The essays in this issue take eleven objects in Melbourne collections to examine the concepts of foreignness and the out-of-place in the early modern world. The objects were made over a span of almost four centuries, from the 1400s into the 1700s, and in regions as far apart as England and the Philippines. They include manuscripts and sculptures, textiles, drawings, and prints. Some were made as artworks, while others began as practical objects with a specific use.
The research presented here developed from a joint project between the Universities of Manchester and Melbourne, titled ‘Foreign Bodies’ and focused on the early-modern art collections in both cities. ‘Foreign Bodies’ began in 2017, and brought together scholars and curators from all over Australia and the United Kingdom to explore ideas of foreignness, exteriority, exclusion, and distance as manifested in early-modern art and culture. To date there have been two major outcomes from this work: the online exhibition ‘Foreign Bodies’ which presents objects from both cities (https://connectingcollections-manmel.com/) and a 2019 special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (vol. 95, no. 2) with extended essays on objects in Manchester collections. The research essays presented here focus on Melbourne collections and are the final part of our project work.
As we noted in the introduction to the 2019 volume, we chose ‘Foreign Bodies’ as a research theme both for its current and its early-modern importance.Footnote1 Notions of the foreign and out-of-place are radically historically and socially contingent: they are shaped by contextual expectations of correct placement, appearance, or behaviour, and subtended by real or perceived exception to prevailing norms or conventions. As our research began, uncertainties associated with Brexit, the status of U.K. and Australian nationals identified as terrorists, and the Australian policy of off-shore refugee imprisonment were placing ideas about ‘foreign’ status and citizenship into sharp focus. As our work advanced, the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement brought debates about inclusivity and structural violence to the fore, and the ways in which these issues can (and must) be remedied. As we now conclude our work, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the medical sense of the phrase ‘foreign bodies’—an invasion of the body by something external to it—a pervasive, ongoing and lived concern. The pandemic has brought new rounds of nationalism and exclusion, and intensified discussions of citizenship and rights: Australia’s borders remained closed to foreign nationals for almost two years, while also excluding citizens who wished to return and stopping those who wished to leave. The U.K. implemented a system of red, amber, and green lists of countries that were deemed more or less risky to the body politic.
Against this background it seems crucial to examine the roots of our current moment, particularly as defining foreignness was a hallmark of the early-modern era. The period between roughly 1400 and 1700 was an age of colonisation, contact, and intense change. People sought to establish literal and metaphorical borders to guarantee their wellbeing and prosperity, and to determine who was, and was not, part of a particular community, ethnicity, or emerging nation state—those things which drew them together, and those which separated them from others. Individuals or groups might be considered or be made to feel out of place because of race, disability, or gender, for example.
Yet to be out-of-place is different from, and often more than, to be foreign. At the root of the idea of foreignness is exteriority—the etymology means the fact of being outside a structure or door.Footnote2 In that sense the category is notionally binary: inside or outside a given place or group. The out-of-place is much more amorphous. It suggests instead a mistaken presence, an unexpected or incorrect inclusion, or a weakness or break in a series or grouping. It may generate unease, and as such it bridges ideas of the uncanny when that is defined by a sense of brief and atavistic perceptual uncertainty—something familiar suddenly defamiliarised and strange, or something beyond one’s ken or understanding.Footnote3
The concept of the out-of-place has been central to a variety of disciplines over the last two decades. Out of Place is the title of Edward Said’s memoir, published in 1999. Said came to the conclusion that being out of place, his sense of dislocation that was more than exile from the land of his birth, was, whilst difficult and uncomfortable, something to be appreciated, something that allowed him a critical distance.Footnote4 Ian Baucom has argued that the notion of the out-of-place is integral to the twentieth-century concept of the postmodern in general: he notes that advocates of the postmodern defined it through an experience of spatial confusion or disorientation, and sometimes cast this disorientation as an emancipatory possibility, a first and necessary step in tearing down older certainties.Footnote5 Yet critics of the postmodern project note the position of privilege that underpins this link: one must first feel or be at home to experience displacement, and it is a further step to see this as a positive shift. The valorisation of displacement may intensify political and social inequality for those who have been literally displaced, including Indigenous Australians, not only by aestheticising real suffering, but by further othering people’s relations and claims to Country and land.Footnote6
The out-of-place is also fundamental as a category in art history and cognate fields like archaeology, where it can be linked to the methods of iconography or semiosis. A focus on the unexpected detail, the small thing out of place, becomes a clue to unlock a larger meaning or whole.Footnote7 In archaeology, the category of the ‘out of place artifact’ (or ‘oopart’) describes any object that seems to disrupt accepted models of the past, and as such it is much loved by conspiracy theorists and hoaxers.Footnote8 But it can also be productive. A recent example of a legitimate oopart might be the coin found in 2018 on the Wessel Islands of Australia’s Northern Territory, which may have come from Kilwa (modern Tanzania) and been minted before the fifteenth century, long before documented contact between Australia and the Indian Ocean world.Footnote9
The essays in this special issue of ANZJA investigate the longer histories of these ideas. Whether clearly articulated or not, categories of the foreign and the out-of-place influenced the lived experience of those who made, paid for, and used or viewed (and view) the objects discussed here. All these objects are both foreign to us and fundamentally out of place, having migrated in time and space. Their meaning and impact is no longer easily understood, and must be reconstructed through careful consideration of historical context. Many represent people, places, or objects that were also foreign or exceptional to their makers. Some appear grotesque in that they are deliberately ugly, shocking, or unnatural; others evoke the abject by appearing deliberately to disturb conventional identities. They have arrived at their current institutions by many circuitous routes, as gifts, bequests, or collection purchases, sometimes moving repeatedly from the places in which they were made. Each displacement has changed their audiences, meanings, value, and even use.
The first three essays focus on atypical, marginalised, or socially ostracised bodies. Hilary Maddocks examines a fifteenth-century manuscript with a poem by Guillaume Deguileville. In this poem, the narrator meets the seven deadly sins, each personified as a female figure and illustrated in the manuscript with innovative pen-and-ink drawings. Maddocks focuses in particular on the image of Avarice: ancient, multi-armed, with a pagan idol on her head, and panting like a dog in heat. Maddocks suggests that the female sins are made doubly foreign in these images: even within the misogynistic norms of medieval clerical writings, there is an extreme insistence on the abjection of these female bodies, and on their links to pagan heresies and far-off lands. Yet Maddocks also notes the comic nature of these sins, as they beat up, laugh at, and otherwise abuse the hapless narrator.
Humour as a form of social subversion is also central to the next essay, ‘Marcolf and his Wife’, by Susanne Meurer. In medieval Europe, Marcolf and his equally canny wife Bolikana were the sly peasant antiheroes of an immensely popular Dialogue in which Marcolf repeatedly outwitted King Solomon, legendary for his wisdom. Meurer examines two prints, made by the Augsburg artists Hans Weiditz and Daniel Hopfer. Hopfer based his work on the earlier artist’s version, but Meurer argues that his figures are more animal in both their physiognomies and their movements, a difference she links to a larger social shift after Luther’s reforms and the 1524-25 Peasants’ War. The outsiders that had been material for entertainment and humour were now a potential threat to the social order as a whole.
The Italian print of a blind peddler studied by Kerrianne Stone is more poignant and apparently more sympathetic to the marginal figure it presents. Made by the Rome-based artist Francesco Villamena at the end of the sixteenth century, the print shows a blind man trying to make a living by selling dubious medical cures. The image is indebted to Annibale Carracci among others. Yet Stone argues that Villamena’s representation gives a dignity to its subject not much found in other images, and an agency that suggests a place for the blind peddler, however small, within the wider social world. Cordelia Warr’s essay also looks at poverty within the social body, but as a social good. It centres on a print by the Flemish artist Lucas Vorsterman showing Saint Francis of Assisi in patched and ragged clothes. Warr notes that the print was made at a time of renewed debates about the place of poverty within the order, and she explores the ways in which mended textiles stressed a particularly Franciscan spirituality for the print’s audience.
The next papers take the animal/human opposition as a central concern. Catherine Mahoney examines one of the most famous early printed health handbooks, Jacob Meydenbach’s lavishly illustrated 1491 Ortus Sanitatis, examining its many images of animal-human hybrids within a larger idea of a spiritual curative function for the book. Catherine Kovesi focuses instead on a single animal, an Asian rhinoceros sent from one sixteenth-century European city to another as a diplomatic gift, and later featured in the compendia of both Conrad Gessner and Edward Topsell. Topsell in particular would use the notion of wonder and the marvellous nature of this beast to stress the natural world’s links to the divine, and his text is Kovesi’s focus here. Anne Dunlop is concerned instead with the out-of-place as an interpretive category. Her focus is a luxurious English embroidered panel of the mid-seventeenth century, done almost certainly by a woman or women, which shows a king and queen somewhat incongruously surrounded by outsized and multifarious plants and animals.
The last two essays move beyond Europe to pick up on Kovesi’s theme of people, animals, and objects literally displaced or out of place. Susanne Chadbourne’s essay looks at a single printed figure, the so-called ‘Devil in Calicut’ in a 1566 edition of Pierre Boaistuau’s extraordinary Histoires prodigues wonder collection. The figure was said to be an idol worshiped in the Indian city of Calicut, and the image was based in part on earlier descriptions of actual Hindu deities. Chadbourne places the Devil within the wider frame of religious warfare in France at the time, seeing in the displaced and translated Indian figure an image of heresy to warn the local reader. The final essay by Matthew Martin examines an ivory head of the Virgin Mary, probably produced in Manilla by Chinese sculptors for the European export market, and later wrongly identified as Spanish after it traveled into Austria and Australia. Martin’s interest is in the use of such objects as cultural mediators, but also in the extraordinary journeys that shaped their making and shifting reception.
Notes
1 Anne Dunlop and Cordelia Warr, ‘Foreign Bodies: Neighbours, Strangers, Monsters’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 95, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.
2 For foreignness as an early-modern category, see ‘Foreign Bodies’ (https://connectingcollections-manmel.com/).
3 Canonical formulations: Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny,’ first published 1906, translation by Roy Sellars: http://www.art3idea.psu.edu/locus/Jentsch_uncanny.pdf; Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. 17, 217-56. Freud claimed in fact that his intervention on the uncanny was an engagement with the discipline of aesthetics, although his examples are literary rather than drawn from the visual arts.
4 Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999).
5 Ian Baucom, ‘Afterword: Something Rich and Strange,’ in Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 219–23.
6 Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Post-colonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994).
7 One example among others: Daniel Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 2004).
8 Andrew O’Hehir, ‘Archaeology from the Dark Side,’ Salon, 31 August 2005: https://www.salon.com/2005/08/31/archaeology/.
9 Kylie Stevenson, ‘It could change everything: coin found off northern Australia may be from pre-1400 Africa,’ The Guardian, 12 May 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/12/it-could-change-everything-coin-found-off-northern-australia-may-be-from-pre-1400-africa.