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In Visual Cultures of Death in Central Europe, Aleksandra Koutny-Jones explores the emergence of a remarkable cultural preoccupation with death in Poland-Lithuania (1569-1795). Examining why such interests resonated so strongly in the Baroque art of this Commonwealth, she argues that the printing revolution, the impact of the Counter-Reformation, and multiple afflictions suffered by Poland-Lithuania all contributed to a deep cultural concern with mortality. Introducing readers to a range of art, architecture and material culture, this study considers various visual evocations of death including 'Dance of Death' imagery, funerary decorations, coffin portraiture, tomb chapels and religious landscapes. These, Koutny-Jones argues, engaged with wider European cultures of contemplation and commemoration, while also being critically adapted to the specific context of Poland-Lithuania.
This book is available in open access thanks to the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań This is the first monographic study of the reception of Herman Hugo's emblem book Pia desideria (1624) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It discusses ten different translations and adaptations, showing how the engravings, elegies and exegetical extracts of the original edition were used by Polish-speaking authors. Attention is also given to the reception of the engravings in paintings. Furthermore, the author examines the reasons for the book's popularity, proving that it was determined by the interest of women who did not know Latin, yet constituted the most important target group for the numerous and varied Polish adaptations.
This volume brings together the latest scholarship on Jewish literary products and the ways in which they can be interpreted from three different perspectives. In part 1, contributors consider texts as literature, as cultural products, and as historical documents to demonstrate the many ways that early Jewish, rabbinic, and modern secular Jewish literary works make meaning and can be read meaningfully. Part 2 focuses on exegesis of specific biblical and rabbinic texts as well as medieval Jewish poetry. Part 3 examines medieval and early modern Jewish books as material objects and explores the history, functions, and reception of these material objects. Contributors include Javier del Barco, ...
The role played by artistic, literary, historical and theological representations in the establishment of the European Reformation has attracted scholarly attention over the years. While they were generally regarded as a significant means of conveying the evangelical message, particularly in a society with a low average literacy rate, this scholarly consensus was then seriously challenged by objecting that their meaning must have remained opaque to those who couldn't read and interpret their sometimes multilayered imagery and their verbal and figurative messages. This volume, which publishes some of the papers delivered at the Fourth Reformation Research Consortium Conference held in Bologna...
This book investigates the importance of printing in early-modern Central Europe, revealing a complicated web of connections linking printers and scholars, Jews and Christians, from the Baltic to the Adriatic.
Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Turkey covers the period from 1603 to 1839.
This book discusses the printers’ devices used in Poland-Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The compositions that served to identify the products of individual printers are explored here as previously unacknowledged research material for cultural studies: they allow for the reconstruction of the mentality of contemporary printers as well as their co-workers and reading public. The book investigates relationships within early modern intellectual communities and shows that the textual and visual discourses of the printers’ devices were pan-European, reflecting the networked communities of European centres of learning and commerce. It documents the broad range of the output of Polish-Lithuanian presses as well and is therefore also a study of book culture in a multinational and multilingual state, whose inheritance is poorly recognised internationally.
Covering areas in today’s Ukraine, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia, this book studies the impact of both natural and human-inflicted disasters on pre-modern towns. Various kinds of catastrophes, starting with major natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, and epidemics caused high population mortality. Others, such as protracted war conflicts, were caused by human activity and could be just as, if not more, destructive for cities, their populations and the urban economy. Crises affected not only the population as a whole, but also townsmen and women in their individual lives. Case studies of renewal and resilience in the volume illustrate that, in many cases, s...
In a new approach to Goethe's Faust I, Evanghelia Stead extensively discusses Moritz Retzsch's twenty-six outline prints (1816) and how their spin-offs made the unfathomable play available to larger reader communities through copying and extensive distribution circuits, including bespoke gifts. The images amply transformed as they travelled throughout Europe and overseas, revealing differences between countries and cultures but also their pliability and resilience whenever remediated. This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence. This book is available in open access thanks to an Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) grant.
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