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 papers in this volume offer examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period used ancient history as a rich field of raw material that could be used, recycled, and adapted to new needs and purposes. They focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. The contributors to this volume have addressed a number of important, common issues that span a wide range of subjects from fifteenth-century Italian painting to the teaching of Greek history in...

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...

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...

This volume focuses on the interdisciplinary investigation of Portuguese humanism, especially as a noteworthy player in the international network of early modern scholars, writers and intellectuals. During the Renaissance, Portugal became a centre for the dissemination of information concerning the new geographical and cultural horizons opened up by voyages of discovery, as well as a meeting place for humanist scholars and intellectuals coming from elsewhere in Europe. Papers in this volume situate Portuguese scholarship within the international humanistic network and examine its connection...

This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of the different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. Early modern reading of the "Book of Nature" comprised, among others, the description of species in the literary tradition of antiquity, as well as empirical observations, vivisection, and modern eyewitness accounts; the "translation" of zoological species into visual art for devotion, prayer, and religious education, but also scientific and scholarly curiosity; theoretical, philosophical, and theological thinking regarding God's creation, the Flood, and the...