Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Dana Leibsohn
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409411895
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures shows how distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had profound implications-in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. Beyond their interest in visual culture, the essays here expand our understanding of transcultural encounters and the history of vision.

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Dana Leibsohn
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409411895
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures shows how distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had profound implications-in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. Beyond their interest in visual culture, the essays here expand our understanding of transcultural encounters and the history of vision.

Collecting Across Cultures

Collecting Across Cultures PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes—personal, imperial, missionary, or trade—and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.

Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe

Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Timothy McCall
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1612480934
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in printed books and drawings, staircases and narrative paintings, ecclesiastical furnishings and engravers’ tools. Topics include how patrons of art and architecture deployed secrets to construct meanings and distinguish audiences, and how artists and patrons manipulated the content and display of the subject matter of artworks to create an aura of exclusive access and privilege. Essays examine the ways in which popes and princes skillfully deployed secrets in works of art to maximize social control, and how artists, printers, and folk healers promoted their wares through the impression of valuable, mysterious knowledge. The authors contributing to the volume represent both established authorities in their field as well as emerging voices. This volume will have wide appeal for historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introducing readers to a fascinating and often unexplored component of early modern culture.

Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World

Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Stephen H. Whiteman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512823597
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Courts and societies across the early modern Eurasian world were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological, and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected how states articulated and projected visions of authority into societies that, in turn, perceived and responded to these visions in often contrasting terms. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between the land and its imagination and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of imperial identities within and beyond the precincts of the court. In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities, and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos. The collected essays expand the meaning and potential of landscape as a communicative medium in this period by putting an array of forms and subjects in dialogue with one another, including not only unique expressions, such as gardens, paintings, and manuscripts, but also the products of rapidly developing commercial technologies of reproduction, especially print. The volume invites a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complexity with which early modern states constructed and deployed different modes of landscape for different audiences and environments. Contributors: Robert Batchelor, Seyed Mohammad Ali Emrani, John Finlay, Caroline Fowler, Katrina Grant, Finola O'Kane, Anton Schweizer, Larry Silver, Stephen H. Whiteman.

A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals PDF Author: Katherine Ellison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315458195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
During and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public. While there are many surveys of cryptography, none pay any attention to the volume of manuals that appeared during the seventeenth century, or provide any cultural context for the appearance, design, or significance of the genre during the period. On the contrary, when the period’s cryptography writings are mentioned, they are dismissed as esoteric, impractical, and useless. Yet, as this book demonstrates, seventeenth-century cryptography manuals show us one clear beginning of the capitalization of information. In their pages, intelligence—as private message and as mental ability—becomes a central commodity in the emergence of England’s capitalist media state. Publications boasting the disclosure of secrets had long been popular, particularly for English readers with interests in the occult, but it was during these particular decades of the seventeenth century that cryptography emerged as a permanent bureaucratic function for the English government, a fashionable activity for the stylish English reader, and a respected discipline worthy of its own genre. These manuals established cryptography as a primer for intelligence, a craft able to identify and test particular mental abilities deemed "smart" and useful for England’s financial future. Through close readings of five specific primary texts that have been ignored not only in cryptography scholarship but also in early modern literary, scientific, and historical studies, this book allows us to see one origin of disciplinary division in the popular imagination and in the university, when particular broad fields—the sciences, the mechanical arts, and the liberal arts—came to be viewed as more or less profitable.

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Merry E Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429535619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World surveys the ways in which people from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson used Christian ideas and institutions to regulate and shape sexual norms and conduct, and examines the impact of their efforts. Global in scope and geographic in organization, the book contains chapters on Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, and North America. It explores key topics, including marriage and divorce, fornication and illegitimacy, clerical sexuality, same-sex relations, witchcraft and love magic, moral crimes, and interracial relationships. The book sets its findings within the context of many historical fields, including the history of gender and sexuality, and of colonialism and race. Each chapter in this third edition has been updated to reflect new scholarship, particularly on the actual lived experience of people around the world. This has resulted in expanded coverage of nearly every issue, including notions of the body and of honor, gendered religious symbols, religious and racial intermarriage, sexual and gender fluidity, the process of conversion, the interweaving of racial identity and religious ideologies, and the role of Indigenous and enslaved people in shaping Christian traditions and practices. It is ideal for students of the history of sexuality, early modern Christianity, and early modern gender.

Mendicant cultures in the medieval and early modern world : word, deed, and image

Mendicant cultures in the medieval and early modern world : word, deed, and image PDF Author: Sally J. Cornelison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503562018
Category : Begging
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Plague in the Early Modern World

Plague in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Dean Phillip Bell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429777833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Plague in the Early Modern World presents a broad range of primary source materials from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, China, India, and North America that explore the nature and impact of plague and disease in the early modern world. During the early modern period frequent and recurring outbreaks of plague and other epidemics around the world helped to define local identities and they simultaneously forged and subverted social structures, recalibrated demographic patterns, dictated political agendas, and drew upon and tested religious and scientific worldviews. By gathering texts from diverse and often obscure publications and from areas of the globe not commonly studied, Plague in the Early Modern World provides new information and a unique platform for exploring early modern world history from local and global perspectives and examining how early modern people understood and responded to plague at times of distress and normalcy. Including source materials such as memoirs and autobiographies, letters, histories, and literature, as well as demographic statistics, legislation, medical treatises and popular remedies, religious writings, material culture, and the visual arts, the volume will be of great use to students and general readers interested in early modern history and the history of disease.

Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation

Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation PDF Author: Stephanie A. Leitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009444514
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004302158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Envisioning Others offers a multidisciplinary view of the relationship between race and visual culture in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, from the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal to colonial Peru and Colombia, post-Independence Mexico, and the pre-Emancipation United States.