HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 (HC)

Larry Silver traces the dramatic changes of the Reformation discernible in the visual arts. Among the subjects he explores are the destruction of church images, witchcraft, reactions to new voyages of exploration, and issues of vision itself when moral codes and the nature of sin and death were being re-examined.

In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds--despite the different paths to wealth in different eras--fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history.

In this illustrated book, which includes numerous artworks by Peter Paul Rubens and others, scholars explore how Jesuits deployed imagery in the church of Saint Charles Borromeo in Antwerp to persuade the public . The authors also show how more modest forms of art, such as religious folk prints, illustrated lives of the saints, and books for schools, prayers and emblemata, were used to kindle the enthusiasm of as many believers as possible, both in their own country and in distant overseas territories.

The painterly style known as bravura emerged in 16th-century Venice and spread through Europe during the 17th century, celebrating a painter's distinct materials, virtuosic execution, and theatrical showmanship. Suthor discusses the personality cult of the transgressive, self-taught, antisocial genius, and the ways in which bravura artists, through their stunning displays of skill, sought applause and admiration.

The Cambridge Global History of Fashion provides timely critical analyses of key topics and themes in the history of fashion, dress, and clothing. Featuring over forty essays from experts across the field, the volumes unveil new perspectives on cultural, social, and economic change, and how these changes were expressed through fashion practice. The first volume presents a tight but comprehensive assessment of fashion from antiquity, through the early modern global era to c. 1800. The second volume advances the critique of 'modernity' from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century.

This book offers a compelling historical narrative of the relationship between food, national identity, and political economy in the early modern period. These mutually influential relationships are revealed through comparative and transnational analyses of effervescent wine, spices and cookbooks, the development of coffeehouses and cafés, and the 'national sweet tooth' in England and France.

This history of early modern news focuses on movement through different media, time, and place, making the case for a comparative, pan-European history. Chapters explore news culture and news communication, news ballads and music, and seeing news through its metadata allows us to find surprising commonalities in news cultures.

Drawing on sources from surviving garments to artworks to moralising pamphlets, this richly illustrated volume presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.

The period between 1300 and 1600 saw the discovery of the New World and the cultivation of new foodstuffs, as well as the efflorescence of culinary literature in European courts and eventually in the popular press, and most importantly the transformation of the economy on a global scale. Food became the object of rigorous investigation among physicians, theologians, agronomists and even poets and artists.

The essays in this volume explore the impact of changes on how people used, thought and felt about their homes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essays. also consider ways in which gender, status, age and geography contributed to different meanings of home, both as an idea and as a place to live.

During the Renaissance, various forms of leisure – from theatre and reading to sports – became more prominent due to professionalization, institutionalization and commercialization. Overview essays in the book address the idea of leisure; the performing arts and their audiences; the cerebral arts and their publics; sports and games; holy days, holidays and tourism; the world of conviviality; the world of goods; the world of nature and representations of leisure.

"For the first time, Early Modern Streets unites the diverse strands of scholarship on urban streets between circa 1450 and 1800 and tackles key questions on how early modern urban society was shaped and how this changed over time. Early Modern Streets is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in urban life in early modern Europe"

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys. Original, critical, lucidly written and deeply researched, this work will change the way we think about the history of homosexuality in early modern Europe. Also available in print.

These volumes are an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The books focus on the Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical periods.

Wolfthal analyzes the intersection of class, race, and gender while also interrogating the ideology of service, investigating both the material conditions of their lives and the qualities with which they were associated. If images repeatedly relegated servants to the background, this book foregrounds them to better understand the ideological and aesthetic functions they served.

Building on the historical study of cultural translation, this volume brings together case studies by scholars from across Europe reflecting on ideological and political change from c. 1600 to 1840. Translations played a crucial role in the transmission of political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders in Europe.

In this study, Christopher Warren argues that early modern literary genres were deeply tied to debates about global legal order and that today's international law owes many of its most basic suppositions to early modern literary culture. The book shows how the separation of scholarship on law from scholarship on literature has limited the understanding of international law on both sides. Warren recognizes the specific nature of early modern international law by showing how major writers of the English Renaissance - including Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes - deployed genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to shore up the canonical subjects and objects of modern international law. Also available in print.

In this important re-examination of early modern European art, an international team of scholars and curators assess the critical concepts that have shaped Western culture's understanding of what constitutes great art. The result is a dynamic introduction to scores of women artists whose names are entirely new and a long-overdue reassessment of the art, culture, and history of early modern Europe.

Brings together researchers from Europe and the United States offering a detailed understanding of the implications and impact of obscene representations in their relationship to the Gutenberg Revolution. The focus is on French and European early modern literature.

This book addresses the multifaceted history of the domestic sphere in Europe from the Age of Reformation to the emergence of modern society. The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe contains a variety of approaches from different regions that each pose a challenge to commonplace views such as the emergence of confessional cultures, of private life, and of separate spheres of men and women.

In this essay collection scholars uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by their labour which was frequently forced. The focus of the volume is on Italy, but it includes studies of France and England, and the editors place these themes in a broader European context.

By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, beauty marks and scars, this volume investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands. .

This exhibit catalog (in Italian) explores connections between the Baroque and time in Rome. Features more than 40 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings and precious watches, in sections concerning: allegories of time in palaces, time as Vanitas, antagonism between time and love, and time as narration within artworks.

Historical sources report a bizarre incident: in 1665, fishermen were eye witnesses to an aerial battle waged by ghostly figures (in fact an atmospheric reflection of a sea battle that was raging just beyond the horizon). This book reconstructs the media of this incident based on images and textual sources. From a historical distance, the reports and reactions parallel those that define UFOs today. The text is in both English and German.

Voices of Conscience analyzes how the link between politics and conscience was articulated and shaped throughout the seventeenth century by confessors who acted as counsellors to monarchs. Against the backdrop of the momentous intellectual, theological, and political shifts that marked this period, the study examines comparatively how the ethical challenges of political action were confronted in France and Spain. Also available in print.

The concluding volume of Francis Oakley's authoritative trilogy moves on to engage the political thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Reformation and religious wars, and the era that produced the Divine Right Theory of Kingship. Oakley's ground-breaking study probes the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern modes of political thinking and dwells at length on the roots and nature of those contract theories that sought to legitimate political authority by grounding it in the consent of the governed. Also available in print.

Advocating a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work, this book both counts and accounts for women's as well as men's economic activity. Focusing on the period of European history (1500-1800) that generated unprecedented growth in the northwest - which, in turn, was linked to the global redistribution of resources and upon which industrialisation depended - the book spans key arenas in which women produced change: households, care, agriculture, rural manufacture, urban markets, migration, and war. Also available in print.