Helen Hills

Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities. Rethinking the Relation between Architecture and Affect in Baroque Italy

This chapter addresses the relation between affect, architecture and place, materiality, miraculous event and ritual in baroque Italy by examining two miraculous liquefactions of saintly blood in baroque Naples. If these interrelationships are treated in non-representational terms, then materiality emerges as central to these relationships and crucial for an understanding of affect. Meanwhile, I suggest below that the role of ritual has been overstated.Thus the chapter thinks art and architecture in relation to affect through its materiality and not in representational terms.

Book Review: Architecture as Performance in Seventeenth-Century Europe. Court Ritual in Modena, Rome, and Paris:

England builds on these complexities in a world where residents had similar myths of origins and homeland, in this case the Anglo-Saxons’ pagan past in Germania. Yet, AngloSaxon and Icelandic law, literature and vocabulary contrast markedly: while notions of home and homelessness were paramount to the latter, such notions were at best confused for the former. In Anglo-Saxon, no equivalent word exists to ours for home; epel, which might be translated as home, has a range of meanings from an animal’s abode to an ancestral region, while the closest notion to ‘homelessness’ seen in Anglo-Saxon laws is that of strangers wandering off beaten paths (145). For the Anglo-Saxons, the true ‘home’ was the heavens, not their temporary earthly abodes taken on loan from God. Unfortunately, Howe makes no attempt to explain these sharp contrasts. Certainly, the presence of Christianity is not enough to do so. After all, in early modern Venice or late medieval Florence, notions of the ‘casa’ defined families, and their wills indicate that hopes for the afterlife were often placed as much on the physical preservation of their palaces and their passage down male blood-lines as on prayers for salvation.

Enamelled with the blood of a noble lineage : Tracing noble blood and female holiness in early modern Neapolitan convents and their architecture

The stark antithesis between the secular and the religious has been effectively challenged by scholarship of early modern Italy, which has shown the degree to which these fields necessarily overlapped. Nevertheless, studies of early modern female devotion, especially within convents, often present women as caught between competing claims of kinship and clerical authority, a conflict between family and convent, an opposition between the secular and the divine. This paper argues that within Neapolitan conventual circles, at least, nuns noble blood was regarded as enhancing the spiritual value of their convents, and that, on the whole, the way in which the Decrees of the Council of Trent were interpreted served to “aristocratize” convents. Something of a fusion occurred between nobility and spirituality in women. This paper relates this fusion to discourses on nobility and to the aristocratization of convent culture after enclosure at Trent, examining how it marked post-Tridentine Neapolitan convent architecture and urbanism. In short, I argue that nuns nobility enhanced the spiritual value of Neapolitan convents after Trent, and that such status was communicated discursively, architecturally, and urbanistically.

Feminism, Architecture, and the Poor Rich Man

In The Story of a Poor Rich Man the architect Adolph Loos describes a man who had everything in his life but art. So he hired a famous architect to provide him with the ultimate artistic environment. The architect ensured that everything the poor rich man experienced thenceforth was designed and given fixed form; and so the poor rich man was excluded from living and striving, becoming and wishing. Architectural historians sometimes tend to believe, or write as if they believe, that architecture does fix and control everything in that way and that it, therefore, can be analysed as if its forms are determining and decisive. The impulse is understandable, but of course the reality is a lot more complex. Architecture is a vital aspect of cultural production, which actively produces meaning by its own special, semiotic, and symbolic procedures. These meanings are materially constituted in discourses and practices. Quite how the social organization and subordination of womens bodies, sexual and otherwise, to the institutions of family, class, and social regulation are defined by, relate to, and resist architectural discourses is a vital question and one that is central to the concerns of this book.