Pathbreaking volume providing a detailed, state-of-the-art overview of the literature of this 350-year period and its cultural and historical background. Early Modern German Literature provides an overview of major literary figures and works, socio-historical contexts, philosophical backgrounds, and cultural trends during the 350 years between the first flowering of northernhumanism around 1350 and the rise of a distinctly middle-class, anti-classical aesthetics around 1700. Recent scholarship has significantly revised many traditional assumptions about the literature of this period, starting with areassessment of the canon. The notion of "literature" has expanded to include a much wider range of texts than before, such as broadsheets, illustrated books, emblem books, travelogues, demonological treatises, and letters. Greater attention to the cultural and social phenomena that affect literary production has led to hitherto neglected areas of research, including the culture of learning and learnedness; the idea of authorship; the relationship betweenthe intellectual elite and the state and other political authorities and institutions; the development of the family; gender dichotomy; and the early formation of an educated, urban middle class. In an introduction and twenty-seven essays on specific but broadly-based topics of seminal importance to the period, written by leading specialists from North America, the United Kingdom, and Germany, this pathbreaking volume reflects this state-of-the-art research. Contributors: Klaus Garber, Graeme Dunphy, Renate Born, Stephan Füssel, Scott Dixon, Wilhelm Külmann, Max Reinhart, joachim Knape, Hans-Gert Roloff, Erika Rummel, John Alexander, Peter Hess, Andreas Solbach, Peter Daly, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Jill Bepler, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Steven Saunders, jeffrey Chipps Smith, Wolfgang Neuber, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Anna Carrdus, John L. Flood, Laurel Carrington, Theodor Verweyen, John Roger Paas Max Reinhart is Professor of German at the University of Georgia.

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.

How gunpowder technology exploded heroes, heroics, and war stories from 1400 to 1700, and how German writers tried to glue them back together

During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volume?s sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition is a major new intervention in research on early modern translation and will be an essential point of reference for anyone interested in the history of women translators. Research on women translators has often focused on early modern England; the example of early modern England has been taken as the norm for the rest of the continent and has shaped research on gender and translation more generally. This book brings a new European perspective to the field by introducing the case of Germany. It draws attention to forty women who can be identified as translators in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany and shows how their work does not fit easily into traditional narratives about marginalization and subversiveness. The study uses the example of Germany to argue against reading the work of translating women primarily through the lens of gender and to challenge claims about the existence of a female translation tradition which transcends the boundaries of time and place. Broadening our perspective to include Germany provides a more nuanced and informed account of the position of women within European translation cultures and forces us to rethink gender as a category of analysis in translation history. The book makes the case for a new 'woman-interrogated' approach to translation history (to borrow a concept from Carol Maier) and as such it will provide a blueprint for future work in the area.

The emblem was big business in early-modern Europe, used extensively not only in printed books and broadsheets, but also to decorate pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows and numerous other domestic, devotional and political objects. At its most basic level simply a combination of symbolic visual image and texts, an emblem is a hybrid composed of words and picture. However, as this book demonstrates, understanding the precise and often multiple meaning, intention and message emblems conveyed can prove a remarkably slippery process. In this book, Peter Daly draws upon many years’ research to reflect upon the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in, and rediscovery of, emblems following years of relative neglect. Beginning by considering some of the seldom asked, but important, questions that the study of emblems raises, including the importance of the emblem, the truth value of emblems, and the transmission of knowledge through emblems, the book then moves on to investigate more closely-focussed aspects such as the role of mnemonics, mottoes and visual rhetoric. The volume concludes with a review of some perhaps inadequately considered issues such as the role of Jesuits (who had a role in the publication of about a quarter of all known emblem books), and questions such as how these hybrid constructs were actually read and interpreted. Drawing upon a database containing records of 6,514 books of emblems and imprese, this study suggests new ways for scholars to approach important questions that have not yet been satisfactorily broached in the standard works on emblems.

The Reformation is often alluded to as Gutenberg’s child. Could it then be said that the Counter-Reformation was his step-child? The close relationship between the Reformation, the printing press and books has received extensive, historiographical attention, which is clearly justified; however, the links between books and the Catholic world have often been limited to a tale of censorship and repression. The current volume looks beyond this, with a series of papers that aim to shed new light on the complex relationships between Catholicism and books during the early modern period, before and after the religious schism, with special focus on trade, common reads and the mechanisms used to control readership in different territories, together with the similarities between the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Contributors include: Stijn Van Rossem, Rafael M. Pérez García, Pedro J. Rueda Ramírez, Idalia García Aguilar, Bianca Lindorfer, Natalia Maillard Álvarez, and Adrien Delmas.