This book examines deployments of mixed emotion in the literary and pictorial arts of early modern Europe. It consists of two parts, the first focusing on portrayals of mixed emotion in theatre, poetry, and prose, the second on forms and functions of mixed emotion in spiritual exercises centering on pictorial images, and on the heuristic and/or restorative functions of portraying mixed emotion. Contributors are Stijn Bussels, Tom Conley, Wietse de Boer, Carolin A. Giere, Barbara A. Kaminska, Graham R. Lea, Walter S. Melion, Mitchell Merback, Ruth Sargent Noyes, Bram Van Oostveldt, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bart Ramakers, Lukas Reddemann, Ludovica Sasso, Aline Smeesters, Paul J. Smith, Anita Traninger, and Elliott D. Wise.

This book explores the making of saints’ cults in the early modern world from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering the entangled roles of materiality and globalization processes. It brings together work across diverse media, objects, and materials as well as communities, cultures, and geographies to reframe a more synoptic, materials-centric, and comparative history of the making and remaking of saints’ cults, with a special focus on the long Counter-Reformation. The contributions engage with dynamics of local and universal and draw attention to the vital role of textual, visual, and material hagiographies in the creation and promotion of saints’ and would-be saints’ cults. The book fosters novel conceptualizations and cross-pollination of ideas across traditions, regions, and disciplines and expands hagiography’s horizons by reconsidering canonical saintly figures and reframing lesser-known cults of saints and would-be saints. The book will be of interest to scholars of religious and early modern history as well as art history and visual and material studies.

This book is about the Dominican church in Antwerp (today St Paul’s). It is structured around three works of art, made or procured by Peter Paul Rubens: the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Vienna) and the Wrath of Christ high altarpiece (Lyon). Within the artist’s lifetime, the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, creating one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in Northern Europe. In this richly illustrated book, Adam Sammut reconceptualises early modern churches as theatres of political economy, advancing an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities, the place of St Paul’s is restored to the crux of Antwerp’s commercial, civic and religious life.

The book examines the representation of affective complexity in the literary and pictorial arts of Northern Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, asking how and why, by what means and to what ends alloyed or multilayered emotions were showcased.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700.

Habent sua fata libelli honors the work of Craig Kallendorf, offering studies in his primary fields of expertise: the history of the book and reading, the classical tradition and reception studies, Renaissance humanism, and Virgilian scholarship.

This volume gathers contributions on key concepts elaborated in the Platonic tradition (Proclus, Plotinus, Porphyry or Sallustius) and reconsidered by Arabic (e.g. Avicenna, the Book of Causes), Byzantine (e.g. Maximus the Confessor, Ioane Petritsi) and Latin authors (e.g. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas etc.).

Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century “best-seller:” scribes produced over two hundred manuscripts. The poem follows Alexander from his first successes in Asia Minor, through his conquest of Persia and India, to his progressive moral degeneration and his poisoning by a disaffected lieutenant. The Alexandreis exemplifies twelfth-century discourses of world domination and the exoticism of the East. But at the same time it calls such dreams of mastery into question, repeatedly undercutting as it does Alexander’s claims to heroism and virtue and by extension, similar claims by the great men of Walter’s own generation. This extraordinarily layered and subtle poem stands as a high-water mark of the medieval tradition of Latin narrative literature. Along with David Townsend’s revised translation, this edition provides a rich selection of historical documents, including other writings by Walter of Châtillon, excerpts from other medieval Latin epics, and contemporary accounts of the foreign and “exotic.”

Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700 examines the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia. The term ‘reflexive’ is here used to refer to images that invite reflection not only on their form, function, and meaning, but also on their genesis and mode of production. Early modern artists often fashioned reflexive images and effigies of this kind, that appraise love by exploring the lineaments of the pictorial or sculptural image, and complementarily, appraise the pictorial or sculptural image by exploring the nature of love. Hence the book’s epigraph—ut pictura amor—‘as is a picture, so is love’.

This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700.