front cover of Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony
Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony
From Sound to Music
Leendert van der Miesen
Amsterdam University Press, 2025
Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony delves into the central role of music among the early modern sciences by focusing on the work of the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Although now regarded more as an art than a science, music was for many early modern scholars a universal science for studying the harmonies present in all beings. For Mersenne, music’s ability to be quantified while being experienced aesthetically meant that it was the central science to approximate the sounding and inaudible harmonies present in the world and universe at large. Bringing together Mersenne’s interests in the physics of sound and hearing, musical composition, instruments, curiosities, and music from outside Europe, this book shows why so many scholars were drawn to music and how music was at the center of the early modern debate on the foundations of knowledge.
[more]

front cover of Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour
Sarah Goldsmith
University of London Press, 2020
The Grand Tour, a customary trip through Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. Through an examination of testimonies written by Grand Tourists, tutors, and their families, Sarah Goldsmith argues that the Grand Tour educated young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues, and vices that extended well beyond polite society.

Goldsmith demonstrates that the Grand Tour was a means of constructing Britain’s next generation of leaders. Influenced by aristocratic concepts of honor and inspired by military-style leadership, elite society viewed experiences of danger and hardship as powerfully transformative and therefore as central to constructing masculinity. Scaling mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers, and even encountering war and disease, Grand Tourists willingly tackled a variety of perils. Through her study of these dangers, Goldsmith offers a bold revision of eighteenth-century elite masculine culture and the critical role the Grand Tour played within it.
[more]

front cover of The Mass Market for History Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
The Mass Market for History Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
Production, Distribution, and Consumption
Angela Jager
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we currently know and see in museums constitute only the tip of the iceberg-the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies is usually linked to high prices, famous painters and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers and consumers active in this segment to gain insight in this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?
[more]

front cover of Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare
Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare
Sara Burdorff
Amsterdam University Press, 2025
This work uses an adaptation of monster theory to rethink the foundations of epic-heroic immortality. Rather than focusing on a specific monster or monsters, the author identifies the “belly-monstrous” as a crucial point of intersection between mothers and warriors in traditional narratives of the Trojan War. Identifying the gestating/digesting belly as the center of the Iliadic world, this groundbreaking approach disrupts androcentric readings of the Iliadic warrior and his ethos, emphasizing the crucial role of female suffering in the generation and preservation of immortal legacy. The author reconsiders ancient Greek depictions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including Homeric epic and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, and illuminates the cohesive patterning of Shakespeare’s “mother-warrior” plays, which place inherited Iliadic-belly-monstrous motifs in conversation with cultural anxieties of late Elizabethan England. With meticulous scholarship and captivating analysis, Maternity, Monstrosity, and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare redefines the relationship between mothers and warriors in the Iliadic-heroic ideal, paving the way for new interpretations of war, grief, and immortal glory in a broad range of literary and cultural contexts.
[more]

front cover of Mazarin’s Quest
Mazarin’s Quest
The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde
Paul Sonnino
Harvard University Press, 2008

In a provocative study, Paul Sonnino examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years’ War.

Sonnino steps back from myriad historical readings of Westphalia to take the diplomats’ intentions and interactions strictly on their own terms. He places the reader alongside the pivotal figure of French minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin as he maneuvers for gain. The narrative thus offers a firsthand experience of the negotiations as they played out, as well as a penetrating look into the character, personality, and ideas of the crafty cardinal. Although Mazarin acquired the province of Alsace—making him a hero to French nationalists—he had a much more successful peace within his grasp, but lost it when he insisted on annexing the Spanish Low Countries. Sonnino also offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Fronde, linking the French domestic revolt to foreign policy, in Mazarin’s failure to secure peace with Spain.

Based on unprecedented archival documentation, Mazarin’s Quest provides an original and illuminating look at one of the most complicated diplomatic gatherings of all time.

[more]

front cover of Milton’s Moving Bodies
Milton’s Moving Bodies
Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz
Northwestern University Press, 2024

A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton’s oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries

This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton’s writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body—human and textual—as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton’s moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton’s contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton’s Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet’s legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.

[more]

front cover of Milton’s Scriptural Theology
Milton’s Scriptural Theology
Confronting De Doctrina Christiana
John K. Hale
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
Milton spoke of <i>De Doctrina</i> as “my best and most precious possession.” Through close reading of the Latin itself, John K. Hale assesses the work and its aim, its degrees of success and its by-products, as these reveal Milton at his “personal best.” While to historians or methodologists of theology his best might not seem the very best ever, this work was unutterably precious to Milton, and close reading reveals the personal dimension of Milton’s theology and the passion and energy of his mind in its acts of thought.
[more]

front cover of Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries
Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th-18th Centuries
Catholic Histories and Fictions
Ines G. Zupanov
Amsterdam University Press, 2025
Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th century onward. Since Portuguese imperialism was unable to justify itself without invoking otherworldly intervention, Catholic missionaries provided the vocabulary and narrative of global salvation. Each chapter in this volume explores a range of enchantment techniques used by missionaries, encompassing historical prose, poetry, images, and translations, woven through with emotions and wrapped in illocutionary force. Catholic missionaries in India wrote from and about the soft belly of tropical colonialism with certainty about the triumph of Christianity. Understanding the subterranean bond between history and fiction is at the heart of this book.
[more]

front cover of Missionary Men in the Early Modern World
Missionary Men in the Early Modern World
German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys
Ulrike Strasser
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of the Jesuit missions, as well as the significance of patriarchal dynamics. Focussing on previously neglected German figures, Strasser shows how stories of exemplary male behavior circulated across national boundaries, directing the hearts and feet of men throughout Europe towards Jesuit missions in faraway lands. The sixteenth-century Iberian exemplars of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, disseminated in print and visual media, inspired late seventeenth-century Jesuits from German-speaking lands to bring Catholicism and European gender norms to the Spanish-controlled Pacific. As Strasser demonstrates, the age of global missions hinged on the reproduction of missionary manhood in print and real life.
[more]

front cover of The Moxon Tennyson
The Moxon Tennyson
A Landmark in Victorian Illustration
Simon Cooke
Ohio University Press, 2021

A new perspective on a book that transformed Victorian illustration into a stand-alone art.

Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems dramatically redefined the relationship between images and words in print. Cooke’s study, the first book to address the subject in over 120 years, presents a sweeping analysis of the illustrators and the complex and challenging ways in which they interpreted Tennyson’s poetry. This book considers the volume’s historical context, examining in detail the roles of publisher, engravers, and binding designer, as well as the material difficulties of printing its fine illustrations, which recreate the effects of painting. Arranged thematically and reproducing all the original images, the chapters present a detailed reappraisal of the original volume and the distinctive culture that produced it.

[more]

front cover of Mughal Arcadia
Mughal Arcadia
Persian Literature in an Indian Court
Sunil Sharma
Harvard University Press, 2017

At its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mughal Empire was one of the largest empires in Eurasia, with territory extending over most of the Indian subcontinent and much of present-day Afghanistan. As part of the Persianate world that spanned from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal, Mughal rulers were legendary connoisseurs of the arts. Their patronage attracted poets, artists, and scholars from all parts of the eastern Islamic world. Persian was the language of the court, and poets from Safavid Iran played a significant role in the cultural life of the nobility. Mughal Arcadia explores the rise and decline of Persian court poetry in India and the invention of an enduring idea—found in poetry, prose, paintings, and architecture—of a literary paradise, a Persian garden located outside Iran, which was perfectly exemplified by the valley of Kashmir.

Poets and artists from Iran moved freely throughout the Mughal empire and encountered a variety of cultures and landscapes that inspired aesthetic experiments which continue to inspire the visual arts, poetry, films, and music in contemporary South Asia. Sunil Sharma takes readers on a dazzling literary journey over a vast geographic terrain and across two centuries, from the accession of the first emperor, Babur, to the throne of Hindustan to the reign of the sixth great Mughal, Aurangzeb, in order to illuminate the life of Persian poetry in India. Along the way, we are offered a rare glimpse into the social and cultural life of the Mughals.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter