ix, 426 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 30 cm
Contents
Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Fault lines and points of light -- 2. 'A fine brilliant glittering on the little finger' -- 3. Jewel boxes in pictorial narratives -- 4. Something rich and strange -- 5. Marie-Antoinette and the diamond necklace affair -- 6. Charlotte of England, Warren Hastings, and the dangers of diamonds -- 7. Chinese whispers : James Cox's Jewellery Museum-London in the 1770s -- 8. Toys and automata : Jaquet-Droz and Leschot-Neuchâtel, Paris, London in the 1780s -- 9. The Treasury of the Santa Casa at Loreto and its English visitors -- 10. Secular memorials : mourning and memory in hair jewellery -- 11. Lapidary loves -- 12. Crystalline terminations -- Appendices -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary
Pointon examines how small-scale and valuable artefacts have figured in systems of belief and in political and social practice in Europe since the Renaissance
