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'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and
importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous
in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to
history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a
prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period. This volume
brings together an international group of scholars to investigate
the various manifestations of, and relationships between,
'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the
multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense
fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been
subjected over three centuries. From instances of curiosity in New
World exploration to the natural wonders of 18th-century Italy,
Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
locates its subjects in a broad geographical and disciplinary
terrain. Taken together, the essays presented here construct a
detailed picture of two complex themes, demonstrating the extent to
which both have been transformed and reconstituted, often with
dramatic results.
Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern
European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work
in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity and
genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the
transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius.
Ranging across the artist's entire career, it explores Rubens's
engagement with these themes in his art and biography. The book
looks at Rubens's forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well
as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of
Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure.
It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci,
the spirit of the place.
What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about
literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in
treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and
essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace
books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the
thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated
between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and
methods come into England from other countries, and take root in
particular locations - the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre,
the great house, the printer's shop, the university. The practice
of criticism is transplanted to the Americas and attempts to
articulate the place of poetry in a new world. And commonplaces of
classical poetics and rhetoric serve both to connect and to measure
the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the
history of the development of early modern thinking about
literature and the visual arts requires consideration of various
kinds of place - material, textual, geographical - and the
practices particular to those places; it also requires that those
different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This
book brings together scholars working in departments of English,
modern languages, and art history to look at the many different
places of early modern criticism. It argues polemically for the
necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what
happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical
practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.
Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity
defined every person-not just exceptional individuals-as having
their own attributes and talents, stemming from an "inborn nature"
that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through
ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to
understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and
things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign
professions that were best suited to one's abilities. Logodaedalus,
a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of
ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750.
By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a
range of languages-Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English,
German, and Dutch-the authors reveal the ways in which significant
words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural
philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics,
poetics, and artistic theory.
Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity
shaped the experience, discourse and conceptualization of materials
and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range
widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts,
professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book
considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature,
and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which wit acted in
and upon the material world through skill and technique.
Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the "maker's knowledge"
tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of
invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, and what were the
ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.
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