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Papers by Kimberley Skelton
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 2024
Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and org... more Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and organising knowledge. Philosophers and rhetorical theorists had argued that one remembered most effectively by imagining a sequence of places, including built spaces, and storing images of what should be recalled in those places. Authors of medieval pilgrimage narratives had led their readers on tours of sacred sites beginning in the twelfth century. From the late fifteenth century, however, imagined movement became more insistently physical and increasingly deployed to communicate, rather than simply store, knowledge: built memory spaces were for the first time categorised according to size; volumes began to present pre-designed memory structures devoted to a particular topic; guidebooks to Rome started to lead readers on tours similar to those of pilgrimage narratives; and university botanic gardens offered the lived equivalent of sequences of memory places. By the seventeenth century, tours with sequences of spaces that stored information were a familiar technique across discourses from natural philosophy to architecture. This article examines the increasing physicality of imagined movement through these spaces and its connection to
communicating knowledge as well as to shaping the attitudes of readers. I focus on mnemonic treatises and volumes presenting pre-designed spaces, the books where imagined movement was especially apparent, alongside guidebooks and botanic gardens. Consequently, built memory spaces, which have been little studied, are highlighted, and two rich
but usually discrete strands of early modern history are brought together: history of memory and studies of movement through the built environment.
History of Education, 2024
Increasingly across sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviou... more Increasingly across sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviour with traditional instruction in reading and writing. Not only did the Council of Trent highlight the importance of training children in Christian comportment, but theological and philosophical tracts argued that the senses, rather than reason, governed human behaviour and so that habit guaranteed predictable actions. While connections among the senses, habit and behaviour became central to education by the early 1700s, these connections have remained little considered as historians have focused on teaching techniques and patronage history. This article explores such connections through the Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine, the network by which the Council of Trent instituted its training in Christian behaviour. It is argued that surveillance and strict choreography of student movement through school spaces became key techniques of instruction and thus that the history of early modern education converges with architectural and intellectual history.
Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 65, 2021
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience, and Rhetoric, ed. Kimberley Skelton, 2020
From the mid-seventeenth century, philosophical arguments about human responses to the physical e... more From the mid-seventeenth century, philosophical arguments about human responses to the physical environment challenged a basic tenet of prison design and administration: that prisoners could use reason to apply religious instruction towards reconsidering their criminal ways. Mechanistic philosophers asserted that humans reacted physically and psychologically on impulse to neural vibrations that were produced by sensory stimuli in their environment and that traversed their bodies and brains. Correspondingly, prison designers and administrators recrafted prisons into reform environments that used sensory cues to choreograph human physical and psychological processes and, in turn, reshape social behavior. This essay examines the early stages of such new prison design by turning to Rome, especially Carlo Fontana's Casa di Correzione for juvenile delinquents.
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience, and Rhetoric, ed. Kimberley Skelton, 2020
Since antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment... more Since antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. During the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, however, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and discussed a new world of motion-one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. This chapter examines the shift from segmented to continuous motion in order to establish the architectural and cultural historical context for the following eight essays. It considers how architects and other authors stressed ever more putting individuals in motion through new types of built spaces and through new approaches to architectural treatises and guidebooks, while writers in other discourses encompassing science, medicine, and philosophy debated movements at all scales from the heliocentric universe to vibrating atoms.
Carlo Fontana 1638-1714. Celebrato Architetto, eds. Giuseppe Bonaccorso and Francesco Moschini , 2018
Architectural Histories, 2015
This article illuminates the changes in English seventeenth-century architectural practice when m... more This article illuminates the changes in English seventeenth-century architectural practice when members of the gentry educated themselves as architectural professionals and as a result several became noted practitioners. The author analyses the rarely examined notes and library of Sir Roger Pratt to explore how a seventeenth-century gentleman both studied and practised architecture literally as both gentleman and architect. Also she considers Pratt's notes chronologically, rather than according to their previous thematic reorganisation by R. T. Gunther (1928)
In the sixteenth-century printed architectural book, text and image together evoked a wide variet... more In the sixteenth-century printed architectural book, text and image together evoked a wide variety of interpretations from readers. Authors of these books explicitly invited highly individual readings by assigning separate information to text and image as well as by instructing their readers to analyze the book with their own knowledge. Yet in suggesting how readers might critique a book, both historians of the book and architectural historians have considered text and image separately from each other and have often stressed single rather than various readers. Studies in the history of the book consider how readers can generate multiple interpretations from the text, its annotations and indices. 1 Scholars in architectural history, on the other hand, have considered the illustration but have assumed that it outlines prescriptive rules. 2 Among architectural books, Wendel Dietterlin's Architectura of 1598 in particular suggests that authors even assumed multiple interpretations from different readers; together, his fantastic engravings and limited text create space for the questions of audiences ranging from elite readers to master builders. 3 By exploring how these readers of Architectura created their own interpretations, I will argue that the text-image relationship in Architectura expands sixteenth-century ideas about the Orders as well as designing buildings and, in turn, suggests the rich array of interpretations available to early modern readers of printed books.
Books by Kimberley Skelton
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early ... more A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 2024
Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and org... more Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and organising knowledge. Philosophers and rhetorical theorists had argued that one remembered most effectively by imagining a sequence of places, including built spaces, and storing images of what should be recalled in those places. Authors of medieval pilgrimage narratives had led their readers on tours of sacred sites beginning in the twelfth century. From the late fifteenth century, however, imagined movement became more insistently physical and increasingly deployed to communicate, rather than simply store, knowledge: built memory spaces were for the first time categorised according to size; volumes began to present pre-designed memory structures devoted to a particular topic; guidebooks to Rome started to lead readers on tours similar to those of pilgrimage narratives; and university botanic gardens offered the lived equivalent of sequences of memory places. By the seventeenth century, tours with sequences of spaces that stored information were a familiar technique across discourses from natural philosophy to architecture. This article examines the increasing physicality of imagined movement through these spaces and its connection to
communicating knowledge as well as to shaping the attitudes of readers. I focus on mnemonic treatises and volumes presenting pre-designed spaces, the books where imagined movement was especially apparent, alongside guidebooks and botanic gardens. Consequently, built memory spaces, which have been little studied, are highlighted, and two rich
but usually discrete strands of early modern history are brought together: history of memory and studies of movement through the built environment.
History of Education, 2024
Increasingly across sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviou... more Increasingly across sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviour with traditional instruction in reading and writing. Not only did the Council of Trent highlight the importance of training children in Christian comportment, but theological and philosophical tracts argued that the senses, rather than reason, governed human behaviour and so that habit guaranteed predictable actions. While connections among the senses, habit and behaviour became central to education by the early 1700s, these connections have remained little considered as historians have focused on teaching techniques and patronage history. This article explores such connections through the Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine, the network by which the Council of Trent instituted its training in Christian behaviour. It is argued that surveillance and strict choreography of student movement through school spaces became key techniques of instruction and thus that the history of early modern education converges with architectural and intellectual history.
Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 65, 2021
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience, and Rhetoric, ed. Kimberley Skelton, 2020
From the mid-seventeenth century, philosophical arguments about human responses to the physical e... more From the mid-seventeenth century, philosophical arguments about human responses to the physical environment challenged a basic tenet of prison design and administration: that prisoners could use reason to apply religious instruction towards reconsidering their criminal ways. Mechanistic philosophers asserted that humans reacted physically and psychologically on impulse to neural vibrations that were produced by sensory stimuli in their environment and that traversed their bodies and brains. Correspondingly, prison designers and administrators recrafted prisons into reform environments that used sensory cues to choreograph human physical and psychological processes and, in turn, reshape social behavior. This essay examines the early stages of such new prison design by turning to Rome, especially Carlo Fontana's Casa di Correzione for juvenile delinquents.
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience, and Rhetoric, ed. Kimberley Skelton, 2020
Since antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment... more Since antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. During the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, however, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and discussed a new world of motion-one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. This chapter examines the shift from segmented to continuous motion in order to establish the architectural and cultural historical context for the following eight essays. It considers how architects and other authors stressed ever more putting individuals in motion through new types of built spaces and through new approaches to architectural treatises and guidebooks, while writers in other discourses encompassing science, medicine, and philosophy debated movements at all scales from the heliocentric universe to vibrating atoms.
Carlo Fontana 1638-1714. Celebrato Architetto, eds. Giuseppe Bonaccorso and Francesco Moschini , 2018
Architectural Histories, 2015
This article illuminates the changes in English seventeenth-century architectural practice when m... more This article illuminates the changes in English seventeenth-century architectural practice when members of the gentry educated themselves as architectural professionals and as a result several became noted practitioners. The author analyses the rarely examined notes and library of Sir Roger Pratt to explore how a seventeenth-century gentleman both studied and practised architecture literally as both gentleman and architect. Also she considers Pratt's notes chronologically, rather than according to their previous thematic reorganisation by R. T. Gunther (1928)
In the sixteenth-century printed architectural book, text and image together evoked a wide variet... more In the sixteenth-century printed architectural book, text and image together evoked a wide variety of interpretations from readers. Authors of these books explicitly invited highly individual readings by assigning separate information to text and image as well as by instructing their readers to analyze the book with their own knowledge. Yet in suggesting how readers might critique a book, both historians of the book and architectural historians have considered text and image separately from each other and have often stressed single rather than various readers. Studies in the history of the book consider how readers can generate multiple interpretations from the text, its annotations and indices. 1 Scholars in architectural history, on the other hand, have considered the illustration but have assumed that it outlines prescriptive rules. 2 Among architectural books, Wendel Dietterlin's Architectura of 1598 in particular suggests that authors even assumed multiple interpretations from different readers; together, his fantastic engravings and limited text create space for the questions of audiences ranging from elite readers to master builders. 3 By exploring how these readers of Architectura created their own interpretations, I will argue that the text-image relationship in Architectura expands sixteenth-century ideas about the Orders as well as designing buildings and, in turn, suggests the rich array of interpretations available to early modern readers of printed books.
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early ... more A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.