Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700
About the Book Series
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.
Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class
1st Edition
By Paula Hohti Erichsen
December 01, 2025
Did ordinary Italians have a ‘Renaissance’? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenth-century visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and ...
Bernardino Poccetti and the Art of Religious Painting at the End of the Florentine Renaissance
1st Edition
By Douglas Dow
December 01, 2025
By almost any measure Bernardino Barbatelli, called Poccetti, was a successful and sought after painter in late sixteenth-century Florence, but his works have remained largely overlooked. This study situates representative examples of his religious painting within their respective contexts to ...
Comfortable Everyday Life at the Swedish Eighteenth-Century Näs Manor
1st Edition
By Carolina Brown
December 01, 2025
During the eighteenth century, comfortable everyday life becomes a new ideal. The good life was no longer about grand representation or the manifestation of material opulence. The new luxury was instead the comfortably arranged life at home. This book is about the traces of this change, its ...
Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture
1st Edition
Edited
By Lauren Jacobi, Daniel Zolli
December 01, 2025
The concepts of purity and contamination preoccupied early modern Europeans fundamentally, structuring virtually every aspect of their lives, not least how they created and experienced works of art and the built environment. In an era that saw a great number of objects and people in motion, the ...
Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention
1st Edition
By Angela Ho
December 01, 2025
In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative...
Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture
1st Edition
Edited
By Elizabeth Merrill
December 01, 2025
The importance of place – as a unique spatial identity – has been recognized since antiquity. Ancient references to the 'genius loci', or spirit of place, evoked not only the location of a distinct atmosphere or environment, but also the protection of this location, and implicitly, its making and ...
Divine and Demonic Imagery at Tor de'Specchi, 1400-1500: Religious Women and Art in 15th-century Rome
1st Edition
By Suzanne M. Scanlan
December 01, 2025
In the fifteenth century, the Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana, a fledgling community of religious women in Rome, commissioned an impressive array of artwork for their newly acquired living quarters, the Tor de'Specchi. The imagery focused overwhelmingly on the sensual, corporeal nature of ...
Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience and Rhetoric
1st Edition
Edited
By Kimberley Skelton
December 01, 2025
Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, ...
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens
1st Edition
By J. Vanessa Lyon
December 01, 2025
Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be ...
Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art, 1260-1610: Ritual and Experience
1st Edition
By Andrew Chen
December 01, 2025
This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the ...
Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te
1st Edition
By Maria Maurer
December 01, 2025
Gender, Space, and Experience at the Renaissance Court investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack...
Godefridus Schalcken: A Dutch Painter in Late Seventeenth-Century London
1st Edition
By Wayne Franits
December 01, 2025
In his own day, Godefridus Schalcken (1643—1706) was an internationally renowned Dutch painter, but little is known about the four years that he spent in London. Using newly discovered documents, this book provides the first comprehensive examination of Schalcken’s activities there. The author ...