In the first major book in four decades on Caterina Sforza (1463-1509), Joyce de Vries investigates the famous noblewoman's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy. Sforza commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, participated in splendid civic and religious rituals, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. By engaging in these realms of cultural production, de Vries suggests, Sforza manipulated masculine and feminine norms of behavior and effectively promoted her social and political agendas. Drawing on visual evidence, inventories, letters, and contemporary texts, de Vries offers a penetrating new interpretation of women's contributions to early modern culture. She explains the correlations between prescriptive literature and women's actions and reveals the mutability of gender roles in the princely courts. De Vries's analysis of Sforza's posthumous legend suggests that what we see as "the Renaissance" was as much a historical invention as a coherent moment in historical time.

In the first major book in four decades on Caterina Sforza (1463-1509), Joyce de Vries investigates the famous noblewoman's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy. Sforza commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, participated in splendid civic and religious rituals, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. By engaging in these realms of cultural production, de Vries suggests, Sforza manipulated masculine and feminine norms of behavior and effectively promoted her social and political agendas. Drawing on visual evidence, inventories, letters, and contemporary texts, de Vries offers a penetrating new interpretation of women's contributions to early modern culture. She explains the correlations between prescriptive literature and women's actions and reveals the mutability of gender roles in the princely courts. De Vries's analysis of Sforza's posthumous legend suggests that what we see as "the Renaissance" was as much a historical invention as a coherent moment in historical time.

Examining women's agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women's Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women's agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women's actions and activism. They address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building. Despite family and social pressures, the actions of girls and women could shape their lives and challenge male-dominated institutions. This volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from various disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific.

These ground-breaking essays, all based on original archival research, consider the evolving interest in Bolognese art in seventeenth-century Italy, particularly focusing on the period after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. Edited by Bolognese specialists Raffaella Morselli and Babette Bohn, the studies collected here focus on the taste for Bolognese art within Bologna itself and in other parts of the Italian peninsula, including Mantua, Ferrara, Rome, and Florence. Essays examine the roles of gender, class, and the social status of the artist in early modern Bologna; approaches to exhibiting artworks in noble Bolognese collections; the reputations of local women artists; the popularity of Bolognese quadratura painting; and the relative success of both contemporary and earlier Bolognese artists with Italian collectors.

EQxpressionists is a book about playing with horses as artistic expression. Featuring interviews with eight progressive trainers from around the world, EQxpressionists questions what makes horses special to people, how we can create good relationships with our horses, and how we can develop a horsemanship practice that is fuel for life. Those interviewed share their experiences training horses for showing, trail riding, and demonstrations. From Classical Dressage to trick-training, the individuals featured are sure to inspire. EQxpressionists encourages readers to imagine their dream horses and digs at the question, "How should we work with our equines so that they can truly be the horses of our dreams?"