Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
Published on 4. November 2019
Book
Hardback
286 pages
978-94-6298-465-3 (ISBN)
Description
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
Reviews / Votes
"This volume is a fine example of what the material turn in historical studies can produce. All of the essays are framed as historical rather than theoretical projects and proceed by historicizing materiality within the coordinates of time and place. The prose is uniformly clear and lends the book to classroom use. Readers will benefit from the authors' careful attention to the material characteristics of the artifacts and practices they study. All of the essays teach in one way or another that matter matters. What things are made of, how they are made, and how people used them come to the fore to demonstrate the difference that the material turn makes in historical work."- David Morgan, Duke University, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, No. 2, 2021
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academic
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 170 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
862 gr
ISBN-13
978-94-6298-465-3 (9789462984653)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Suzanna Ivanic | Mary Laven | Andrew Morrall
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
Book
approx. 12/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€73.22
Not yet published
Suzanna Ivanic | Mary Laven | Andrew Morrall
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download
Suzanna Ivanic | Mary Laven | Andrew Morrall
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download
Suzanna Ivanic | Mary Laven | Andrew Morrall
Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
E-Book
11/2019
Amsterdam University Press
€249.50
Available for download
Persons
Suzanna Ivanic is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on religion and material culture in central Europe and she has published on religious material culture and on travelogues in early modern Bohemia. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious materiality of seventeenth-century Prague.
Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. While she has published on many different aspects of religion, her recent work has focused especially on the material culture of devotion. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Andrew Morrall is Professor of Early Modern Art and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. He has written widely on the visual and material culture of the Reformation and, most recently, on urban craft productions and the Kunstkammer. His publications include Joerg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg.
Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. While she has published on many different aspects of religion, her recent work has focused especially on the material culture of devotion. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Andrew Morrall is Professor of Early Modern Art and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. He has written widely on the visual and material culture of the Reformation and, most recently, on urban craft productions and the Kunstkammer. His publications include Joerg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg.
Content
Introduction - Editors Part I - Meanings 1. Wax versus wood: the material of votive offerings in Renaissance Italy - Mary Laven 2. The substance of divine grace: Ex-votos and the material of paper in early modern Italy - Maria Alessandra Chessa 3. Powerful objects in powerful places: pilgrimage, relics and sacred texts in Tibetan Buddhism - Hildegard Diemberger 4. Myer Myers: Silversmith in the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Ledger - Vivian B. Mann Part II - Practices 5. Christian materiality between East and West: Notes of a Capuchin among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire - John-Paul Ghobrial 6. The materiality of death in early modern Venice - Alexandra Bamji 7. Living with the Virgin in the Colonial Andes: Images and personal devotion - Gabriela Ramos 8. 'Watching myself in the mirror, I saw 'Ali in my eyes': On Sufi visual and material practice in the Balkans - Sara Kuehn Part III - Transformations 9. Religious materiality in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II - Suzanna Ivanic 10. The Reformation of the rosary bead: Protestantism and the perpetuation of the Amber Pater Noster - Rachel King 11. Magical words: Arabic amulets in Christian Spain - Abigail Krasner Balbale 12. Mesoamerican idols, Spanish medicine: Jade in the collection of Philip II - Kate E. Holohan Epilogue - Caroline Walker Bynum Index