Print, in the early modern period, could make or break power. This volume addresses one of the most urgent and topical questions in early modern history: how did European authorities use a new medium with such tremendous potential? The eighteen contributors develop new perspectives on the relationship between the rise of print and the changing relationships between subjects and rulers by analysing print’s role in early modern bureaucracy, the techniques of printed propaganda, genres, and strategies of state communication. While print is often still thought of as an emancipating and disruptive force of change in early modern societies, the resulting picture shows how instrumental print was in strengthening existing power structures. Contributors: Renaud Adam, Martin Christ, Jamie Cumby, Arthur der Weduwen, Nora Epstein, Andreas Golob, Helmer Helmers, Jan Hillgärtner, Rindert Jagersma, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, Nina Lamal, Margaret Meserve, Rachel Midura, Gautier Mingous, Ernesto E. Oyarbide Magaña, Caren Reimann, Chelsea Reutchke, Celyn David Richards, Paolo Sachet, Forrest Strickland, and Ramon Voges.

Milan was for centuries the most important center of economic, ecclesiastical and political power in Lombardy. As the State of Milan it extended in the Renaissance over a large part of northern and central Italy and numbered over thirty cities with their territories. A Companion to Late Medieval and early Modern Milan examines the story of the city and State from the establishment of the duchy under the Viscontis in 1395 through to the 150 years of Spanish rule and down to its final absorption into Austrian Lombardy in 1704. It opens up to a wide readership a well-documented synthesis which is both fully informative and reflects current debate. 20 chapters by qualified and distinguished scholars offer a new and original perspective with themes ranging from society to politics, music to literature, the history of art to law, the church to the economy. Contributors are: Giuliana Albini, Giancarlo Andenna, Jane Black, Stefano D’Amico, Alessandra Dattero, Massimo Della Misericordia, Giuliano Di Bacco, Claudia Di Filippo, Federico Del Tredici, Andrea Gamberini, Christine Getz, T.J. Kuehn, Germano Maifreda, Patrizia Mainoni, Alessandro Morandotti, Simona Mori, Serena Romano, Giovanna Tonelli, Massimo Zaggia.

This volume, first published in 2007, examines the role of religion as a vehicle for cultural exchange.

Explores the role of music in the cultural, religious, and political upheavals of late Renaissance Italy, revealing how musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power. Italian culture did not lose its vigour after 1530, but underwent a transformation.

This volume presents essays from eight scholars who trained with Robert Kingdon, a vanguard of early modern studies. He required students to go to primary sources, yet they were free to pursue their own curiosity. No matter what their approach to the sources, students were held to a high standard of thoroughness, precision, and attention to detail. This festschrift displays something of the diversity of language, source materials, methods, and visions that Kingdon encouraged in his students during his forty-year career in graduate education.

This engaging book highlights the role of blue paper in the history of drawing. The rich history of blue paper, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, illuminates themes of transcultural interchange, international trade, and global reach. Through the examination of significant works, this volume investigates considerations of supply, use, economics, and innovative creative practice. How did the materials necessary for the production of blue paper reach artistic centers? How were these materials produced and used in various regions? Why did they appeal to artists, and how did they impact artistic practice and come to be associated with regional artistic identities? How did commercial, political, and cultural relations, and the mobility of artists, enable the dispersion of these materials and related techniques? Bringing together the work of the world’s leading specialists, this striking publication is destined to become essential reading on the history, materials, and techniques of drawings executed on blue paper.

Although largely unknown today, during his lifetime Mutio Oddi of Urbino (1569–1639) was a highly esteemed scholar, teacher, and practitioner of a wide range of disciplines related to mathematics. A prime example of the artisan-scholar so prevalent in the late Renaissance, Oddi was also accomplished in the fields of civil and military architecture and the design and retail of mathematical instruments, as well as writing and publishing. In Between Raphael and Galileo, Alexander Marr resurrects the career and achievements of Oddi in order to examine the ways in which mathematics, material culture, and the book shaped knowledge, society, and the visual arts in late Renaissance Italy. Marr scrutinizes the extensive archive of Oddi papers, documenting Oddi’s collaboration with prominent intellectuals and officials and shedding new light on the practice of science and art during his day. What becomes clear is that Oddi, precisely because he was not spectacularly innovative and did not attain the status of a hero in modern science, is characteristic of the majority of scientific practitioners and educators active in this formative age, particularly those whose energetic popularization of mathematics laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution. Marr also demonstrates that scientific change in this era was multivalent and contested, governed as much by friendship as by principle and determined as much by places as by purpose. Plunging the reader into Oddi’s world, Between Raphael and Galileo is a finely wrought and meticulously researched tale of science, art, commerce, and society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It will become required reading for any scholar interested in the history of science, visual art, and print culture of the Early Modern period.

Cheap print moved across Europe in surprising ways, crossing unusual distances by unusual routes and by unusual means. Pedlars, news, and cheap print defy the conventional categories and models of distribution: we need to think about their extraordinary diversity, and about the means by which their unstable cultural images inflect distribution. Books were not dead things, and the examination of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, three regions that contain instructive parallels and contrasts, reveals their unpredictable liveliness. This collection of essays, which emerges from transnational dialogues about pedlars and commerce and communication, examines the various means by which cheap print moved across Europe, and the cultural and material and economic premises of the European landscape of print. Contributors include: Alberto Milano; Jason Peacey; Jeroen Salman; Jo Thijssen; Joad Raymond; Joop Koopmans; Karen Bowen; Kate Peters; Melissa Calaresu; Roeland Harms; Rosa Salzberg; Sean Shesgreen.