Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700
About the Book Series
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.
Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention
1st Edition
By Angela Ho
December 01, 2025
In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative...
Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture
1st Edition
Edited
By Elizabeth Merrill
December 01, 2025
The importance of place – as a unique spatial identity – has been recognized since antiquity. Ancient references to the 'genius loci', or spirit of place, evoked not only the location of a distinct atmosphere or environment, but also the protection of this location, and implicitly, its making and ...
Divine and Demonic Imagery at Tor de'Specchi, 1400-1500: Religious Women and Art in 15th-century Rome
1st Edition
By Suzanne M. Scanlan
December 01, 2025
In the fifteenth century, the Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana, a fledgling community of religious women in Rome, commissioned an impressive array of artwork for their newly acquired living quarters, the Tor de'Specchi. The imagery focused overwhelmingly on the sensual, corporeal nature of ...
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience and Rhetoric
1st Edition
Edited
By Kimberley Skelton
December 01, 2025
Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, ...
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
1st Edition
By J. Vanessa Lyon
December 01, 2025
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be ...
Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art, 1260-1610: Ritual and Experience
1st Edition
By Andrew Chen
December 01, 2025
This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the ...
Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te
1st Edition
By Maria Maurer
December 01, 2025
Gender, Space, and Experience at the Renaissance Court investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack...
Godefridus Schalcken: A Dutch Painter in Late Seventeenth-Century London
1st Edition
By Wayne Franits
December 01, 2025
In his own day, Godefridus Schalcken (1643—1706) was an internationally renowned Dutch painter, but little is known about the four years that he spent in London. Using newly discovered documents, this book provides the first comprehensive examination of Schalcken’s activities there. The author ...
Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth
1st Edition
Edited
By Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger, Leopoldine Prosperetti
December 01, 2025
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor is a poetic image that borrows from the vocabulary of weaving and epitomizes the Renaissance interest in fashioning green worlds in art and poetry. Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made representing living nature increasingly popular...
Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death
1st Edition
By Sarah Schell
December 01, 2025
Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and ...
In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters
1st Edition
Edited
By Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Stefan Hanß
December 01, 2025
In-Between Textiles is a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed subjectivities in the age of the first globalisation. The volume presents a radically cross-disciplinary approach that brings together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, ...
Indecent Bodies in Early Modern Visual Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison Stewart
December 01, 2025
The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered ‘decent’ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. ...