The book offers convincing evidence to incorporate the Catholic world of early modernity into the history of modern science. The research is supported by the analysis of not widely studied primary sources such as the sixteenth century Iberian nautical manuals. Through the use of theoretical frameworks such as the Actor Network Theory, the book sheds light on the need to incorporate the role of heterogeneous human actors and artifacts (ships, navigation tools, sails, cannons), natural and geographical agents (ocean currents, winds, the sun, the moon and the stars), and divine entities (gods, daemons and saints) into the political history of early modernity.

Different Engines investigates the emergence of technologies in Latin America to create images, sounds, video games, and physical interactions. The book contributes to the construction of a historiographical and theoretical framework for understanding the work of creators who have been geographically and historically marginalized through the study of five exemplary and yet relatively unknown artifacts built by engineers, scientists, artists, and innovators. It offers a broad and detailed view of the complex and sometimes unlikely conditions under which technological innovation is possible and of the problematic logics under which these innovations may come to be devalued as historically irrelevant. Through its focus on media technologies, the book presents the interactions between technological and artistic creativity, working towards a wider understanding of the shifts in both fields that have shaped current perceptions, practices, and design principles while bringing into view the personal, social, and geopolitical singularities embodied by particular devices. It will be an engaging and insightful read for scholars, researchers, and students across a wide range of disciplines, such as media studies, art and design, architecture, cultural history, and the digital humanities.

Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers are seen by many as icons of Western European art. Two of these masterpieces -- the first version painted in August 1888 (The National Gallery, London) and the painting made after it in January 1889 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) -- have been the subject of a detailed comparison by an interdisciplinary team of experts. The pictures were examined in unprecedented depth using a broad array of techniques, including state-of-the-art, non-invasive imaging analytical methods, to look closely at and under the paint surface. Not only the making, but also the subsequent history of the works was reconstructed, including later campaigns of restoration. The study's conclusions are set out in this book, along with the fascinating genesis of the paintings and the sunflower's special significance to Van Gogh. More than 30 authors, all specialists in the field of conservation, conservation science and art history, have contributed to the research and publication presenting the outcomes of this unique project.

"An erotic scandal chronicle so popular it became a byword... Expertly tailored for contemporary readers. It combines scurrilous attacks on the social and political celebritites of the day, disguised just enough to exercise titillating speculatuion, with luscious erotic tales." —Belles Lettres This story concerns the return of to earth of the goddess of Justice, Astrea, to gather information about private and public behavior on the island of Atalantis. Manley drew on her experience as well as on an obsessive observation of her milieu to produce this fast paced narrative of political and erotic intrigue.

In The Complexity of Hispanic Religious Life in the 16th–18th Centuries, Doris Moreno has assembled a team of leading scholars to discuss and analyze the diversity of Hispanic religious and cultural life in the Early Modern Age. Using primary sources to look beyond the Spanish Black Legend and present new perspectives, this book explores the realities of a changing and plural Catholicism through the lens of crucial topics such as the Society of Jesus, the Inquisition, the Martyrdom, the feminine visions and conversion medicine. This volume will be an essential resource to all those with an interest in the knowledge of multiple expressions of tolerance and cultural dialectic between Spain and the Americas.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.