Bøger i Transculturalisms, 1400-1700 serien

Focuses on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, this title examines exile both as physical departure from England - to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America - and as inner, mental withdrawal.

Exploring the reasons for a flurry of geographical works in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, this study analyzes how cartographers, travellers, astrologers, historians and naval captains promoted their vision of the world and the centrality of the Ottoman Empire in it.

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, Monica Dominguez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the "conquest" in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures.

Working through the descriptive and ethnographic texts produced by Czech speakers about Islam and the Ottoman Empire, this study brings to light how they used this discourse to create Czech identities. Rather than simply constructing identity in opposition to the Islamic Other.

Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book interrogates textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history.

In this study, art historian Elizabeth Sutton reads the engravings of Pieter de Marees' Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602) as a demonstration of the intertwining domains of the Dutch pictorial tradition, intellectual inquiry and Dutch mercantilism.

Based on travel writings, religious history and literature, this title explores the encounter between English travellers and the Jews. While literary and religious traditions created an image of Jews as untrustworthy, even sinister, travellers came to know them in their many and diverse communities with rich traditions and intriguing life-styles.

Offers an analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer), this title shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics.

Explores the subject of lenses, spectacles, aventurine glass, and windows found in China from the sixteenth century. This work traces their technological development back to the glassworks in Murano, Venice, and explores their significance in terms of Venice's commerce with China.

With its emphasis on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection of essays takes the messenger figure as a focal point for the discussion of transnational exchange and intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain''s comedia and Italy''s commedia dell''arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women''s participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.　　

The sixteenth century was a critical period both for SpainΓÇÖs formation and for the imperial dominance of her Crown. Spanish monarchs ruled far and wide, spreading agents and culture across Europe and the wider world. Yet in Italy they encountered another culture whose achievements were even prouder and whose aspirations often even grander than their own. Italians, the nominally subaltern group, did not readily accept Spanish dominance and exercised considerable agency over how imperial Spanish identity developed within their borders. In the end ItaliansΓÇÖ views sometimes even shaped how their Spanish colonizers eventually came to see themselves. The essays collected here evaluate the broad range of contexts in which Spaniards were present in early modern Italy. They consider diplomacy, sanctity, art, politics and even popular verse. Each essay excavates how Italians who came into contact with the Spanish crownΓÇÖs power perceived and interacted with the wider range of identities brought amongst them by its servants and subjects. Together they demonstrate what influenced and what determined ItaliansΓÇÖ responses to Spain; they show Spanish Italy in its full transcultural glory and how its inhabitants projected its culture - throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.

What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? How did political expansion, cross-cultural trade, scientific exploration and discrete religious practices require new ways of rendering the unknown visible, and of making what was seen knowable? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures argues that distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had epistemic consequences: in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. The essays here consider prints and panoramas, sculpted works of stone and corn pith cane - and their physical presence in the lived world - calling attention to the materiality and sensuality of visual experience. Anchored in writings on art history and visual culture, Seeing Across Cultures also engages histories of transcultural encounters and vision.

An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection offers new perspectives on how these cultural contacts were acted out on the real and metaphorical stages of theatre, literature, music, diplomacy and travel.

Unprecedented in its range - extending from Venice to the New World and from the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire - this collection probes the place that the Ottoman Turks occupied in the Western imaginaire, and the ways in which this occupation expressed itself in the visual arts. Individual essays in this volume examine specific images or groups of images, problematizing the ''truths'' they present and analyzing the contexts that shape the presentation of Ottoman or Islamic subject matter in European art. The contributors trace the transmission of early modern images and representations across national boundaries and across centuries to show how, through processes of translation that often involved multiple stages, the figure of the Turk (and by extension that of the Muslim) underwent a multiplicity of interpretations that reflect and reveal Western needs, anxieties and agendas. The essays reveal how anachronisms and inaccuracies mingled with careful detail to produce a "Turk," a figure which became a presence to reckon with in painting, sculpture, tapestry and printmaking.

The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrep├┤ts and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange.

Covering the transpacific period--in between Magellan's opening of the transpacific route to the Far East and the eventual dominance of the region by the British and the Dutch--this collection provides a broad perspective on how Western Europe made sense of a complex, multi-faceted, and by and large Sino-centered East and Southeast Asia.

A detailed examination of the relationship between the discourses and practices of authority and diplomacy in the late medieval and early modern periods, this volume interrogates the persistent duality of the roles of author and ambassador. Contributors analyze various forms of writing, including drama, poetry, diplomatic correspondence, peace treaties and household accounts; and a range of major literary figures, including Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wyatt, Sidney and Spenser.

While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain’s comedia and Italy’s commedia dell’arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women’s participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.　　

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Habsburg family began to rely on dynastic marriage to unite an array of territories, eventually creating an empire as had not been seen in Europe since the Romans. Other European rulers followed the Habsburgs'' lead in forging ties through dynastic marriages. Because of these marriages, many more aristocrats (especially women) left their homelands to reside elsewhere. Until now, historians have viewed these unions from a primarily political viewpoint and have paid scant attention to the personal dimensions of these relocations. Separated from their family and thrust into a strange new land in which language, attire, religion, food, and cultural practices were often different, these young aristocrats were forced to conform to new customs or adapt their own customs to a new cultural setting. Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer examines these marriages as important agents of cultural transfer, emphasizing how marriages could lead to the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, common to the elites of Europe. These essays focus on the personal and domestic dimensions of early modern European court life, examining such areas as women''s devotional practices, fashion, patronage, and culinary traditions.

The essays collected here evaluate the broad range of contexts - from political thought and militarism to art and religion - in which images of Spain and Spanish culture were created by the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth century.