"The book is generously illustrated and includes full translations of the infamous sonnets that Pietro Aretino wrote to accompany I modi. Exploring such issues as censorship, religious teachings about sex, and the influence of antique culture, Taking Positions is a major contribution to our understanding of the erotic in Renaissance culture."--BOOK JACKET.

The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso's Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the 'discovery of childhood'. Famous pictures by great artists, as well as barely known anonymous artefacts, illustrate not only Western society's perennially ambivalent attitudes to children, but also the many and varied functions that works of art have played throughout its history.

This volume consists of fourteen original essays that showcase the latest thinking about John Milton's emergence as a popular and canonical author. Contributors consider how Milton positioned himself in relation to the book trade, contemporaneous thinkers, and intellectual movements, as well as how his works have been positioned since their first publication. The individual chapters assess Milton's reception by exploring how his authorial persona was shaped by the modes of writing in which he chose to express himself, the material forms in which his works circulated, and the ways in which his texts were re-appropriated by later writers. The Milton that emerges is one who actively fashioned his reputation by carefully selecting his modes of writing, his language of composition, and the stationers with whom he collaborated. Throughout the volume, contributors also demonstrate the profound impact Milton and his works have had on the careers of a variety of agents, from publishers, booksellers, and fellow writers to colonizers in Mexico and South America.

Exploring every aspect of art, philosophy, politics, life and culture between 1450 and 1620, this enthralling panorama examines one of the most fascinating and exciting periods in European history. "A rich, dense book which combines inspiring generalizations with idiosyncratic detail".--The Spectator. Photos.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

The essays in this book traverse two centuries of queens and their afterlives—historical, mythological, and literary. They speak of the significant and subtle ways that queens leave their mark on the culture they inhabit, focusing on gender, marriage, national identity, diplomacy, and representations of queens in literature. Elizabeth I looms large in this volume, but the interrogation of queenship extends from Elizabeth's historical counterparts, such as Anne Boleyn and Catherine de Medici, to her fictional echoes in the pages of John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. Celebrating and building on the renowned scholarship of Carole Levin, Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies exemplifies a range of innovative approaches to examining women and power in the early modern period.

Exploring the intersection between art and political ideology, this innovative study of art in Henrician England sheds new light on the ways in which Henry VIII and his advisers exploited visual images in order to communicate ideas to his subjects. The works analyzed include water triumphs, coronation pageants and funeral processions, printed title pages of vernacular Bibles, coins, portrait miniatures, and murals, as well as panel paintings. With her analysis of these categories of objects, and using communication theory as a starting point, String presents a new model of communication based on the concepts of magnificence, topicality, persuasiveness, and propaganda. Through this model she shows how medium, location, display, and viewership were all considered in the transmission of royal messages. Using the art of Henry VIII's reign as a case study, String enriches our understanding of the fundamental contribution of imagery to communication, and also provides a model for the study of the dissemination of ideas and the patron-artist relationship in other royal courts and historical periods.