In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

In this book, Leah R. Clark examines collecting practices across the Italian Renaissance court, exploring the circulation, exchange, collection, and display of objects. Rather than focusing on patronage strategies or the political power of individual collectors, she uses the objects themselves to elucidate the dynamic relationships formed through their exchange. Her study brings forward the mechanisms that structured relations within the court, and most importantly, also with individuals, representations, and spaces outside the court. The volume examines the courts of Italy through the wide variety of objects - statues, paintings, jewellery, furniture, and heraldry - that were valued for their subject matter, material forms, histories, and social functions. As Clark shows, the late fifteenth-century Italian court an be located not only in the body of the prince, but also in the objects that constituted symbolic practices, initiated political dialogues, caused rifts, created memories, and formed associations.

During the period 1000-1700 major transformations took place in material culture. Quite simply, more objects were manufactured and used than ever before and many objects travelled across geographic, political, religious, linguistic, class and cultural boundaries. By starting with a focus on past objects, this volume brings together essays from art historians, historians, archaeologists, literary scholars and museum curators to reveal the different disciplinary approaches and methods taken to the study of objects and what this can reveal about transformations in material culture 1000-1700. Contributors: Katherine A. Wilson, Leah R. Clark, Alison M. Leonard, Steven P. Ashby, Michael Lewis, Robert Maniura, Sarah Hinds, Christina Antenhofer, Alexandra van Dongen, Bettina Bildhauer, Julie De Groot, Jennifer Hillman, Ruth Whelan, Christopher Donaldson, Thomas Pickles.