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A bold reconstruction of the origins of the “ancient, medieval, modern” trope used to define historical eras and the transitions between them.

We are used to dividing time, indicating the beginning or end of an era based on a year, a month, or even a specific day, after which (supposedly) “nothing was the same.” In this book, historian and classicist Frederic Clark looks at a particularly enduring form of dividing time—the tripartite distinction between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity—in order to analyze the history of this division, how it has been constructed and deployed, and what its past and present implications are.

Clark argues that the study of the past has always depended on subdividing it into multiple parts, which tend to underpin any attempt to articulate a system of culture or value. After all, certain eras, ages, and epochs are celebrated as having ushered in a new, better time, whereas others are depicted as extended periods of decay and darkness. Clark provides an ingenious critique of the foundational assumptions underlying our narratives of periodization and the complex and messy process by which historical schemas develop, from the Renaissance through the early modern period to the Enlightenment and beyond. The result is an engaging and erudite tour through time and its many contested divisions, imagined and reimagined across history.

An alternative history of Renaissance art from a Netherlandish perspective and focusing on printed images.

Through his treatises, letters, and support of printmaking projects, Bruges-born humanist Dominicus Lampsonius (1532–1599) tested the limits of what it meant to be an artist in the early modern period. This book—the first monographic study of Lampsonius to appear in the English language—investigates the convergence of art history, aesthetics, cultural politics, and theology in Lampsonius’s writings, with a particular focus on his novel theory of the printed image as a work of art.

In Lampsonius’s art history, painting recedes and engraving comes to the fore. This inversion of traditional hierarchies entailed a remaking of the Renaissance image as a graphic and replicable phenomenon. Here was a new way of looking at the image: not as a painted likeness of the sacred or the world, but rather as a graphic representation formed from the attenuated patterns of the engraved surface. In both meaning and making, printed images deflected the threats of iconoclasm precisely because, as manufactured objects, they could never be confused for what they represented—the sacred “prototype” they explicitly did not resemble. Tracing Lampsonius’s evolving views against the religious, political, and cultural upheaval of the Dutch Revolt, Edward H. Wouk considers the lasting implications of his efforts to change the course of art history.

In today's connected and interactive world, it is hard to imagine a time when cultural and intellectual interests did not lead people to associate with others who shared similar views and preoccupations. In this volume of essays, fifteen scholars explore how these kinds of relationships began to transform early modern European culture.

Forms of Association grows out of the “Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe” (MaPs) project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This scholarly initiative convened an interdisciplinary research team to consider how “publics”—new forms of association built on the shared interests of individuals—developed in Europe from 1500 to 1700. Drawing on a wide array of texts and histories, including the plays of Shakespeare, the legend of Robin Hood, paintings, and music as well as English gossip about France, the contributors develop a historical account of what publics were in early modern Europe. This collaborative study provides a dynamic way of understanding the political dimensions of artistic and intellectual works and opens the way toward a new history of early modernity.

Until his death in 2008, the great Renaissance scholar Richard Helgerson was a key participant in the MaPs project. The scholars featured in this volume originally met in Montreal to engage in a critical, commemorative conversation about Helgerson's work, the issues and questions coming out of the MaPs project, and how Helgerson's thinking advanced and could in turn be advanced by MaPs. This collection represents the fruits of that conversation.

Viktoria von Hoffmann explores four kinds of early modern texts--culinary, medical, religious, and philosophical--to follow taste's ascent from the sinful to the beautiful. Combining food studies and sensory history, she takes readers on an odyssey that redefined a fundamental human experience. Scholars and cooks rediscovered a vast array of ways to prepare and present foods. Far-sailing fleets returned to Europe bursting with new vegetables, exotic fruits, and pungent spices. Hosts refined notions of hospitality in the home while philosophers pondered the body and its perceptions. As von Hoffmann shows, these labors produced a sea change in perception and thought, one that moved taste from the base realm of the tongue to the ethereal heights of aesthetics.

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines.

Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

Drawing on early modern literature and historical documents, this study investigates the various political, discursive, and symbolic measures employed to negotiate and support female sovereignty by both early modern writers and the rulers themselves. The detailed analysis of the women's responses--or inability to respond--to these strictures underscores the relationship between early modern authors and sovereigns and the complex and vexed situation of European women rulers.

Contributors are Tracy Adams, Anne J. Cruz, Éva Deák, Mary C. Ekman, Catherine L. Howey, Elizabeth Ketner, Carole Levin, Sandra Logan, Magdalena S. Sánchez, Mihoko Suzuki, and Barbara F. Weissberger.

How seventeenth-century Europeans, following Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, saw their continent as historically, environmentally, and culturally intertwined with China.

The Tartar Moment focuses on understanding how the Manchu conquest of the Ming Empire in 1644 transformed European science, technology, and politics for over a century. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh argues that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers found the nomadic takeover of a seemingly eternal empire deeply relevant for their own concerns. They began to reevaluate how they thought about the roles of astronomy, history-writing, agriculture, and military technologies in ensuring the long-term survival of a state. 

The book’s narrative center is the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, who first grasped the global significance of the Tartar War and its aftermath. Giovannetti-Singh situates Martini as a broker bridging multiple worlds, each grappling with new forms of turbulence. Martini’s writings reinterpreted Chinese knowledge and culture for diverse European audiences urgently seeking order in an age of uncertainty. China ceased to be imagined as a timeless Other and instead appeared as a civilization that, like Europe, confronted recurring disorder and crafted philosophical solutions to maintain stability. During this period, Europeans selectively appropriated Chinese methods of reading the heavens, cultivating the earth, and governing the state.

 

By tracing how Martini recognized, theorized, and recounted crises in Ming, Manchu, and European contexts, The Tartar Moment shows that the 1640s and 1650s were not simply years of collapse but of intense creativity in interpreting and responding to disorder.

Women Rethinking Genres in Early Modern Europe brings together research rooted in both gender and genre as categories of analysis to illustrate how the two frameworks are inextricably linked in how we understand the experiences of European women who wrote between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than considering genres as prescriptive, in this collection we emphasize that genres can take different forms and are central to the ways in which authors and readers understand and perceive the world. Together, these essays in this volume demonstrate that women authors not only experimented with genres in different ways but also contributed significantly to the development and circulation of ideas in early modern Europe. This volume includes a variety of case studies from different geographical areas within Western Europe that explore the role of gender in the dissemination of genres such as dialogue, poetry, pastoral, novellas, devotional literature, epic poems, account books, scientific treatises, and fictional romances. In doing so, the essays here contribute to scholarship on marginalized and less studied aspects of early modern female culture.