Peter Auger

Edited by Sria Chatterjee
Hilary Term 2011 Issue, Edgar Wind Journal

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The Hilary 2011 issue of the Edgar Wind Journal is a calendar, with holes where you would expect to find page numbers. It can be ‘hung on a wall, flipped through, written on, consulted, ignored’, according to its editor, Sria Chatterjee. She notes that the format allows the ‘viewer’ to consider the colour images apart from the accompanying text. It is appropriate to consider ‘viewers’ as well as ‘readers’, since Edgar Wind was a professor of Art History at Oxford in the 1950s, and the eponymous society is based in the University of Oxford’s History of Art department.

Turning the journal into a calendar is an innovative response to the issue’s theme, ‘materiality and temporality’. Each of the twelve months is paired with an image of an object from Oxford collections, and followed by a double-page essay by a curator, librarian, or faculty member who studies and/or looks after the item. These short pieces describe how the objects interact with time: a John Constable painting seeks to freeze ephemeral cloud movements onto canvas; a species of snowdrop called galanthus nivalis sprouts each February in the Botanic Garden; nineteenth-century photographs of Rome will continue to fade away in the Ashmolean until funding is secured to preserve them; and the mediaeval encyclopaedist Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale encases world history in a huge four-volume book, a copy of which is kept in the Merton College library.

These material objects are gateways into the periods and places in which they were created. This issue of the journal is also a record of eye-catching items held in Oxford museums and libraries, and the research and conservation activity that goes on around them. As an academic publication it offers an interdisciplinary meditation on material culture, which is a burgeoning field in the humanities that recently came to public attention through the British Museum’s ‘History of the World in 100 Objects’. The journal is open-eyed and forward-thinking, but is attentive to Edgar Wind’s legacy as well: it follows his conviction that images and ideas belong together, and achieves the same balance that he did, between upholding exacting academic standards while disseminating research in an accessible and relevant way. This issue of the Edgar Wind Journal is well-written and imaginatively designed, and draws viewer-readers’ attention to an eclectic but coherent set of images and words that might otherwise pass them by.

* The Edgar Wind Journal has been recommended for full classification in the Bodleian Library. It is available from the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museum shops, and the History of Art department. Copies can be requested by emailing the History of Art department.

Peter Auger is a DPhil student in early modern English literature at Merton College, Oxford.

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