Taking as their premiss the subjective experience of art, the authors look at how paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer & other masters were displayed & comprehended in the 17th century.

A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.

Publisher description

The idea that 'home' is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it. But, as Judith Flanders shows in her best and most ambitious work to date, "home" is a relatively new idea. In The Making of Home, Flanders traces the evolution of the house from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century across northern Europe and America, showing how the homes we know today bear only a faint resemblance to homes though history. What turned a house into the concept of home? Why did northwestern Europe, a politically unimportant, sociologically underdeveloped region of the world, suddenly became the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, the capitalist crucible that created modernity? While investigating these important questions, Flanders uncovers the fascinating development of ordinary household items--from cutlery, chairs and curtains, to the fitted kitchen, plumbing and windows--while also dismantling many domestic myths. In this prodigiously researched and engagingly written book, Flanders brilliantly and elegantly draws together the threads of religion, history, economics, technology and the arts to show not merely what happened, but why it happened: how we ended up in a world where we can all say, like Dorothy in Oz, "There's no place like home."

This captivating volume paints a broad portrait of daily life in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Taking the reader into the heart of the Dutch Golden Age, Derek Phillips uses a wide variety of sources in order to provide a wealth of domestic detail: from how people washed their clothes and cooked their meals to how they lived, married, and raised their children. Well-Being in Amsterdam's Golden Age covers the terrain of merchants' offices, regents' drawing rooms, and servants' quarters through a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, revealing the processes linking equality and well-being in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and beyond.

The scholarly essays in this book focus on the theme of art and social change in Western art from the Renaissance to about 1950. The edited volume includes contributions by scholars with a range of professional backgrounds and affiliations. Their essays address some aspect of the theme and engage with one or more artworks in the collection of La Salle University Art Museum. Topics include religious iconography, portraiture, landscape, journal illustrations, and Modernist abstraction. These essays on the collection add to the body of scholarship which situates works of art in contexts that help reveal and explain changes in social, political or cultural values. The book is lavishly illustrated, with 104 color illustrations.

Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll includes essays by Catherine Belsey, Harry Berger, Jr., Philippa Berry, Raphael Falco, Jean E. Howard, Lena Cowen Orlin, Patricia Parker, Phyllis Rackin, Bruce R. Smith, Barbara Maria Stafford, Peter Stallybrass, and Susanne Woods. With sections on England at the Margins, Researching the Renaissance, The Human Figure on the Stage, and Artificial Persons, the collection makes interventions in historiography as well as history, literary interpretation, and also literary criticism. Some of the issues are England's marginal status in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century world; the re-centering strategies of the Renaissance public theater in both time and space; mutually reinforcing fallacies engendered by common practices of canon formation and historical narrative; the central meanings of marginal characters in Shakespeare and Milton;

In a brilliantly inventive work, bestselling author Simon Schama explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES throbs with life on every page. 314 photos & illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.

Women's bodies have become a battleground. Around the world, people argue about veiling, schooling for Afghan girls, and "SlutWalk" protests, all of which involve issues of women's sexuality and freedom. Globalization, with its emphasis on human rights and individuality, heats up these arguments. In Of Virgins and Martyrs, David Jacobson takes the reader on a fascinating tour of how self-identity developed throughout history and what individualism means for Muslim societies struggling to maintain a sense of honor in a globalized twenty-first century. Some patriarchal societies have come to see women’s control of their own sexuality as a threat to a way of life that goes back thousands of years. Many trace their lineage to tribal cultures that were organized around the idea that women’s virginity represents the honor of male relatives and the good of the community at large. Anyone or anything that influences women to the contrary is considered a corrupting and potentially calamitous force. Jacobson analyzes the connection between tribal patriarchy and Muslim radicalism through an innovative tool—the tribal patriarchy index. This index helps to illuminate why women's sexuality, dress, and image so compel militant Muslim outrage and sometimes violent action, revealing a deeper human story of how women's status defines competing moral visions of society and why this present clash is erupting with such ferocity. -- Subrata Mitra, Department of Political Science, and South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg