Montaigne (1533-1592) is known as the inventor of the essay. His relativism, his craving for self-knowledge and his taste for freedom and tolerance have had a long-lasting influence in Europe. It is therefore surprising that until present no substantial study has been devoted to the multiple relationships between Montaigne and the Low Countries. This volume aims to fill this gap. It studies the Netherlandish presence in Montaigne's Essays, represented by Erasmus and Lipsius and by contemporary history (the Dutch Revolt against Spain). It also deals with Montaigne's translations and...

The early modern period is a particularly relevant and fascinating chapter in the history of pain. This volume investigates early modern constructions of physical pain from a variety of disciplines, including religious, legal and medical history, literary criticism, philosophy, and art history. The contributors examine how early modern culture interpreted physical pain, as it presented itself for instance during illness, but also analyse the ways in which early moderns employed the idea of physical suffering as a powerful rhetorical tool in debates over other issues, such as the nature of...

Spirits airy, volatile subtle bodies' occupied a central place in early modern European culture. At the edge of the visible and perceptible, "spiritus" could signify a broad variety of subtle substances, both natural and divine: the vapours moving inside the body, the elements of air and fire, angels, demons and spectres, the Holy Spirit and the human soul. Spirits functioned as intermediaries between two opposite worlds with continually shifting borders. This book investigates specific meanings and uses of "spiritus" in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields physiology, psychology,...

Interest in early modern women writers is on the rise. However, familiarity with their works varies greatly from one country to another, and resources to assess their historical significance remain insufficient. Yet empirical evidence suggests that women writers who are no longer well-known today played surprisingly varied roles in the literary field of early modern Europe. The papers collected in this volume address early modern female authorship from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, ranging geographically from Portugal to Russia, and from Italy to Denmark. In...

For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch...

Modernity has historically defined itself by relation to classical antiquity on the one hand, and the medieval on the other. While early modernity's relation to Antiquity has been amply documented, its relation to the medieval has been less studied. This volume seeks to address this omission by presenting some preliminary explorations of this field. In seventeen essays ranging from the Italian Renaissance to Enlightenment France, it focuses on three main themes: continuities and discontinuities between the medieval and early modern, early modern re-uses of medieval matter, and...

In modern Western society horses appear as unexpected visitors: not quite exotic, but not familiar either. This estrangement between humans and horses is a recent one since, until the 1930s, horses were fully present in the everyday world. Indeed, as well as performing utilitarian functions, horses possessed iconic appeal. But, despite the importance of horses, scholars have paid little attention to their lives, roles and meanings. This volume helps to redress the balance. It considers the value that the influential elite placed on horses as essential accompaniments to their way of life and...

This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions - typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others - based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated...

In bringing together work on optic theory, ethnography, and the visual cultures of Christianity, this volume offers a sense of the richness and the complexity of early modern thinking about the human eye. The seven case studies explore the relationship between vision and knowledge, taking up such diverse artifacts as an emblem book, a Jesuit mariological text, Calvin's Institutes, Las Casas's Apologia, Hans Staden's True History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and an exegetical painting by Herri met de Bles. Argued from different disciplinary perspectives, these essays...

Across all times and cultures, mankind has attached great importance to the foundation of buildings, cities and communities. By means of rituals of foundation, dedication and consecration, buildings and objects are charged with meaning. At the same time, these rituals bear witness of the way communities understand their own place in history, and how they position themselves in relation to others. As such, the study of these rituals deepens our understanding of society at large. Bringing together contributions from art history, architectural history, historiography and history of law, this...