Why is an object, an artwork, or a person deemed ?exotic?? How does one?s gaze get directed onto things or people seemingly belonging to other regions or cultures? These questions are examined here in relation to a specific context: the Enlightenment era from the Swiss perspective. This publication brings together research by academics and museum specialists for the first time in order to rethink this time period and geography. It contains essays and shorter texts centered on pictures, objects, books, and natural specimens from Swiss museum collections. ?Exotic? in this context refers to things that come from elsewhere and that can be used and ?improved? for the benefit of European powers. The term invites us to reconsider both the long eighteenth century and the international history of Switzerland.00Exhibition: Palais de Rumine, Lausanne, Switzerland (24.09.2020 - 28.02.2021).

States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism, its doctrine of neutrality, and its transnationally entangled scientific community, constitutes a perfect case in point.

The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.

This major volume aims to re-colour the European world of dress, c.1300-1800. New dyes created one of the most important visual experiences of the period, yet their story has been side-lined by a focus on visual experiences shaped by the high arts. Meanwhile, theatrical productions and period films still abound with broad assumptions about the growing dominance of black clothing for elites during the period, while ordinary people are imagined having worn coarse greys and bleached garments. This volume presents clear evidence that even the clothing of the middle classes could be much more expensive than paintings, and that coloured clothing and accessories were ubiquitous across society. Contributors shed new light on the economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions of colour in dress. The range of dyes expanded considerably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawing on Asian and Mediterranean knowledge, new collections of recipes, and the greater diversity of plants available through New World trade. Working creatively with organic plant, animal, and mineral materials to make colours involved considerable knowledge, pleasure and skill. The creation of colour through dyes thus reveals a whole range of global agricultural and craft technologies that can inspire future material worlds and transforms our understanding of Europe ́s cultural heritage.

A travel diary from 1863 inspires author Diccon Bewes to retrace Thomas Cook's historic train trip that revolutionized tourism forever.

Gray Kunz has teamed up with food writer Peter Kaminsky to put together a cookbook that looks precisely at what taste is. They have identified 14 basic tastes in the chef's palate and offer recipes showing how to use these fundamental building blocks.