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  • The Material Culture of the Jacobitesby Neil Guthrie, and: Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places by Murray Pittock
  • Niall MacKenzie
The Material Culture of the Jacobites. By Neil Guthrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii + 268. ISBN 978 1 1070 41332. £60.00.
Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places. by Murray Pittock. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xvi + 226. ISBN 978 1 1372 78081. £55.00.

A specimen of wit, eighteenth century-style: ‘The dowager Duchess of Aiguillon wore [Bonny Prince Charlie’s] picture in a bracelet, with Jesus Christ for the reverse. People could not find a reason for the alliance; Madame de Rochfort said, why the same motto will suit both, “Mon royaume n’est pas de ce monde”’.

Horace Walpole’s anecdote shows that multiple interpretations could attach themselves to even the most apparently unambiguous productions of the Jacobite material culture on which Neil Guthrie and Murray Pittock have written the first comprehensive studies. Their subject encompasses a richly miscellaneous body of artefacts and environmental modifications, from the intimacy of a tartan garter to the public statements of architecture and gardening, and including prints, medals, ceramics, glass, jewelry, furniture, weapons, textiles; works by folk [End Page 198] artists and court artists; functional devices like snuffboxes and purely symbolic contrivances like a rioter’s white cockade; unique, numinous objects like martyrs’ relics or locks of Prince Charlie’s hair, and mass-produced commodities which reified the Stuart dynasty’s charisma (to use a phrase which Pittock borrows from Thomas Richards) in the direction of kitsch. The overlapping taxonomies that can be laid across this field of expression include those which distinguish between Continental and archipelagic origins and those which recognise diverse constituencies (based on class, gender, religion, nationality and language) in Britain and Ireland. Its themes cut across its many media and developed over time. If carefully interpreted, Jacobite material culture can contribute to a more accurate MRI scan of the eighteenth-century body politic than the documentary record by itself, given the latter’s social limitations and exposure to censorship.

Inevitably, Guthrie and Pittock sometimes look at the same objects. Both are fascinated, for instance, by the anamorphosis tray preserved in the West Highland Museum in Fort William. Inevitably, they explore some of the same concepts: what Pittock calls ‘false loyalism’, for instance (the backward-looking references to Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles the Martyr, the Restoration, etc., which could serve as safe expressions of support for the Stuart claimants of the eighteenth century). Just as the duchess d’Aiguillon and Mme de Rochefort could find different meanings when turning over a two-sided cameo, however, so do Guthrie and Pittock evince sufficient differences in emphasis, interpretation and ambition to ensure that their books will be read as complementary rather than competitive efforts.

Guthrie, for example, a lawyer by profession and a numismatist by vocation, has more to say about the pertinent laws of treason, seditious libel and seditious words, and more to say about the medallic record. He is a scholar who can discern the effects of local influence on medals commissioned by the Stuart court-in-exile before and after its move from France to Italy, and he writes with assurance about the relation between eighteenth-century medallic art and the Renaissance emblem (itself a confluence, like Jacobitism, of elite and popular traditions). The highpoints of Guthrie’s book include his discussions of such Jacobite medals as the Unica Salus piece of 1721, struck in reference to the South Sea Bubble, which shows an up-to-date London skyline on its reverse and frames its critique of the Hanoverian regime through a sophisticated combination of heraldic and literary allusion. (Guthrie does not mention the apparent reflection of this object in Samuel Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense [1739].) Pittock, on the other hand, is more expansive on architecture (the highlights of his book include his reading of the decorative plasterwork in the House of Dun, west of Montrose), and on the symbols and cant phrases through which Jacobite discourse, visual as well as literary, disguised its purposes. A glossary of such terms is included as...

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