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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rome was an aged but still vigorous power while Spain was a rising giant on track toward becoming the world’s most powerful and first truly global empire. This book tells the fascinating story of the meeting of these two great empires at a critical moment in European history. Thomas Dandelet explores for the first time the close relationship between the Spanish Empire and Papal Rome that developed in the dynamic period of the Italian Renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. The author examines on the one hand the role the Spanish Empire played in shaping Roman politics, economics, culture, society, and religion and on the other the role the papacy...
Examines the intellectual and artistic foundations of the Imperial Renaissance in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and traces its political realization in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Power often operates in strange and surprising ways. With A Convent Tale, Renee Baernstein uncovers some of the nuanced methods cloistered women devised to exert their agency. In the tradition of Simon Schama and Steven Ozment, Baernstein uses the compelling story of a single clan, the Sfondrati, to refashion our understanding of the early modern period. Showing the nuns as neither helpless victims nor valiant rebels, but reasonable beings maneuvering as best they could within limits set by class, gender and culture. Baernstein writes against the tendency to depict women as inactive pawns, and shows that even within the convent walls, nuns were empowered by ties with their (often earthly) families and actively involved in the politics of the period. Both a major contribution to scholarship on gender, family and religion in early modern Europe, and a colorful well-told tale of Renaissance intrigue, A Convent Tale is sure to attract a wide range of academic and general readers.
Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".
The period of the baroque (late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) saw extensive reconfiguration of European cities and their public spaces. Yet, this transformation cannot be limited merely to signifying a style of art, architecture, and decor. Rather, the dynamism, emotionality, and potential for grandeur that were inherent in the baroque style developed in close interaction with the need and desire of post-Reformation Europeans to find visual expression for the new political, confessional, and societal realities. Highly illustrated, this volume examines these complex interrelationships among architecture and art, power, religion, and society from a wide range of viewpoints and localities. From Krakow to Madrid and from Naples to Dresden, cities were reconfigured visually as well as politically and socially. Power, in both its political and architectural guises, had to be negotiated among constituents ranging from monarchs and high churchmen to ordinary citizens. Within this process, both rulers and ruled were transformed: Europe left behind the last vestiges of the medieval and arrived on the threshold of the modern.
This volume, published in honor of historian Geoffrey Parker, explores the working of European empires in a global perspective, focusing on one of the most important themes of Parker’s work: the limits of empire, which is to say, the centrifugal forces - sacral, dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, informational - that plagued imperial formations in the early modern period (1500-1800). During this time of wrenching technological, demographic, climatic, and economic change, empires had to struggle with new religious movements, incipient nationalisms, new sea routes, new military technologies, and an evolving state system with complex new rules of diplomacy. Engaging with a host of ...
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Early Modern Festivals. These spectacles articulated the self-image of ruling elites and played out the tensions of the diverse social strata. Responding to the growing academic interest in festivals this volume focuses on the early modern Iberian world, in particular the spectacles staged by and for the Spanish Habsburgs. The study of early modern Iberian festival culture in Europe and the wider world is surprisingly limited compared to the published works devoted to other kingdoms at the time. There is a clear need for scholarly publications to examine festivals as a vehicle for the presence of Spanish culture beyond territorial bou...
The sixteenth century was a critical period both for Spain’s formation and for the imperial dominance of her Crown. Spanish monarchs ruled far and wide, spreading agents and culture across Europe and the wider world. Yet in Italy they encountered another culture whose achievements were even prouder and whose aspirations often even grander than their own. Italians, the nominally subaltern group, did not readily accept Spanish dominance and exercised considerable agency over how imperial Spanish identity developed within their borders. In the end Italians’ views sometimes even shaped how their Spanish colonizers eventually came to see themselves. The essays collected here evaluate the broa...
This work explores the question of Vesuvius as an object of study in the early modern science of volcanism from the investigations and opinions of humanists and naturalists in the late Renaissance to the early 18th-century philosophizing on volcanoes and the development of geology later in the century.
Examines the relation between imperialism and religion through the practice of good government in Spanish Naples. Ideal for courses on the Renaissance, imperialism, the Spanish world, European history, diplomatic-international relations and the general reader interested in cultural history, Renaissance Italy, social minorities, and religious rituals.