What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures shows how distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had profound implications-in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. Beyond their interest in visual culture, the essays here expand our understanding of transcultural encounters and the history of vision.

Courts and societies across the early modern Eurasian world were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological, and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected how states articulated and projected visions of authority into societies that, in turn, perceived and responded to these visions in often contrasting terms. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between the land and its imagination and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of imperial identities within and beyond the precincts of the court. In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities, and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos. The collected essays expand the meaning and potential of landscape as a communicative medium in this period by putting an array of forms and subjects in dialogue with one another, including not only unique expressions, such as gardens, paintings, and manuscripts, but also the products of rapidly developing commercial technologies of reproduction, especially print. The volume invites a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complexity with which early modern states constructed and deployed different modes of landscape for different audiences and environments. Contributors: Robert Batchelor, Seyed Mohammad Ali Emrani, John Finlay, Caroline Fowler, Katrina Grant, Finola O'Kane, Anton Schweizer, Larry Silver, Stephen H. Whiteman.

During and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public. While there are many surveys of cryptography, none pay any attention to the volume of manuals that appeared during the seventeenth century, or provide any cultural context for the appearance, design, or significance of the genre during the period. On the contrary, when the period’s cryptography writings are mentioned, they are dismissed as esoteric, impractical, and useless. Yet, as this book demonstrates, seventeenth-century cryptography manuals show us one clear beginning of the capitalization of information. In their pages, intelligence—as private message and as mental ability—becomes a central commodity in the emergence of England’s capitalist media state. Publications boasting the disclosure of secrets had long been popular, particularly for English readers with interests in the occult, but it was during these particular decades of the seventeenth century that cryptography emerged as a permanent bureaucratic function for the English government, a fashionable activity for the stylish English reader, and a respected discipline worthy of its own genre. These manuals established cryptography as a primer for intelligence, a craft able to identify and test particular mental abilities deemed "smart" and useful for England’s financial future. Through close readings of five specific primary texts that have been ignored not only in cryptography scholarship but also in early modern literary, scientific, and historical studies, this book allows us to see one origin of disciplinary division in the popular imagination and in the university, when particular broad fields—the sciences, the mechanical arts, and the liberal arts—came to be viewed as more or less profitable.

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World surveys the ways in which people from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson used Christian ideas and institutions to regulate and shape sexual norms and conduct, and examines the impact of their efforts. Global in scope and geographic in organization, the book contains chapters on Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, and North America. It explores key topics, including marriage and divorce, fornication and illegitimacy, clerical sexuality, same-sex relations, witchcraft and love magic, moral crimes, and interracial relationships. The book sets its findings within the context of many historical fields, including the history of gender and sexuality, and of colonialism and race. Each chapter in this third edition has been updated to reflect new scholarship, particularly on the actual lived experience of people around the world. This has resulted in expanded coverage of nearly every issue, including notions of the body and of honor, gendered religious symbols, religious and racial intermarriage, sexual and gender fluidity, the process of conversion, the interweaving of racial identity and religious ideologies, and the role of Indigenous and enslaved people in shaping Christian traditions and practices. It is ideal for students of the history of sexuality, early modern Christianity, and early modern gender.

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.

The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which ‘things’, ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects? This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of ‘proto-globalization’, ‘the first global age’ and ‘commodities/consumption’. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship. Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.

In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, Daniel Savoy assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to evaluate the global discourse on early modern European art. Over the course of eleven chapters and a roundtable, the contributors assess the discourse’s goal of transcending Eurocentric boundaries, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of current terms, methods, theories, and concepts. Although it is clear that the global perspective has exposed the artistic and cultural pluralism of early modern Europe, it is found that more work needs to be done at the epistemological level of art history as a whole. Contributors: Claire Farago, Elizabeth Horodowich, Lauren Jacobi, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jessica Keating, Stephanie Leitch, Emanuele Lugli, Lia Markey, Sean Roberts, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Marie Neil Wolff.