Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1750: Objects, Affects, Effects

This collection embraces the increasing interest in the material world of the Renaissance and the early modern period, which has both fascinated contemporaries and initiated in recent years a distinguished historiography. The scholarship within is distinctive for engaging with the agentive qualities of matter, showing how affective dimensions in history connect with material history, and exploring the religious and cultural identity dimensions of the use of materials and artefacts. It thus aims to refocus our understanding of the meaning of the material world in this period by centring on the vibrancy of matter itself. To achieve this goal, the authors approach the material through four themes, glass, feathers, gold paints, and veils, in relation to specific individuals, material milieus, and interpretative communities. In examining these four types of materialities and object groups, which were attached to different sensory regimes and valorizations, this book charts how each underwent significant changes during this period.

Susanna Burghartz is professor of Renaissance and Early Modern History at the University of Basel. She has published on Reformation, Confessionalization and Gender history, as well as early European globalization and material culture. Her current research investigates advertising journals as the new marketplaces for the emerging consumer society of the eighteenth century, and includes a micro-global history of the Leisler family and Basel’s silk ribbon industry. Lucas Burkart has been Professor of History at the University of Basel since 2012. His research interests encompass the cultural history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the history of material culture, and the history of historiography. Currently, he is also overseeing the completion of the critical edition of the works by Jacob Burckhardt. Christine Göttler is Professor emerita of Art History at the University of Bern and specializes in the art of early modern Europe, with a focus on the Netherlands. She has published widely on collecting practices, historical aspects of artists’ materials, and the imagery of solitude. Her current projects explore Peter Paul Rubens’s engagement with Antwerp’s global world and the relationship between landscape and nature. Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John´s College. In addition to research on Reformation and on gender history, Rublack specializes in the history of dress. Her books on this subject include Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Oxford University Press: 2010.