Lesley Ellis Miller

Reviews of Books: La moda española en el Siglo de Oro [Exhibition Catalogue]. Editado por Rafael García Serrano

os. Longhurst ha escrito un libro sólido, riguroso, persuasivo, bien argumentado y fundamentado en un amplio conocimiento de la obra completa de Unamuno y de la filosofía moderna. Este libro está destinado a ser uno de los punto de referencia básicos para todo lector interesado en conocer la teoría de la novela y la práctica novelesca de Miguel de Unamuno. NIL SANTIÁÑEZ Saint Louis University. La cara fosca de la cultura catalana: la col·laboració amb el feixisme i la dictadura franquista. Edició de Jordi Larios. Palma: Lleonard Muntaner Editor. 2013. 394 pp. This volume brings together a series of fourteen essays stemming from a conference organized by the Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary, University of London in 2008 to explore how the collaboration and/or sympathy of some twentieth-century Catalan intellectuals with the Franco regime, enters into direct conflict with the stereotypical representation of the Catalan intellectual as both artist and patriot. The main ‘traitors’ who are scrutinized in the volume —Eugeni d’Ors, Josep Pla, Salvador Dalí and Llorenç Villalonga—are introduced by Henry Ettinghausen in Chapter 1, which provides an excellent overview of the polarity of Catalan ideologies before, during and after the Spanish Civil War. Closing the chapter with documentary evidence from his own correspondence with former director of the publication Destino, Josep Vergés, Ettinghausen’s challenge to the supposed liberal and anti-regime stance of the magazine is supported by Francesc Vilanova’s review of its editorial positioning up to 1945 in Chapter 2. REVIEWS OF BOOKS 355

Material Marketing: How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers Sold Silks, 1660–1789

Textiles are products that rely for their effect on colour, texture, handle or drape, and sometimes on pattern, too. Such physical and aesthetic qualities determine their end use and are difficult to represent satisfactorily in black and white, in either words or images. Despite this fact, the exploration of the selling of textiles by historians of the early modern period has tended to rely on printed and manuscript sources. This focus on text and image has perhaps obscured the variety of methods used to sell textiles internationally and the skills and experience of salesmen who were not necessarily shopkeepers.1 Most selling activity is, of course, notoriously difficult to pin down because it uses oral communication and is often peripatetic, taking place at the site of production or consumption or somewhere in between.2 Its practitioners are not prominent in the annals of guilds or cities because they were frequently absent from home on business or were just passing through the towns where they sought custom. Moreover, the tools of their trade were ephemeral and transitory, their use often deliberately shrouded in secrecy. Exploration of commercial correspondence and analysis of surviving merchants’ sample books, however, pay dividends. In the case of the Lyon silk manufactures, they may be read in conjunction with the deliberations of the Chamber of Commerce, the regulations, deliberations and procedures of the silk weaving guild (the Grande Fabrique) and notarial acts. They highlight the significance of the material (silk samples) over the graphic (print and drawings) in enabling Lyonnais silk manufacturers to make and retain connections with their international and domestic markets.