral components in larger bids for social distinction, supremacy, and cultural Frenchness by white creole women. Notwithstanding colonial fantasies and contemporary pseudo- scientific racial discourse, these same women’s dressing glasses quite literally reflected evolving hierarchies of race and slavery.
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Accessioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1941, an early eighteenth-century sleeved waist... more Accessioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1941, an early eighteenth-century sleeved waistcoat of silk and metallic damask and brocaded satin is a rare survivor. In cut and construction, this visually striking garment trimmed with gold metallic braid and lined with taffeta and linen dates to about 1720. It would have been worn as part of a relatively new form of male dress, the three-piece suit. Extraordinary in its own right as a splendid example of textile design and historic fashion, the waistcoat does not appear to have undergone any later alteration, as is often the case with such early examples of eighteenth-century clothing. Its bold, exotic design, consisting of multicolor floral, foliate and abstract brocaded motifs, adorns both the front and back panels as well as the cuffs of the sleeves.
The waistcoat was acquired with a known provenance identifying its original owner, Ebenezer Storer, Sr., a Boston merchant born in Maine in 1699. In this paper, I treat Storer’s waistcoat as a foil for exploring the trans-Atlantic influence and circulation of European fashion in colonial New England, focusing specifically on Boston in the period spanning the 1680s through the 1730s. Critical consideration of these factors will be used to interpret the motivations for and consequences of owning such a garment during an important period of transition in New England’s colonial history. Storer’s waistcoat might well be cast as emblematic of this paradigm in its own right. Informed by European tastes and the likely product of the British silk industry in and around London, the waistcoat was worn and refashioned within the context of both an evolving spiritual tradition and a developing mercantile elite on the fringes of the British Atlantic world. The cosmopolitan nature of Boston’s merchant community and its conscious self-fashioning marked a significant departure from orthodox Puritan doctrine and theology. These differing perspectives and aspirations converged in New England, with changing opinions on dress helping to give rise to a new social order and civil society at the turn of the eighteenth century.
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Completed in 1753, portraits of the armateur Dominique-René Deurbroucq and his wife Marguerite-Ur... more Completed in 1753, portraits of the armateur Dominique-René Deurbroucq and his wife Marguerite-Urbane Sengstack of Nantes are the earliest and among the more ambitious examples of the enigmatic Dijon artist Pierre-Bernard Morlot’s documented œuvre. Celebrating the fruits of French colonial trade and standing as markers for family ambition, cultural integration, and social prestige, these same portraits and those of their peers in other French Atlantic ports bear witness to the inherent diversity and dynamism of the provincial merchant class before the French Revolution. Crossing both cultural and confessional divides, the heterogeneous merchant communities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, and other coastal cities patronized a variety of artists, demanding and consuming portraits on a wide scale. With and without letters of true nobility, they established themselves as leaders and tastemakers in their respective cities, with portraiture serving to express and consolidate dignity, rank, and agency. For the Deurbroucq family, their portraits also recalled the couple’s place and that of Nantes within a vast imperial sphere and trade network that included significant involvement in the slave trade. In proposing a cultural biography for the Deurbroucq portraits, this paper presents them as a compelling point of departure for considering the economic, racial, and social realities of early modern European port towns and the legacy of the eighteenth-century armateur.
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A prototype for a furnishing plan for the reconstructed Roman Catholic chapel at History Saint Ma... more A prototype for a furnishing plan for the reconstructed Roman Catholic chapel at History Saint Mary's City. Built in 1667, the original chapel was closed in 1704 and subsequently dismantled by Maryland Jesuits. A reconstruction was built atop the original chapel foundation and completed in 2009.
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Printed and painted cotton textiles from India and Persia first arrived in France in the late six... more Printed and painted cotton textiles from India and Persia first arrived in France in the late sixteenth century. In 1686, a royal decree promoting domestic manufactures banned the importation of authentic, colorfast Asian fabrics in addition to the production of domestic imitations, both referred to as indiennes. Inconsistently applied in France, this policy of indienne prohibition lasted until 1759 and only served to encourage the fashion for illicit indiennes and textile smuggling throughout the French Atlantic world.
Records from colonial Canada reveal a variety of people- Amerindians, French sea captains, colonial tradespeople, the enslaved, and Anglo-colonial merchants- taken to court and fined for owning and dealing in indiennes. Fines and punishments varied, and contraband indiennes, muslins, and “English” textiles seized by authorities were alternately burnt or confiscated to profit the French East India Company. The indiennes documented in the archives of New France bear witness to the developed nature of intercolonial trade networks and the difficulties in enforcing metropolitan laws an ocean away from the metropole.
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A discussion of ornamental flower display in the late baroque era, with special emphasis on relat... more A discussion of ornamental flower display in the late baroque era, with special emphasis on related ceramic and glass objects from the Winterthur Museum collection.
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An extended interpretive discussion of a 1700s tea table from Albany, New York, including its pro... more An extended interpretive discussion of a 1700s tea table from Albany, New York, including its provenance, style, and decorative context.
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The Monitor: Journal of International Studies, Apr 2011
An account of Louis Aniaba, "Prince of Issiny," and his sojourn to France, including reception by... more An account of Louis Aniaba, "Prince of Issiny," and his sojourn to France, including reception by Louis XIV at Versailles, from 1688 to 1701.
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Conference Presentations by Philippe Halbert, PhD
Visiting Russia in 1774, the English traveler Nathaniel Wraxhall did not hesitate to express his ... more Visiting Russia in 1774, the English traveler Nathaniel Wraxhall did not hesitate to express his profound aversion towards local interpretations of the rococo, which he termed “the compleatest triumph of barbarous taste.” Far from passive in their engagement with an inherently foreign, Western style, Russian decorative arts of the mid-eighteenth century integrated Slavic aesthetics, including a penchant for painted wooden surfaces, glittering gold ornament, and often-monumental proportions, within a larger and highly original design dialogue. As it shaped aristocratic patronage and served the ambitions of three female sovereigns, Russian rococo furniture and interior decoration both accompanied and, in its own way, propelled the empire’s bid for Westernization in the wake of Peter the Great’s revolutionary reforms.
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Like their British and Spanish counterparts, French colonists in the New World looked to the metr... more Like their British and Spanish counterparts, French colonists in the New World looked to the metropole for consumer products and luxury goods including textiles, the single largest import commodity of New France. The trade in painted and printed cottons or indiennes, actually illegal in France and French colonies from the 1680s to the 1750s, continued unabated in Canada, Louisiana, and sugar islands like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti). As colonial officials bemoaned the population’s disregard for the royal ban on indienne, confiscation reports and probate inventories record those owned and smuggled by everyone from royal governors and bourgeois merchants to ordinary craftsmen and the enslaved. In similar fashion, merchants’ accounts and newspaper advertisement are replete with references to the indienne clothing and household textiles that became only more plentiful after the ban’s 1759 repeal.
This paper will introduce a host of historic characters, archival materials, and material objects from the French Atlantic, long absent from the traditional narratives of early “America” and American decorative arts. In the process, it will interpret the complicated reality of textile consumption and colonial fashions in the long eighteenth century.
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French colonial governors and other military officials made full use of public ceremony and domes... more French colonial governors and other military officials made full use of public ceremony and domestic display to communicate royal authority, rank, and social prestige in the New World. Informed by both archival materials and material objects, this presentation will introduce a number of these individuals, their personal possessions, and cosmopolitan households stretching from Louisbourg to New Orleans and across the Caribbean.
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Theses by Philippe Halbert, PhD
Through the lens of archival records, architecture, and decorative arts, this study draws connections between the ownership of such commodities in New France and the development and entrenchment of elite cultural practice there. An approach combining Atlantic world history, biography, material culture theory, and social history specifically targets expressions of authority through material display, unpacking efforts by colonial officials to adhere to an established set of values and standards that were thoroughly French. Considering their experiences in both France and in French colonies stretching from Canada to Louisiana, this thesis further contextualizes the nearly vanished material worlds of political elites in New France. The interpretive period spans the 1660s, the decade in which French North America was made a royal province, through the 1760s, when it was lost to Great Britain and Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War.
The size of the document, including appendices of transcribed and translated documents, precludes it from being uploaded here in its entirety.
This thesis takes as its focus the "harpies" of 1784, fantastic hybrid creatures that made their first appearance in popular broadsides and pamphlets. The harpy speaks to numerous concerns and issues as a symbolic monster in the eighteenth-century French imaginary. Inspiring fears and sensations of disorder and sterility as well as fascination and humor, the harpy manifested itself across multiple spheres of French society in the decade that would explode in revolution.
Web Presence and Online Publications by Philippe Halbert, PhD
Through participant-driven, virtual “un-conferences,” object-centered scholarship, and a desire to explore other forms of interrogation and connection, Materializing Race privileges new and emerging voices that are committed to furthering this type of research and conversation.
- Early American Women Unmasked
- Q&A: Kate Egner Gruber, Curator of “Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia”
- New Orleans at 300: A Year in Review and a Look to the Future
- Creole Comforts and French Connections: A Case Study in Caribbean Dress
- “A curious font of porphyry”
- Q&A: Erin M. Greenwald, PhD, author of New Orleans, the Founding Era
Papers by Philippe Halbert, PhD
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo184795135.html
quite literally embody a kind of refined civility. Corporeal concerns were far from trivial, and goods like mirrors and cosmetics helped broker imperial ambitions and French connections an ocean away from the metropole.
Focusing on Louisiana and the Caribbean Basin before 1800, this paper considers the historical context and cultural stakes of the dressing table and related material culture across a wider French Atlantic world. Informed by a cross-section of objects and archival sources, it casts the art and artifice of the toilette as integral components in larger bids for social distinction, supremacy, and cultural Frenchness by white creole women. Notwithstanding colonial fantasies and contemporary pseudo- scientific racial discourse, these same women’s dressing glasses quite literally reflected evolving hierarchies of race and slavery.
The waistcoat was acquired with a known provenance identifying its original owner, Ebenezer Storer, Sr., a Boston merchant born in Maine in 1699. In this paper, I treat Storer’s waistcoat as a foil for exploring the trans-Atlantic influence and circulation of European fashion in colonial New England, focusing specifically on Boston in the period spanning the 1680s through the 1730s. Critical consideration of these factors will be used to interpret the motivations for and consequences of owning such a garment during an important period of transition in New England’s colonial history. Storer’s waistcoat might well be cast as emblematic of this paradigm in its own right. Informed by European tastes and the likely product of the British silk industry in and around London, the waistcoat was worn and refashioned within the context of both an evolving spiritual tradition and a developing mercantile elite on the fringes of the British Atlantic world. The cosmopolitan nature of Boston’s merchant community and its conscious self-fashioning marked a significant departure from orthodox Puritan doctrine and theology. These differing perspectives and aspirations converged in New England, with changing opinions on dress helping to give rise to a new social order and civil society at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Records from colonial Canada reveal a variety of people- Amerindians, French sea captains, colonial tradespeople, the enslaved, and Anglo-colonial merchants- taken to court and fined for owning and dealing in indiennes. Fines and punishments varied, and contraband indiennes, muslins, and “English” textiles seized by authorities were alternately burnt or confiscated to profit the French East India Company. The indiennes documented in the archives of New France bear witness to the developed nature of intercolonial trade networks and the difficulties in enforcing metropolitan laws an ocean away from the metropole.
Conference Presentations by Philippe Halbert, PhD
This paper will introduce a host of historic characters, archival materials, and material objects from the French Atlantic, long absent from the traditional narratives of early “America” and American decorative arts. In the process, it will interpret the complicated reality of textile consumption and colonial fashions in the long eighteenth century.
Through the lens of archival records, architecture, and decorative arts, this study draws connections between the ownership of such commodities in New France and the development and entrenchment of elite cultural practice there. An approach combining Atlantic world history, biography, material culture theory, and social history specifically targets expressions of authority through material display, unpacking efforts by colonial officials to adhere to an established set of values and standards that were thoroughly French. Considering their experiences in both France and in French colonies stretching from Canada to Louisiana, this thesis further contextualizes the nearly vanished material worlds of political elites in New France. The interpretive period spans the 1660s, the decade in which French North America was made a royal province, through the 1760s, when it was lost to Great Britain and Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War.
The size of the document, including appendices of transcribed and translated documents, precludes it from being uploaded here in its entirety.
This thesis takes as its focus the "harpies" of 1784, fantastic hybrid creatures that made their first appearance in popular broadsides and pamphlets. The harpy speaks to numerous concerns and issues as a symbolic monster in the eighteenth-century French imaginary. Inspiring fears and sensations of disorder and sterility as well as fascination and humor, the harpy manifested itself across multiple spheres of French society in the decade that would explode in revolution.
Through participant-driven, virtual “un-conferences,” object-centered scholarship, and a desire to explore other forms of interrogation and connection, Materializing Race privileges new and emerging voices that are committed to furthering this type of research and conversation.
- Early American Women Unmasked
- Q&A: Kate Egner Gruber, Curator of “Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia”
- New Orleans at 300: A Year in Review and a Look to the Future
- Creole Comforts and French Connections: A Case Study in Caribbean Dress
- “A curious font of porphyry”
- Q&A: Erin M. Greenwald, PhD, author of New Orleans, the Founding Era
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo184795135.html
quite literally embody a kind of refined civility. Corporeal concerns were far from trivial, and goods like mirrors and cosmetics helped broker imperial ambitions and French connections an ocean away from the metropole.
Focusing on Louisiana and the Caribbean Basin before 1800, this paper considers the historical context and cultural stakes of the dressing table and related material culture across a wider French Atlantic world. Informed by a cross-section of objects and archival sources, it casts the art and artifice of the toilette as integral components in larger bids for social distinction, supremacy, and cultural Frenchness by white creole women. Notwithstanding colonial fantasies and contemporary pseudo- scientific racial discourse, these same women’s dressing glasses quite literally reflected evolving hierarchies of race and slavery.
The waistcoat was acquired with a known provenance identifying its original owner, Ebenezer Storer, Sr., a Boston merchant born in Maine in 1699. In this paper, I treat Storer’s waistcoat as a foil for exploring the trans-Atlantic influence and circulation of European fashion in colonial New England, focusing specifically on Boston in the period spanning the 1680s through the 1730s. Critical consideration of these factors will be used to interpret the motivations for and consequences of owning such a garment during an important period of transition in New England’s colonial history. Storer’s waistcoat might well be cast as emblematic of this paradigm in its own right. Informed by European tastes and the likely product of the British silk industry in and around London, the waistcoat was worn and refashioned within the context of both an evolving spiritual tradition and a developing mercantile elite on the fringes of the British Atlantic world. The cosmopolitan nature of Boston’s merchant community and its conscious self-fashioning marked a significant departure from orthodox Puritan doctrine and theology. These differing perspectives and aspirations converged in New England, with changing opinions on dress helping to give rise to a new social order and civil society at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Records from colonial Canada reveal a variety of people- Amerindians, French sea captains, colonial tradespeople, the enslaved, and Anglo-colonial merchants- taken to court and fined for owning and dealing in indiennes. Fines and punishments varied, and contraband indiennes, muslins, and “English” textiles seized by authorities were alternately burnt or confiscated to profit the French East India Company. The indiennes documented in the archives of New France bear witness to the developed nature of intercolonial trade networks and the difficulties in enforcing metropolitan laws an ocean away from the metropole.
This paper will introduce a host of historic characters, archival materials, and material objects from the French Atlantic, long absent from the traditional narratives of early “America” and American decorative arts. In the process, it will interpret the complicated reality of textile consumption and colonial fashions in the long eighteenth century.
Part of the marquise’s vision for glory included a home worthy of her family’s nobility and her husband’s position as the most senior colonial official in French North America. The governor-general's official residence in Québec, the château Saint-Louis, was an incomplete structure built atop a series of earlier wooden and masonry forts. The marquise de Vaudreuil's unremitting persistence and connections at court finally convinced the Marine Council to fund the renovations and expansion of the château that she so strongly desired, including a separate apartment for herself. Despite the protestations of royal engineers over rising expenses, the château Saint-Louis was brought to the level of a provincial metropolitan residence by the spring of 1724. An inventory of the château taken in 1726 reveals both the quantity and quality of the items used there, including Flemish tapestries, Asian porcelain and lacquer, matching furniture sets, silver serving wares, royal portraits, a multitude of linens, and even a sedan chair and five carriages.
Drawing from a diverse array of archival sources and material culture, this presentation will explore the life and legacy of the château’s most prominent mistress, the marquise de Vaudreuil. A trans-Atlantic perspective will help to situate this extraordinary colonial-born woman within a larger network of aristocratic consumption, colonial sociability, and vice-regal politics in France and New France.
Although the period of religious struggle following Henry VIII’s dramatic break with Rome in 1533 might indicate otherwise, historical and archaeological records reveal a less than static state of spiritual tradition and religious toleration in Virginia, England's first permanent foothold in the New World settled in 1607. Catholic devotional objects have been unearthed at Jamestown including religious medals of Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary, conjectured rosary beads, and even crucifixes from the first two decades of settlement. Colonial archives illuminate the military and administrative careers of openly Catholic Virginians a generation later. The accession of James II, a Catholic king who legalized religious toleration, emboldened the small community of Virginia Catholics to the point that they even attempted to build a chapel in Norfolk in the 1680s.
This presentation addresses combined documentary and material evidence to situate Roman Catholicism in the wider context of religious, political, and social life in seventeenth-century Virginia.
Notarial records including inventories exist that describe the domestic furnishings of two governors, Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil, and his son Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, and one intendant, Claude-Thomas Dupuy. Although neither the intendant's palace nor the château Saint-Louis survived fire and urban renewal in the early nineteenth century, archaeological artifacts, archival sources, and extant objects reveal an impressive array of materials from the periods of their occupation under the French colonial regime. Through close scrutiny of surviving objects and documents, this presentation explores the nature of aristocratic society, material culture, and domestic life in New France.
Such a fashion did not evade comment and received outright condemnation in contemporary tracts on manners, deportment, and morality. This discourse is revelatory of greater community concerns in the Atlantic world, including the distinction of godliness over sinfulness, the maintenance of gender roles, the construction and manipulation of personal identity, and the demarcation of rank and race as mask consumption extended beyond elite women or even those of European descent.
Cette exposition numérique s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche ayant pour but de documenter la culture matérielle et le comportement de la haute société coloniale sous l'Ancien Régime. Les œuvres exposées virtuellement ici regroupent des pièces- céramique, mobilier, orfèvrerie, textile- avec une provenance coloniale ainsi que des objets comparables à ceux qui sont décrits dans les inventaires ou semblables aux artefacts archéologiques. Ils lèvent le voile sur la vie quotidienne et l'ameublement des foyers élitaires de l'Amérique française, un territoire qui s'étendait des côtes rocheuses du Labrador jusqu'à La Nouvelle-Orléans et aux Antilles.
1- le château Saint-Louis sur les hauteurs du Cap aux Diamants, résidence du gouverneur-général
2- le palais de l’intendant au pied de la Côte du Palais, demeure de l’intendant;
3- le palais épiscopal au milieu de la Côte de la Montagne, domicile de l’évêque.
Au cours des dernières années, de nombreuses publications et fouilles archéologiques nous ont amené à mieux connaître ces lieux de pouvoir, la vie qu’on y menait et les gens qui y résidaient. Toutefois, on en sait encore trop peu sur le décor intérieur de ces endroits et le mobilier qu’on y trouvait. À quoi ressemblaient les antichambres de ces palais ? Y trouvait-on un mobilier similaire à celui qu’y faisait la renommée de Versailles et des hôtels particuliers parisiens ? Comment s’exprimait le luxe, le raffinement et la recherche de confort dans un contexte colonial ? À l’occasion des Fêtes de la Nouvelle-France, l’équipe de 3 600 secondes d’histoire vous propose d’explorer ces questions en compagnie de Philippe Halbert, étudiant au doctorat en histoire de l’art à Yale University.