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.
Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth
1st Edition
Edited
By Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger, Leopoldine Prosperetti
December 01, 2025
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor is a poetic image that borrows from the vocabulary of weaving and epitomizes the Renaissance interest in fashioning green worlds in art and poetry. Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made representing living nature increasingly popular...
Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe: Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death
1st Edition
By Sarah Schell
December 01, 2025
Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and ...
In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters
1st Edition
Edited
By Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Stefan Hanß
December 01, 2025
In-Between Textiles is a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed subjectivities in the age of the first globalisation. The volume presents a radically cross-disciplinary approach that brings together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, ...
Indecent Bodies in Early Modern Visual Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison Stewart
December 01, 2025
The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered ‘decent’ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. ...
Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes
1st Edition
By Catherine Levesque
December 01, 2025
This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “...
Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature
1st Edition
Edited
By Christine Göttler, Mia Mochizuki
December 01, 2025
Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and ...
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture
1st Edition
By Katrina Grant
December 01, 2025
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres ...
Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750
1st Edition
Edited
By Natasha Seaman, Joanna Woodall
December 01, 2025
Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 focuses on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in early modern arts. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied...
Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century: Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power
1st Edition
By Elisabetta Toreno
December 01, 2025
This book investigates the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenth-century female portraiture on panel. Portraits of women increased substantially during this century. They formed part of a material and a visual culture borne out of the rapid rise of an oligarchy from entrepreneurial ...
Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art
1st Edition
Edited
By Chris Askholt Hammeken, Maria Fabricius Hansen
December 01, 2025
Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating...
Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture
1st Edition
Edited
By Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, Federica Pich
December 01, 2025
The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch’s legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch’s vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and ...
Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800
1st Edition
Edited
By Tamara H. Bentley
December 01, 2025
Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this ...