Christian's long reign (1588-1648) saw Denmark reduced from a major to a second-rate power, and in response he sought to portray the country as a powerful, rich, and culturally refined monarchy with long and glorious traditions. Skovgaard-Petersen examines the Latin histories of Denmark by Johannes Pontanus (1571-1639) and Johannes Meursius (1579-1639) as part of that endeavor. The study is revised from her 1998 doctoral dissertation for the University of Bergen. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Sides of the North is dedicated to Yona Pinson’s extensive scholarly work on Northern Renaissance art, from Hieronymus Bosch’s and Peter Breughel’s oeuvre, through lessons of morality, the Fool’s imagery, gender problems in the representation of the “femme fatale” bourgeois seductress, to emblem studies, and up to her most recent project on “Mirror, Moralization and Irony” in Bosch’s painting. In tribute to her research, this volume offers new insights into her fields of interest from a number of leading scholars in these disciplines. Larry Silver reconstructs a recently found Adoration of the Magi Triptych by Bosch, while Mara R. Wade, Michael J. Giordano and Kathryn M. Rudy discuss aspects of self-fashioning through portraiture, emblem books, and manuscripts and their spiritual and performative qualities. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Liad Rinot delve into problems of marginality in Gothic sculpture, as well as in Robert Campain’s and Jan van Eyck’s paintings. Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes, Ruth Strauss and Juliette Roding explore the topic of artistic identities and intentionalism, and political ideologies in various media, such as in small-scale sculptures and paintings. Just as Yona Pinson’s research diversified from iconographical studies to post-modern reflections on such issues as marginality and folly, this anthology presents a broad spectrum not only of the diverse topics, genres, and media of Northern Renaissance art, but also, and particularly, an overview of the methodological range of art scholarship of recent decades, thus offering readers insights into the intricate sides of contemporary Netherlandish visual culture.

With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Jerusalem is conceived as a code, in this volume focussing on Jerusalem's impact on Protestantism and Christianity in Early Modern Scandinavia. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)

Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination, edited by Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn, approaches the early modern republican political imagination from a fresh perspective. While most scholars agree on the importance of the classical world to early modern republican theorists, its role is all too often described in rather abstract and general terms such as “classical republicanism” or the “neo-roman theory of free states”. The contributions to this volume propose a different approach and all focus on the specific ways in which ancient republics such as Rome, Athens, Sparta, and the Hebrew Republic served as models for early modern republican thought. The result is a novel interpretation of the impact of antiquity on early modern republicanism.

This monograph offers the first comprehensive treatment of the multi-faceted scholarly interests of Ole Worm, professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. Scholarship about Worm has focused mainly on Worm’s collecting and the creation of his cabinet of curiosity, the Museum Wormianum, resulting in Worm’s rationale for his research being largely overlooked. Worm shared his many interests with a number of other physicians of the age, but in terms of breadth, few matched the variety of his concerns. For a man who considered himself first and foremost a physician and anatomist, his interests in Paracelsianism and collecting can at times be baffling, while his interests in antiquarianism, runes, and chronology strike the modern reader as at odds with his medical and natural philosophical interests. It is important to comprehend that Worm’s multi-faceted interests in the created world were underpinned by his Lutheran, Melanchthonian natural philosophy, and this served to unify all Worm’s scholarly undertakings, inquiries, and experiments in the single aim of reaching a better understanding of God’s creation, the Book of Nature.

What was the role of historical thought and historical inquiry in debates over reform during the Enlightenment? In Ancient Constitutions and Modern Monarchy, Håkon Evju addresses this issue by considering the case of eighteenth-century Denmark-Norway. He argues that historians contributed crucially to the rethinking of Dano-Norwegian absolutism in the face of a shift towards commercial society. Their vision of an ancient Nordic constitution helped recast the monarchy as moderate and influenced debates over agricultural improvements in Denmark and Norway. In an innovative comparative analysis, Evju demonstrates how notions of a common political past were used differently in the two kingdoms. Yet in both cases, such appeals to tradition were vital in controversies over monarchical reform politics during the Enlightenment.

This text offers a collective exploration of aspects of cross-border and transnational interaction in the Holy Roman Empire.