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How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.
Cover -- Halftitle -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Unveiling the Manuscript -- Chapter One. Toledo to Cadiz -- Chapter Two. Cadiz to Mexico -- Chapter Three. The Manila Galleon -- Chapter Four. The Convent in Manila -- Chapter Five: Literacy and Inspirational Role Models -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of commu...
Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.
The struggles and achievements of forty-six notable women artists of the early modern period, as documented by their contemporaries, are uniquely brought together in this anthology. The life stories presented here are foundational texts for the history of art, but since most are found only in rare volumes and few have been translated into English, until now they have been generally inaccessible to many scholars. Originally published in biographical compendia such as Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the writings included here document not only the lives of relatively well known women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but also those who have languished in obscurity,...
Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group?s production and use of painting, collage, photography, and other media illustrates not only the broad scope of Mass-Observation?s efforts to document everyday life, but also, more specifically, the centrality of visual elements to its efforts at understanding national identity in the 1930s. Although much interest has previously focused on Mass-Observation?s use of written reports and opinion surveys, as well as diaries that were kept by hu...
Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.
This volume of twelve interdisciplinary essays addresses the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe. By dismantling the boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, art history, musicology and literary studies it offers new cross-cultural readings essential to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Utilising a wide range of archival material, encompassing art, architecture, writings and music commissioned or produced by nuns, the volume's main emphasis is on the limitations and potentials created by the boundaries of the convent. Each chapter explores how the personal and national circumstances in which the women lived affected the formation of their spirituality and the assertion of their social and political authority. Consisting of four sections each dealing with different parts of Europe and discussing issues of spiritual and social identity such as 'Femininity and Sanctity', 'Convent Theatre and Music-Making', 'Spiritual Directorship' and 'Community and Conflict', this compelling collection offers a significant addition to a thriving new field of study.
This book examines the religious and ideological consequences of mass conversion in Iberia, where Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted or expelled at the end of the XVth century and beginning of the XVIth, and in this way it explores the fraught relationship between origins and faith. It treats also of the consequences of coercion on intellectual debates and the production of knowledge, taking into account how integrating new converts from Judaism and Islam stimulated Christian scholars to confront the converts’ sacred texts and created a distinctive peninsular hermeneutics. The book thus assesses the importance of the “Converso problem” in issues such as religious dissidence, dissimulation, and doubt and skepticism while establishing the process by which religious dissidence came to be categorized as heresy and was identified with converts from Judaism and Islam even when Lutheranism was often in the background.
Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.