You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Cambridge historian Laven has created a detailed and dramatic tapestry of resourceful, determined, often passionate women who managed to lead fulfilling lives despite their virtual imprisonment in Venice's 16th-century convents.
This book explores the significance of beautiful and engaging objects - chosen, acquired, personalised and treasured - to the people who once owned them. With over 300 works discussed, it takes us on a dazzling visual adventure through the decorative arts, from Renaissance luxuries wrought in glass, bronze and maiolica to the elaborate tablewares and personal adornments available to shoppers in the Age of Enlightenment. En route the authors consider the impact of global trade on European habits and expectations: the glamour of the Eastern exotic, the ubiquity of New World products like chocolate and sugar, and the obsession with Chinoiserie decoration. They ask what decorative objects meant to their owners before the age of industrial mass production, and explore how technological innovation and the proliferation of goods from the sixteenth century onwards transformed the attitude of Europeans to their personal possessions. Illustrated throughout with superb colour photographs, many unfamiliar and hitherto unseen gems of the Fitzwilliam Museum's Applied Arts collection are here published for the first time.
Rich in intrigue and gossip, this book uncovers the long-hidden stories of the "virgins of Venice"--3,000 nuns, many of them immured against their will, in the city's 50 convents during the late Renaissance. 18 illustrations.
In the sixteenth century, the vast and sophisticated empire of China lay almost entirely unknown to Western travellers. As global trade expanded, this land of reputedly boundless wealth, pale-faced women, and indecipherable tongues began to feed the fantasies of European merchants and adventurers. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, saw in this great people millions of souls who would be damned unless the Christian message could be brought to them. In this book, Mary Laven tells the extraordinary story of the first Jesuit mission to China. Confronting enormous challenges, the Italian priest Matteo Ricci and a tiny handful of learned companions travelled thousands of miles from southern Europe to...
'In the last two decades, the history of the Counter-Reformation has been stretched and re-shaped in numerous directions. Reflecting the variety and innovation that characterize studies of early modern Catholicism today, this volume incorporates topics as diverse as life cycle and community, science and the senses, the performing and visual arts, material objects and print culture, war and the state, sacred landscapes and urban structures. Moreover, it challenges the conventional chronological parameters of the Counter-Reformation and introduces the reader to the latest research on global Catholicism. The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation presents a comprehensive examination of recent scholarship on early modern Catholicism in its many guises. It examines how the Tridentine reforms inspired conflict and conversion, and evaluates lives and identities, spirituality, culture and religious change. This wide-ranging and original research guide is a unique resource for scholars and students of European and transnational history.
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World investigates for the first time how seismic religious changes, a dramatic rise in the availability and consumption of goods, and new global connections transformed the nature and experience of religious material life.
Global Gifts considers the role that the circulation of material culture played in the establishment of early modern global diplomacy.
Madonnas and Miracles' exposes a hidden world of religious devotion in the Italian Renaissance home. Challenging the idea of the Renaissance as an age of increasing worldliness, it shows how religion remained a powerful force that coloured every aspect of daily life. Across the length and breadth of Italy, houses were filled with decorative objects and works of art with spiritual significance, designed to aid members of the family in their devotional lives. A wide range of religious activities, from routine prayers to extraordinary experiences such as miracles and exorcisms, took place within the home, where they were adapted to key moments in the life-cycle, including birth, marriage, sickness and death. 0This illustrated publication explores a variety of devotional objects and images, from luxury items to everyday household goods. Bringing together jewellery and ceramics, manuscripts and printed books, sculpture and paintings, the book offers a vivid encounter with Renaissance spirituality and domesticity. The result is a new vision of a period in which the material world was charged with sacred power. 0Exhibition: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (Spring 2017).
The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy explores the rich devotional life of the Italian household between 1450 and 1600. Rejecting the enduring stereotype of the Renaissance as a secular age, this interdisciplinary study reveals the home to have been an important site of spiritual revitalization. Books, buildings, objects, spaces, images, and archival sources are scrutinized to cast new light on the many ways in which religion infused daily life within the household. Acts of devotion, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences such as miracles and visions, frequently took place at home amid the joys and trials of domestic life — from childbirth and marriage to sickness and d...
Bringing the study of early modern Christianity into dialogue with Atlantic history, this collection provides a longue durée investigation of women and religion within a transatlantic context. Taking as its starting point the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on the effects of confessional difference among women in the age of religious reformations, the volume expands the focus to broader temporal and geographic boundaries. The result is a series of essays examining the effects of religious reform and revival among women in the wider Atlantic world of Europe, the Americas, and West Africa from 1550 to 1850. Taken collectively, the essays in this volume chart the extended impact of confessional di...