Imaging and Imagining Early Modern Feather Fans

Join us for a lunchtime seminar exploring how imaging technology was used on an early modern fan to advance our understanding of artisanal creativity.

In the age of globalisation, early modern featherwork was a theatre for innovative cultural crossings and material experiments. Dr Stefan Hanß and Tony Richards (Senior Photographer, John Rylands Research Institute and Library) will discuss how a collaborative approach using in-depth archival research and imaging technologies revealed new insights into material choices and artisanal making processes that crafted the modalities of early modern feather fans.

An artisan's creative response to South American biodiversity, the featherwork discussed in this seminar charts the global scale of trade in materials, the transmission of artisanal knowledge, and the blurred boundaries of consumer cultures in the late 17th century Dutch Empire. The affectivity of the fan translates Amazonian biocreativity into the material aesthetics of early modern craft cultures.

Dr Stefan Hanß achieved the 2020/21 John Rylands Research Institute Scientific and Digital Humanities grant for his project 'Proteomics Analysis of Medical and Cosmetical Recipes from Early Modern Germany’ and is now the undertaking his Philip Leverhulme Prize funded project 'Hair, Social Order and Cultural Encounters in the Habsburg World, c.1450-1750.

Image: The Messel Standing Feather Fan, c. 1665 © University of Manchester. Image photographed by Tony Richards.

For event enquires, you can contact us by email at jrl.events@manchester.ac.uk or telephone on 0161 306 0555

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