Dramatic changes during the Reformation era in Northern Europe, such as witchcraft and new global discoveries, are examined through visual culture, both prints and paintings.

In the sixteenth century, the humanist values and admiration for classical antiquity that marked the early Renaissance spread from Italy throughout the rest of the continent. Part of the "Art through the Centuries" series, this volume is divided into three sections that discuss the important people, concepts, and artistic centres of this period.

This volume contains twenty-four essays, which, in their subjects and methodology, pay tribute to the scholarship of Walter S. Melion. The contributions are grouped under three categories: “Devotion,” “Art and Image Theory,” and “Vision and Contemplation.” The Devotion section addresses votive practices, theological theory and polemic literature. The Art and Image Theory section focuses on Jesuit image theory, the reflexive dimension of works, and artists’ reflections on the function of images. Finally, the Vision and Contemplation section discusses the ‘early modern eye’ as a tool for thoughtful, prolonged looking to ascertain visual wit, deception, self-assessment and friendship, sacred and profane allegories.

Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.

At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.

This exciting and wide-ranging volume examines the construction and dissemination of the image of female power during the Renaissance. Chapters examine the creation, promotion, and display of the image of women in power, and how the artistic and cultural patronage they developed helped them craft a self-image that greatly contributed to strengthening their power, consolidating their political legitimacy, and promoting their authority. Contributors cover diverse models of sixteenth-century female power: from ruling queens, regents, and governors, to consorts of sovereigns and noblewomen outside the court. The women selected were key political figures and patrons of art in England, France, Castile, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian city states. The volume engages with crucial and controversial debates regarding the nature and use of portraiture as well as the changing patterns of how portraits were displayed, building a picture of the principal iconographic solutions and representational strategies that artists used. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, and Renaissance studies.