SESSION: Carrying Across: Translation as Material Practice in the Pre-/Early Modern World

This session explores how portable things, such as reliquaries, textiles, books, and tools, are objects of translation. A coconut shell from Ceylon, joined to a Fatimid rock-crystal ewer and refashioned as a Christian reliquary in thirteenth-century Münster, invites us to rethink the concept of ‘translation’ as an act of transgressing linguistic, sociocultural, geospatial, and temporal boundaries. Taking its etymological root, the Latin translation (‘to carry across’), as our point of departure, we ask how materials move across contexts. We explore how they mediate intercultural traffic, urging a reconceptualisation of translation not only as a linguistic but also a material act. Shifting focus from the moment and place of an object’s creation to the networks through which it has travelled, we seek to illuminate pre- and early modern circuits of local and global exchange. Building on scholarship on material agency by Beate Fricke, Finbarr Barry Flood, Tim Ingold, and others, we invite conference papers that explore questions such as: How can translating (e.g., mounting, re-cutting, over-painting) be understood as a form of making? How do deliberate misuses, repairs, or forgeries reveal contested meanings? In what ways do pre-/early modern artefacts act as ‘temporal hinges,’ enabling dialogue between past, present, and future? We welcome papers that consider materials and makers that have been underrepresented in existing scholarship and that stimulate a productive methodological conversation between art history and other adjacent disciplines, including translation studies, cultural heritage preservation studies, and material anthropology.

Session Convenors:

Yupeng Wu, Yale University

Se Jin Park, Yale University

Speakers:

Sarah F. Cohen, Columbia University

A Fatimid Crystal Reliquary in Thirteenth-Century Tyrol: Questions of Cross-Cultural Value and Symbolic Reuse

A small thirteenth-century reliquary housed in Marienberg, Tyrol, prominently reuses a deeply carved rock crystal from Fatimid Egypt (ca. 909–1171). Consequently, the relic is barely visible through the vessel’s ornate carving, leading one to wonder: why reuse this vessel? What does it do for the relic? To answer these questions, the paper first draws on extant literary sources that identify the vessel’s original Fatimid use and attest to the perception of rock crystal in both the Medieval Levant and Europe. It then assesses the material’s recognized splendour and inferred divine allure to identify a cross-cultural aesthetic value. In addition to aesthetic value, the vessel’s status as an object crafted in Biblical, eastern lands is shown to support its ‘value for history,’ a concept introduced by Alois Riegl. Combined, both value systems substantiate the Fatimid vessel’s suitability to be refitted as a container for the sacred in European contexts. Lastly, comparable reused rock crystal reliquaries produced near Tyrol and connected to Marienberg via the trade routes of the Hanseatic League are introduced to evaluate the circulation, aesthetic desirability, and symbolic utility of such objects in the region.

Alan Mitchell, University of Cambridge

Phoebe Traquair: a temporal hinge from the pre-modern to the twentieth century

This paper uses the work of the Irish / Scottish artist Phoebe Traquair (1852-1936) to explore how this session’s concept of translation can also be discerned in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early twentieth century. Traquair worked across a wide range of media and often took historical forms, such as medieval manuscripts, reliquary caskets, and leather book bindings, and reimagined them in her own work. This was not mere copying or imitation, but rather an act of homage to artists of earlier centuries having studied and emulated their craft techniques.

I will focus on her Cupid and Psyche Chalice, inspired by early-modern examples she had seen in the South Kensington Museum in London (now the V&A). It was made from a Paua shell, an exotic, rare species from the global south, brought from New Zealand, then an outpost of the British Empire. The chalice is decorated with moonstones and miniature enamels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, from the second century CE. Traquair respects the natural form of the shell, placing it on display on an elaborate silver stand, inviting the viewer to question its materiality and story, and then problematizes the narrative with images of the universal theme of love and a search for immortality.

I argue that this curious example of cultural hybridity, blending historical forms and techniques with an object of colonial trade, is a fascinating witness to translation and cross-cultural interaction across both geography and time.

Morton Wan, University of Oxford

Translating between China and Europe Musically in the Early Modern Era

From Matteo Ricci’s clavichord to the Kangxi Emperor’s harpsichord, keyboard instruments stood at the frontier of early modern China–Europe encounters. More than vehicles of sound, they mediated entire systems of musical though and the cultural beliefs underpinning them. To Europeans, the keyboard embodied harmony, counterpoint, and the rational order of Western music; to the Chinese, it appeared as diplomatic gift, exotic curiosity, and intricate machine laden with foreign knowledge. For both, the instrument became an interface — a point of contact where two ostensibly distinct musical worlds sought to render one another legible.

This paper examines two eighteenth-century moments in which the keyboard served as an agent of musical translation. The first concerns the English music historian Charles Burney’s 1774 proposal to send a barrel organ to China with the Macartney embassy as an ethnomusicological device to “test” the Chinese ear. Programmed with Chinese melodies harmonized in the Western style, the instrument was meant to substantiate European speculation about China’s supposed incapacity for harmony, serving as an empirical trial of musical translatability. The second turns to Chinese encounters with Western sound. In 1738, the scholar-official Zhao Yi described hearing an organ performance in Beijing’s cathedral with mingled awe and unease, admiring the instrument’s mechanical ingenuity as evidence of Western technological prowess while reaffirming the moral and aesthetic superiority of Chinese music.

Burney’s later dismissal of Chinese music, informed by reports of failed musical translation from members of the Macartney embassy, reflected Britain’s shift from earlier Sinophilia to emerging Sinophobia. Zhao’s reflections, by contrast, reveal China’s growing awareness of Western power, attenuated by a Sino-centric impulse to neutralize that threat through reaffirming the supremacy of its own moral and intellectual order. Taken together, the keyboard emerges as an epistemic wedge between China and the West, laying bare the political ideologies that underpinned these fraught acts of musical translation as both sides grew increasingly ambivalent towards one another.

Meagan Khoury, The Cooper Union

Rebellious Replications: Dismantling Lace and Embroidery Pattern Books

Sixteenth-century lace and embroidery got around. Small and pocketable, these ornamental textiles were highly covetable. Humbly embroidered tablecloths graced the home, opulent lace cuffs and ruffs demarcated the body. Such threadwork could be found in the laps of women from Bologna to Chantilly to Toledo. The production and sale of lace and embroidery gave women social and economic power within the home, the convent, the conservatory, and the court. But how can we trace the traffic of evolving designs and the attendant shifts in female agency? The short answer: pattern books. Italy’s booming print and textile industries began talking to each other through the publication of printed patterns. Popularly marketed to an emerging female readership, the pattern books were highly mobile objects themselves. They were traded hand over hand, with patterns cut, pierced, torn, remixed, and edited. Slippages occurred between time and place. Designs became an intergenerational language between mothers and daughters, while old patterns emigrated to new cities. This paper examines the contested utility and transmission of Italian pattern books. I will focus on the books as a thick archive of mends, stains, tears, scribbles – all evidence of reader engagement. I show that instead of obediently copying patterns (as male publishers advised in the introductions), women used the books as spaces of creative experimentation, turning their translation of patterns into an act of transgression. Women’s disloyalty to the patterns resulted in a subversive resistance movement – one in which thousands of female makers entered the global economy for the first time.