Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature [Paperback]

Playful, useful, decorative, revolutionary: small things possess a rich array of meanings, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.Featuring tiny books, buttons, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, handkerchiefs, mugs, tea caddies, coins and much more, this interdisciplinary book explores how people in the eighteenth century interacted with the small things they used, wore, played with, and displayed to signal their engagement with the larger world.Featuring tiny books, buttons, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, handkerchiefs, mugs, tea caddies, coins and much more, this interdisciplinary book explores how people in the eighteenth century interacted with the small things they used, wore, played with, and displayed to signal their engagement with the larger world.Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight?and entertain,?generating tactile pleasures?for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness?or the hand's dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the?decorative?and playful?to the?useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.Introduction: The Scale and Sense of Small Things Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin; Part I. Reading Small Things: 1. The sum of All in All: The miniature book and the nature of legibility Abigail Williams; 2. Nuts, flies, tlÓz