Instilled with intrinsic emotional connotations and a distinctive aesthetic ambiguity, images of children possess diachronic, transcultural and anthropological relevance. The reinvention and the adaptations of the ?normative image? of the ancient "putto" in the Renaissance triggered the multiform transmigration, adaptation and uses of images of children in early modern Europe. So did Christianity?s attachment to a divine child, which catalyzed the reception and visual dissemination of images of children in various forms. 00While social historians have explored the changes in status and perception of childhood during the early modern period, an extensive exploration of the visual relevance of this theme in sacred imagery has yet to emerge from art historical studies. What are the aesthetic values, the emotional effects and the cultural significance of these ubiquitous and frequently liminal images? 0The proposed volume aims to offer an innovative exploration of the visualization and materiality of infancy in early modern sacred contexts in different medias, by looking at the relationship between form and meaning from a cross-cultural perspective. 0This is a collection of 9 essays that brings together well-known experts and fresh voices to approaches these questions through case studies. Issues addressed include the functions of images of infants and "putti" in baptismal context, visual and spatial interactions between images of children, migrations of images of infants from the sacred to the prophane sphere, and their associations with interreligious violence.

A study into the role of visual and material culture in shaping early modern emotional experiences, c. 1450–1800

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early ‘early modern’ period -- has been much less fully investigated. Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550) addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures), and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts). Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God—and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning. The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

Early modern objects, images and artworks were often nodes of discussion and contestation. If images were sometimes contested by external and often competing agencies (religious and secular authorities, image theoreticians, various Inquisitions etc.), artists and objects were often just as likely to impose their own rules and standards through the continuation and/or contestation of established visual traditions, styles, iconographies, materialities, reproductions and reframings. While issues such as censorship and iconoclasm have already received much attention from scholars, the actual role and capacity of the image as agent?either in actual legal processes or, more generally, in the creation of new visual standards?has yet to be adequately thematised. At present, no comprehensive study collects the many diverse instances of the multi-layered normative power of images, objects and art. 0This volume?Contested forms? aims to provide a first exploration of image normativity by means of a series of case studies, which will focus in different ways on the intersections between the limits of the sacred image and the power of art, especially but not exclusively in Europe, between 1450 and 1650. Each essay will approach the question of normativity in sacred images from different perspectives. Dealing with different types of images and materials, authors will discuss the status of images and objects in trials, contested portraits, objects and iconographies, the limits to representations of suffering, the tensions between theology and art, and the significance of copies and adaptations that establish as well as contest visual norms from Europe and beyond.

Written by leading scholars in the field, the essays in this book address the relationships between gender and the built environment, specifically architecture, in early modern Europe. In recent years scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which architecture plays a part in the construction of gendered identities. So far the debates have focused on the built environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the neglect of the early modern period. This book focuses on early modern Europe, a period decisive for our understanding of gender and sexuality. Much excellent scholarship has enhanced our understanding of gender division in early modern Europe, but often this scholarship considers gender in isolation from other vital factors, especially social class. Central to the concerns of this book, therefore, is a consideration of the intersections of gender with social rank. Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe makes a major contribution to the developing analysis of how architecture contributes to the shaping of social relations, especially in relation to gender, in early modern Europe.

Christianity took root in the Americas during the early modern period when a historically unprecedented migration brought European clergy, religious seekers, and explorers to the New World. Protestant and Catholic settlers undertook the arduous journey for a variety of motivations. Some fled corrupt theocracies and sought to reclaim ancient principles and Christian ideals in a remote unsettled territory. Others intended to glorify their home nations and churches by bringing new lands and subjects under the rule of their kings. Many imagined the indigenous peoples they encountered as "savages" awaiting the salvific force of Christ. Whether by overtly challenging European religious authority and traditions or by adapting to unforeseen hardship and resistance, these envoys reshaped faith, liturgy, and ecclesiology and fundamentally transformed the practice and theology of Christianity. Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas explores the impact of colonial encounters in the Atlantic world on the history of Christianity. Essays from across disciplines examine religious history from a spatial perspective, tracing geographical movements and population dispersals as they were shaped by the millennial designs and evangelizing impulses of European empires. At the same time, religion provides a provocative lens through which to view patterns of social restriction, exclusion, and tension, as well as those of acculturation, accommodation, and resistance in a comparative colonial context. Through nuanced attention to the particularities of faith, especially Anglo-Protestant settlements in North America and the Ibero-Catholic missions in Latin America, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas illuminates the complexity and variety of the colonial world as it transformed a range of Christian beliefs. Contributors: Ralph Bauer, David A. Boruchoff, Matt Cohen, Sir John Elliot, Carmen Fernández-Salvador, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Sandra M. Gustafson, David D. Hall, Stephanie Kirk, Asunción Lavrin, Sarah Rivett, Teresa Toulouse.