Resumen de The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths , by Angela Vanhaelen
Angela Vanhaelen, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths . University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. 236 pp. 13 color/47 b&w ill. ISBN: 9780271091402.
For decades, scholars across disciplines have confronted a perplexing conundrum: how do we activate and repopulate now empty historical spaces so that we can understand the ways in which these spaces were experienced? Archaeologists, material culture historians, and architectural historians have traced circulation patterns through interior and exterior areas. Recently, both cultural and architectural historians have also sought to reconstruct early modern sensory experience of built spaces, considering how such experience might structure political, social, and economic interactions. Angela Vanhaelen’s The Moving Statues of Amsterdam merges these two strands of historical inquiry with a novel approach: she puts not only early modern individuals in motion but also the environment through which they moved. Analyzing Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century Doolhoven, licensed public houses offering display spaces for the entertainment of visitors, Vanhaelen discusses objects that were literally in motion, automata and clocks, while she speculates about how visitors would have experienced the spaces of the Doolhoven.
