Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1750: Objects, Affects, Effects(Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700)

This collection embraces the increasing interest in the material world of the Renaissance and the early modern period, which has both fascinated contemporaries and initiated in recent years a distinguished historiography. The scholarship within is distinctive for engaging with the agentive qualities of matter, showing how affective dimensions in history connect with material history, and exploring the religious and cultural identity dimensions of the use of materials and artefacts. It thus aims to refocus our understanding of the meaning of the material world in this period by centring on the vibrancy of matter itself. To achieve this goal, the authors approach the material through four themes, glass, feathers, gold paints, and veils, in relation to specific individuals, material milieus, and interpretative communities. In examining these four types of materialities and object groups, which were attached to different sensory regimes and valorizations, this book charts how each underwent significant changes during this period.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, Introduction: Materializing Identities: The Affective Values of Matter in Early Modern Europe - Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Christine Gottler, and Ulinka Rublack, Part 1 Glass, 1. Negotiating the Pleasure of Glass : Production, Consumption, and Affective Regimes in Renaissance Venice - Lucas Burkart, 2. Shaping Identity through Glass in Renaissance Venice - Rachele Scuro, Part 2 Feathers, 3. Making Featherwork in Early Modern Europe - Stefan Hans, 4. Performing America: Featherwork and Affective Politics - Ulinka Rublack, Part 3 Gold Paint, 5. Yellow, Vermilion, and Gold: Colour in Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck - Christine Gottler, 6. Shimmering Virtue: Joris Hoefnagel and the Uses of Shell Gold in the Early Modern Period - Michele Seehafer, Part 4 Veils, 7. Fashioned with Marvellous Skill: Veils and the Costume Books of Sixteenth-Century Europe - Katherine Bond, 8. Moral Materials: Veiling in Early Modern Protestant Cities. The Cases of Basel and Zurich - Susanna Burghartz, Index

About the Author :
Susanna Burghartz is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern History at the University of Basel. Lucas Burkart is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at the University of Basel. Christine Göttler, Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern, specializes in the art of early modern Europe. She has published widely on collecting practices, the interactions between various arts and crafts, the alchemy of color, and the changing relations between art and nature and between natural philosophical and religious traditions. Her current book project explores Peter Paul Rubens’s engagement with the global world of seventeenth-century Antwerp. Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John's College.