Tea at Trianon: How Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell Does History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

How Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell Does History

From Contingent Magazine:

I went to Stanford for undergrad, where I majored in English and fell in love with eighteenth-century literature. But I quickly realized that I was less interested in the rise of the novel than in what all the characters were wearing. In my senior year, I wrote a paper on the hoop petticoat for a history class using Aileen Ribeiro’s book, Dress and Morality, as a source. I read her author bio and immediately applied to the History of Dress MA program at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, where she taught. I got in, and my hoop petticoat paper later got published in Eighteenth-Century Studies. London was an ideal place to study because of all the museums and libraries and archives on my doorstep. I had planned to stay at the Courtauld for my PhD, but the University of Aberdeen made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’d never been there and I had no idea what I was getting into, but it ended up being a wonderful place to live and work, and the university was so supportive of my research. By the time I finished my dissertation on Rose Bertin, Marie-Antoinette’s dressmaker, I’d come to appreciate how many extraordinary eighteenth-century collections Southern California has, and I was thrilled to find a three-year postdoctoral curatorial fellowship at The Huntington Library, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I ended up staying for four years. (Read more.)