front cover of Before Disenchantment
Before Disenchantment
Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World
Peter Mason
Reaktion Books, 2009

Imagine barnacle geese—creatures that begin life as leaves on a tree growing above water, but turn into small birds as soon as they fall in. Or the Lamb of Tartary that gestates inside a large gourd-like fruit.  These are just some of the animal and plant hybrids imagined by early modern explorers and artists to describe unfamiliar flora and fauna. 

            In Before Disenchantment, Peter Mason explores how naturalists grappled with the problem of representing exotic plants and animals, turning an analytic eye on the sketches of German adventurer Caspar Schmalkalden, the skilled artistic renderings of Peter Paul Rubens, the observations of Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen, and the antiquarian pursuits of Nicola Fabri de Peiresc, among others.

            Featuring one hundred illustrations of these unusual and captivating creatures—from camel-sheep to races of monopods and red-haired dwarves—Before Disenchantment goes beyond orthodox histories of scientific illustration and champions a sense of wonder often lost in the modern world.

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front cover of Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World
Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World
The Practice and Experience of Movement
Paul Nelles
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. The present work challenges dominant notions of the ‘fixed,’ immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.
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front cover of Evangelizing Korean Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
Evangelizing Korean Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
The Power of Body and Text
Susan Broomhall
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe’s late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women’s experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized.
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From Lived Experience to the Written Word
Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World
Pamela H. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2022
How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge.

In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today.
 
Focusing on metalworking from 1400–1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.
 
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front cover of Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
Edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Is time gendered? This international, interdisciplinary anthology studies the early modern era to analyse how material objects express, shape, complicate, and extend human concepts of time and how people commemorate time differently. It examines conceptual aspects of time, such as the categories women and men use to define it, and the somatic, lived experiences of time ranging between an instant and the course of family life. Drawing on a wide array of textual and material primary sources, this book assesses the ways thatgender and other categories of difference affect understandings of time.
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Global Gold
Aesthetics, Material Desires, Economies in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World
Thomas B. F. Cummins
Harvard University Press
Gold as a material and gold as a value becomes a truly universal equivalent in the early modern world as global economies begin to emerge after 1492. The essays in Global Gold present both the aesthetic and economic conditions that immediately precede the emergence of this global commerce as well as the immediate and various consequences of those interactions. Through interdisciplinary essays by scholars of European, American, African, and Asian history and art history, the differences and commonalities of gold’s monetary, economic, and aesthetic roles are explored within the crucible of a unique historical period of transition, conquest, and the exploitation of natural and human resources.
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Lost and Found
Locating Foundlings in the Early Modern World
Nicholas Terpstra
Harvard University Press
Florence’s foundling home of the Innocenti is often taken as a symbol of Renaissance creativity, innovation, and humanity. Its progressive approach to caring for abandoned children was matched by the iconic architectural form designed one of the period’s leading architects, Filippo Brunelleschi. Did reality match the reputation? The essays in Lost and Found explore new dimensions and contexts for foundling care at the Innocenti and use archival documents and digital tools to locate it architecturally, geographically, and socially. They ask questions that reframe the Ospedale degli Innocenti in different contexts and open paths for further research: Was Brunelleschi’s design a failure? How can digital tools recover the Innocenti’s lost spaces and extensive real estate holdings? What did the law say about foundlings and abandonment? What was it like to live in the Innocenti and in homes elsewhere? What roles did race and enslavement play in infant abandonment?
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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.
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front cover of Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World
Non-Elite Women's Networks Across the Early Modern World
Elizabeth Storr Cohen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Non-elite or marginalized early modern women—among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers—have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.
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Osiris, Volume 29
Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World
Edited by Matthew D. Eddy, Seymour H. Mauskopf, and William R. Newman
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2014
The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry.  The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner of “chymistry.”  In a similar vein, the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its focus on phlogiston and airs, has been expanded to include artisanal, medical, and industrial practices.  This collection of essays builds on these reappraisals and excavates the affinities between alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.  It reveals a rich world of theory and practice in which instruments, institutions, inscriptions and ideas were used to make material knowledge.  More generally, the volume will catalyze wide-ranging discussions of material and visual cultures, the role of expertise, and the religious and practical contexts of scientific inquiry.
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The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World
Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea
John Coakley
Amsterdam University Press

front cover of Reassessing Epistemic Images in the Early Modern World
Reassessing Epistemic Images in the Early Modern World
Ruth Noyes
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This edited collection of papers explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the role of images and objects in early modern knowledge-making practices with an emphasis on mapping methodological approaches against printed pictures and things. The volume brings together work across diverse printed images, objects, and materials produced c. 1500-1700, as well as well as works in the ambit of early modern print culture, to reframe a comparative history of the rise of the ‘epistemic imprint’ as a new visual genre at the onset of the scientific revolution. The book includes contributions from the perspective of international scholars and museum professionals drawing on methodologies from a range of fields.
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front cover of Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
Suzanna Ivanic
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
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Three Ways to Be Alien
Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Three Ways to Be Alien draws on the lives and writings of a trio of marginal and liminal figures cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world. The subjects include the aggrieved and lost Meale, a “Persian” prince of Bijapur (in central India, no less) held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa; English traveler and global schemer Anthony Sherley, whose writings reveal a surprisingly nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century; and Nicolò Manuzzi, an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider. In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam also succeeds in injecting humanity into global history and proves that biography still plays an important role in contemporary historiography.
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Trading Territories
Mapping the Early Modern World
Jerry Brotton
Reaktion Books, 1997
Trading Territories is a beautifully illustrated book that offers a new account of the status of maps and geographical knowledge in the early modern world. Focusing on how early European geographers mapped the territories of the Old World—Africa and Southeast Asia—Jerry Brotton contends that the historical preoccupation with Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492 has tended to obscure the importance of the mapping of territories that have been defined as “eastern.”
 
Brotton situates the rise of early modern mapping within the context of the seaborne commercial adventures of the early maritime empires—the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Ottomans, the Dutch, and the English—and explores the ways in which maps and globes were used to mediate the commercial and diplomatic disputes between these empires. Rather than the development of early maps being shaped by disinterested intellectual pursuits, Trading Territories argues that trade, diplomacy, and financial speculation played the most essential role.
 
“In this outstanding study of maps and mapping, Jerry Brotton reveals a dynamism in the transaction between East and West beyond anything we have previously appreciated.”—Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary, University of London
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front cover of The Translations of Nebrija
The Translations of Nebrija
Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World
Byron Ellsworth Hamann
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In 1495, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija published a Spanish-to-Latin dictionary that became a best seller. Over the next century it was revised dozens of times, in nine European cities. As these dictionaries made their way around the globe in this age of encounters, their lists of Spanish words became frameworks for dictionaries of non-Latin languages. What began as Spanish to Latin became Spanish to Arabic, French, English, Tuscan, Nahuatl, Mayan, Quechua, Aymara, Tagalog, and more.

Tracing the global influence of Nebrija's dictionary, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, in this interdisciplinary, deeply researched book, connects pagan Rome, Muslim Spain, Aztec Tenochtitlan, Elizabethan England, the Spanish Philippines, and beyond, revealing new connections in world history. The Translations of Nebrija re-creates the travels of people, books, and ideas throughout the early modern world and reveals the adaptability of Nebrija's text, tracing the ways heirs and pirate printers altered the dictionary in the decades after its first publication. It reveals how entries in various editions were expanded to accommodate new concepts, such as for indigenous languages in the Americas—a process with profound implications for understanding pre-Hispanic art, architecture, and writing. It shows how words written in the margins of surviving dictionaries from the Americas shed light on the writing and researching of dictionaries across the early modern world.

Exploring words and the dictionaries that made sense of them, this book charts new global connections and challenges many assumptions about the early modern world.
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