Böcker utgivna av Penn State University Press

With its incorporation into architecture on a grand scale during the long nineteenth century, steel forever changed the way we perceive and inhabit buildings. In this book, Peter H. Christensen shows that even as architects and engineers were harnessing steel's incredible properties, steel itself was busy transforming the natural world. Precious Metal explores this quintessentially modernist material--not for the heroic structural innovations it facilitated but for a deeper understanding of the role it played in the steady change of the earth. Focusing on the formative years of the architectural steel economy and on the corporate history of German steel titans Krupp and Thyssen, Christensen investigates the ecological interrelationship of artificial and natural habitats, mediated by steel. He traces steel through six distinct phases: birth, formation, display, dispersal, construction, and return. By following the life of steel from the collection of raw minerals to the distribution and disposal of finished products, Christensen challenges the traditional narrative that steel was simply the primary material responsible for architectural modernism.Based on the premise that building materials are as much a part of the natural world as they are of a building, this groundbreaking book rewrites an important chapter of architectural history. It will be welcomed by specialists in architectural history, nineteenth-century studies, environmental history, German studies, modernist studies, and the Anthropocene.

In the eighteen years since Ivan Illich's death, David Cayley has been reflecting on the meaning of his friend and teacher's life and work. Now, in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, he presents Illich's body of thought, locating it in its own time and retrieving its relevance for ours.Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a revolutionary figure in the Roman Catholic Church and in the wider field of cultural criticism that began to take shape in the 1960s. His advocacy of a new, de-clericalized church and his opposition to American missionary programs in Latin America, which he saw as reactionary and imperialist, brought him into conflict with the Vatican and led him to withdraw from direct service to the church in 1969. His institutional critiques of the 1970s, from Deschooling Society to Medical Nemesis, promoted what he called institutional or cultural revolution. The last twenty years of his life were occupied with developing his theory of modernity as an extension of church history. Ranging over every phase of Illich's career and meditating on each of his books, Cayleyfinds Illich to be as relevant today as ever and more likely to be understood, now that the many convergent crises he foresaw are in full public view and the church that rejected him is paralyzed in its "folkloric" shell.Not a conventional biography, though attentive to how Illich lived, Cayley's book is "continuing a conversation" with Illich that will engage anyone who is interested in theology, philosophy, history, and the Catholic Church.

In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence, change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick's reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create community and empathy rather than hierarchies. Specifically, Simmons advocates for incorporating memoir, history, theory, poetry, and even "the cringey admissions of a fanboy" into criticism. Love and Degradation argues for queer feminism's value to reading and thinking about works by creators as varied as Lana Del Rey, Charlotte Brontë, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and filmmaker Steve McQueen. It also includes essays on Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Kristen Stewart. In essence, the essays in this volume represent a series of the author's "saviors, obsessions, and losses."A compelling read for students and scholars of art history, queer and gender studies, creative writing, and the study of film, television, and pop culture, this book encourages readers to embrace fandom and raises important questions about the state of queer and feminist discourse.

Most people equate democracy with discussion, speech, and making one's voice heard. But where does silence fit in? Democracy and the Politics of Silence investigates the largely overlooked role of silence in democratic politics. It challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that silence can support and affirm democratic pillars and outcomes like empowerment, inclusion, and equality.Rather than focusing on theory, Brito Vieira explores real-world examples, including the Silent Parade of African Americans in 1916, demonstrations by the Women in Black in Serbia and Falun Gong practitioners in China, Gandhi's political vows of silence, debates related to the representation and rights of nonhuman beings, and the famous Miranda judgment on the right to silence. Through these and other case studies, the author demonstrates how silence can be a means of building political community and resisting despotic rule. She reveals the power in silences, as well as their limitations, and illuminates the complex relationship between speech and silence. In thus expanding the repertoire of democratic citizenship, Brito Vieira invites readers to consider what silence might teach them about democracy.This timely book should appeal to political science students and scholars, as well as anyone interested in the history of democracies and popular resistance movements.

Long dependent on the Asian spice trade, Portugal suffered serious setbacks during the period of political union with Spain (1580-1640), as the Dutch and others seized key regions and destroyed commercial monopolies. By 1668, the greatest hope for a renewed Portuguese empire lay to the west. This book examines the "Atlanticization" of Lisbon during the early modern era, investigating the social, economic, religious, and political evolution that took place in Portugal's capital during a period of upheaval and transformation in Europe and in the Atlantic world.In this book, Cacey Bowen Farnsworth shows how, between 1668 and 1750, Lisbon became a crossroads where colonial developments intermingled with metropolitan and global influences to produce something novel among European port capitals. Drawing from extensive primary and secondary sources from Portugal, Brazil, England, France, and Spain, Farnsworth lays out how Lisbon's transformations were generated in commercial exchanges, especially the slave trade, as well as in the often-tense arrangements between the British and the Portuguese, and he shows how social, economic, cultural, and religious transformations made Lisbon a unique center of encounter.Responding to valid criticisms of Atlantic history, Farnsworth's history of early modern Lisbon demonstrates that historians do not always have to defer to a global lens of analysis. It is sure to be of value to any researcher interested in early modern Iberia, commerce, and globalism.

In the eighteenth century, missionaries of the radical, pietist Moravian Church wandered from Germanic Europe to the edges of the known world in search of tolerance and a closer relationship to God. This open-minded, cosmopolitan undertaking led to unintended consequences, however, both for the Moravians and for the other persecuted peoples--European, African, and Indigenous--they sought to convert. Religion on the Margins examines the complexities of early modern Moravians as a cosmopolitan community focused on an eschatological global vision while having to negotiate diverse cultures and, most importantly, the institution of slavery. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of teachings, letters, and diaries, Benjamin M. Pietrenka sheds light on how a professedly anti-colonial cast of characters navigated and found themselves taking part in a deeply colonial narrative. Ultimately, Pietrenka shows how the Moravians, operating from within the constraints of mission work, became complicit in the European imperial project in spite of their stated values and their own experience of marginalization.For scholars of early modern religion, empire, and politics, Pietrenka's book challenges tendencies in the field to equate modernity with secularization and invites us to consider how nonelite actors understood religion and ethnicity through each other, in ways that contributed to the emergence of modern scientific racism and white supremacy.

In 1965, striking farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley sparked the beginning of the Chican@ Movement. As the movement quickly gained traction across the southwestern United States, there emerged public frictions and splits among activists over strategic political decisions. José G. Izaguirre III explores how these disagreements often hinged on the establishment of a racial(ized) identity for Mexican Americans, leading to the formation of La Raza Unida, a political party dedicated to naming and defending Mexican Americans as a racialized communityThrough close readings of figures, vocabularies, and visualizations of iconic texts of the Chican@ Movement--including The Plan de Delano, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's "I Am Joaquin," and newspapers like El Grito del Norte and La Raza--Izaguirre demonstrates that la raza was never singular or unified. Instead, he reveals a racial identity that was (re)negotiated, (re)invented, and (re)circulated against a Cold War backdrop that heightened rhetorics of race across the globe and increasingly threatened Mexican American bodies in the Vietnam War. In lieu of a unified, nationalist movement, Izaguirre argues that activists energized and empowered La Raza as a political community by making the Chican@ movement multivocal, global, and often aligned with whiteness.For scholars of political movements, US history, race, or rhetoric, Becoming La Raza will provide a valuable perspective on one of the most important civil rights movements of the twentieth century.

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture, but in the mid-eighties it returned with a vengeance. Today, remembrance of World War II is ubiquitous across US media and politics, demonstrating its centrality to American collective identity. In this book, Barbara Biesecker explores this shift, revealing how "The Good War" was retooled to restore social equilibrium to the US.Drawing on methods of contemporary philosophy, Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995, the film Saving Private Ryan, and Tom Brokaw's best-selling book The Greatest Generation. Situating these texts within the culture wars and the broader framework of American politics and international relations, Biesecker argues that the return of the Good War to public memory was an effect of the fall of the Soviet Union. Once America's Other was gone, a new narrative was needed to maintain American identity. By highlighting the potent forms of American exceptionalism running through these texts, Biesecker shows how these reconstructions of World War II functioned as civic lessons, teaching the American public how a good citizen ought to live, solidifying the official remembrance of World War II, and perhaps most importantly, advancing a neoliberal nationalist politics.By tracing the links between the popular memory of the war and an ethnonational state ideology, Biesecker not only uncovers the source of the MAGA movement but also underscores the power of public memory in shaping national identity. This book will interest historians as well as students and scholars in the fields of US politics and communication studies.

Inspired by Richard Wagner's idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova's At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia--the physiological or figurative blending of senses--as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth.Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, Dimova explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists--Richard Strauss, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleksandr Skriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke--At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle.Rooted in archival research in France, Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic, At the Crossroads of the Senses taps overlooked scientific sources to offer a fresh perspective on European modernism. Sensory studies scholars, literary critics, and art historians alike will welcome its many contributions, not least among them a refreshing advocacy for a kind of sensuous reading practice.

While many recognize William Penn as the founder of Pennsylvania and a defender of religious liberty, much less is known about Penn as a man of faith. This wide-ranging history examines Penn as a deeply religious man who experienced personal triumph and success as well as tragedy and failure.After an introduction to Penn and his times, J. William Frost explores various aspects of Penn's faith, including his conversion, service within the Society of Friends, moral teachings, and advocacy for toleration in England and religious freedom in Pennsylvania. He examines Penn as a figure whose contradictions reflect, at least in part, his turbulent times. Penn was a radical who converted to an outlawed religion and sought to transform English society, but he was also a conservative who supported monarchical authority in England and demanded deference in Pennsylvania. Penn was born under Puritanism and lived through three revolutions, five wars, and decades of religious turmoil. He died in the Age of Enlightenment, having gone from leader and shaper of the Society of Friends to King's courtier to a prisoner accused of treason (though he was eventually exonerated).This intriguing history fills significant gaps in writings about Penn--particularly concerning Penn's faith and its intersection with his work as a statesman and politician. It will be of interest to those interested in William Penn, the history of Quakerism, and the history of religion in America.

This volume examines the cultural legacy of Jewish emigration from the Maghreb and the Middle East in the years following 1948. Drawing on the remarkable cinematic and literary output of the last twenty years, this collection posits loss as a new conceptual framework in which to understand Jewish-Muslim relations. Whereas previous studies of Jewish emigration have followed the mass departure of Jews, the contributors to this book choose to remain behind and trace the contours of the Jewish absence in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern societies. Attuned to loss in this way, the cultural memories of Jewish-Muslim life transcend the narratives of turmoil, taboo, and nostalgia that have dominated Muslim and prevalent scholarly perspectives on Jewish emigration.Read as a whole, the collection affords an uncommon opportunity to mourn and heal through a nuanced reckoning with the absence of Jews from communities in which they had lived for millennia. Its wide geographic reach and interdisciplinary nature will speak both to scholars and lay readers in Amazigh Studies, Arabic Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies, Memory Studies, and a host of other disciplines.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Abdelkader Aoudjit, İlker Hepkaner, Sarah Irving, Stephanie Kraver, Lital Levy, Nadia Sabri, and Lior B. Sternfeld.

Animal Sightings challenges two common ideas about the depiction of animals in early modern European court art: first, that the human figure relegated animals to peripheral and often symbolic roles, both compositionally and conceptually; second, that the representation of animals during this period was predominantly tied to a growing interest in naturalism derived from scientific study and discovery. Art historian Jodi Cranston considers the diversity of art representing animals common to that time and place--including dogs, stags, falcons, and even insects. She discusses how early modern European courts (primarily in northern Italy, Tyrol, Saxony, and southern Germany where the preponderance of European courtly activity related to animals occurred) acquired and kept living animals, sponsored hunts in purpose-cultivated forests, and fostered trade in animal products. The diverse works created by artists associated with those courts reveal an ambivalent and complex view of animals as beings who shared and shaped the world alongside humans. Ultimately, Animal Sightings explores how early modern artists and viewers thought about human-animal interactions, how visual representation facilitated and inhibited knowledge about animals, and how animals could reveal the limits and possibilities of visual representation. It should be of special interest to scholars of early modern studies, art history, and animal studies.

The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as "Lo Spagnoletto," or "Little Spaniard." Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera's Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Ribera's artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project.Drawing from a diverse range of sources, including poetry, literature, natural history, philosophy, and political history, Olson presents Ribera's work in a broad context. He examines how Ribera's techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artist's drawings and paintings. Many of Ribera's works featured scenes of physical suffering--from Saint Jerome's corroded skin and the flayed bodies of Saint Bartholomew and Marsyas to the ragged beggar-philosophers and the eviscerated Tityus. But far from being the result of an individual sadistic predilection, Olson argues that Ribera's art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Ribera's material processes and themes, Olson shows us, were not hermetically sealed in the studio but rather engaged in a global Spanish Empire.Pathbreaking and deeply interdisciplinary, this copiously illustrated book offers art history students and scholars a means to see Ribera's art anew.

From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the "Holy Land," from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion brings us to the literal drawing board of "Christendom"--and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace. In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations centering the role of cartography in medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth-century England, Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically "mislocating" Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories.Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Mittman's thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.

The longest political conflict of the twentieth century, the Cold War, was carried out on the human senses--and through them. Largely conducted through nonlethal methods, it was a war of competing cultures, politics, and covert operations. While propaganda reached targets through vision and hearing, it also exploited taste, smell, and pain. This volume is the first to explore the sensory aspect of the Cold War and how this warfare changes contemporary perception of the war. The authors highlight the global dimension of sensory warfare, examining conflicts around the world and across different phases of the war, including "cold" and "hot" warfare--both covert and overt. Case studies highlight US food deliveries to Eastern Europe, attempts to sovietize Polish perfumery, intelligence-financed broadcasts over the Iron Curtain, the loudspeaker war at the China-Taiwan "aquatic frontier," the Maoist Cultural Revolution, and sensory deprivation and drug abuse in covert operations in both Hungary and the United States. In its wide-ranging treatment, this volume offers an illuminating new perspective on the Cold War and deepens our understanding of the sensory aspects of current and future conflicts. Sensory Warfare in the Global Cold War will be of interest to students and scholars of sensory studies, Cold War studies, twentieth-century history, and military history. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Cyril Cordoba, Mark Fenemore, Walter E. Grunden, Dayton Lekner, José Manuel López Torán, Markus Mirschel, Victoria Phillips, Carsten Richter, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Christy Spackman, and Stephanie Weismann.

Albert the Great (1200-1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic. Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert's reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimately to his canonization by the Catholic Church in 1931. But his thoughts about magic have been debated for centuries. Disenchanting Albert the Great takes Albert's contested reputation as a case study for the long and complex history surrounding the concept of magic and magic's relationship to science and religion. Over the centuries, Albert was celebrated for his magic, or it was explained away--but he was never condemned. In the fifteenth century members of learned circles first attempted to distance Albert from magic, with the goal of exonerating him of superstition, irrationality, and immorality. Disenchanting Albert discusses the philosopher's own understanding of magic; an early, adulatory phase of his reputation as a magician; and the three primary strategies used to exonerate Albert over the centuries. In the end, Disenchanting Albert tells the story of a thirteenth-century scholar who worked to disenchant the natural world with his ideas about magic but who would not be disenchanted himself until the modern era. This accessible and insightful history will appeal to those interested in Albert the Great, Catholic Church history, the history of magic, and Western understandings of the natural and the rational over time.

This volume addresses a vital point of intersection between images in the Middle Ages and those in the modern world: the potential of medieval works of art to convey messages of power and resistance. Provoked by the misuse of medieval imagery in modern discussions, the contributors to this volume assess how medieval images connect to discourses of power in both the past and the present.The contributors each began with a single question: In the eyes of their makers and viewers, how were medieval images understood to assert or to resist forces of power? Their case studies come from a wide range of cultural, geographic, and historical contexts: the Byzantine, Ottonian, and Valois courts; the Umayyad and Castilian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula; the pluralistic military and commercial zones of the eastern Mediterranean; and the metaphorical as well as personal battlegrounds linked to medieval "courtly love" culture. Over eight chapters, the authors highlight patterns of visual rhetoric still evident in art today. They invite readers to contemplate how modern priorities and sensibilities might amplify, mute, or transform the discourses related to power and resistance that were threaded through the visual culture of the Middle Ages.This insightful book should be of value to anyone interested in medieval art history and art's relationship to power and authority in society.In addition to the editor, the contributors include Heather A. Badamo, Elena N. Boeck, Thomas E. A. Dale, Martha Easton, Eliza Garrison, Anne D. Hedeman, Tom Nickson, and Avinoam Shalem.

Perhaps the single most important founding document of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence became both a work of art and a mass-market commodity during the nineteenth century. This book traces the fascinating history of Declaration prints and broadsides and reveals the American public's changing attitudes toward this iconic text.The new and improved intaglio, letterpress, and lithographic printing technologies of the nineteenth century led to increasingly elaborate reproductions of the Declaration. Some were touted as precious relics; others were aimed at the bottom of the market. Rival publishers claimed to have produced the definitive visualization of the document, attacking the character and patriotism of other firms even as they promoted their own artistic abilities and attention to detail. Meanwhile, painter John Trumbull attempted to sell subscriptions for an engraved version of his Declaration painting, and John Quincy Adams--then secretary of state--commissioned an official 1823 edition in response to the feuding facsimilists seeking government patronage. In this book, graphic arts historian John Bidwell unravels the intricate web of rivalries surrounding these competing publications.Featuring a comprehensive checklist of nearly two hundred prints and broadsides drawn from various collections, this engrossing history highlights the proliferation and widespread influence of the Declaration of Independence on American popular culture. It will be equally esteemed by general readers interested in American history, print and autograph collectors, and art and book historians.

The letter from prison discussing deeply felt ethical and religious principles dates to antiquity. In the early modern era, the rise of printing houses in England helped turn these letters into a powerful form of resistance. W. Clark Gilpin's fascinating book looks at how letter writers ranging from archbishops and royalty to country weavers, London apprentices, and Quaker women helped solidify the prison letter as a literary form. Drawing froma large collection of prison letters written during the reign of Henry VIII and the early part of the English Reformation, Gilpinexplores how the genre evolved within the context of revolution and reform. Prison writers helped develop the prisoner of conscience as a distinct persona and the prison as a place of redemptive suffering where bearing witness had the power to change society. The Letter from Prison features a diverse cast of characters and a literary genre that combines drama and inspiration. It is sure to appeal to those interested in the English modern era, prison literature, and cultural forms of resistance.

If we want to decolonize the history of art, argues Kristopher Kersey, we must rethink our approach to the historical record. This means dispensing with Eurocentric binaries--divisions between Western and non-Western, modern and premodern--and making a commitment to artworks that challenge the perspectives we build upon them. In Facing Images, the question takes elegant and intriguing form: If the aesthetic hallmarks of "modernity" can be found in twelfth-century art, what does it really mean to be "modern"?Kersey's answer to this question models a new historiography. Facing Images begins by tracing the turbulent discourse surrounding the emergence of Japanese art history as a modern field. In lieu of examining canonical works from the twelfth century, Kerseyforegrounds the elusive and the enigmatic in artworks little known and understudied outside Japan; the manuscripts he selects defy traditional art historical narratives by exhibiting decidedly modern techniques, including montage, self-reference, reuse, noise, dissonance, and chronological disarray. Kersey weaves these medieval case studies together with insights from a wide array of interdisciplinary scholarship, using a methodology that will prove important for historians: Facing Images produces a history of non-Western art in which diverse and anachronic works are brought responsibly and equitably into dialogue with the present, without being subsumed under Eurocentric formalisms or false universals.A timely intervention in the history of medieval Japanese art, art historiography, and the history of global modernism, Facing Images redefines the relationship of the "premodern" non-West to "modern" art. It will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval Japanese art and of modernism.

The works covered in college art history classes frequently depict violence against women. Traditional survey textbooks highlight the impressive formal qualities of artworks depicting rape, murder, and other violence but often fail to address the violent content and context. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer investigates the role that the art history field has played in the past and can play in the future in education around gender violence in the arts. It asks art historians, museum educators, curators, and students to consider how, in the time of #MeToo, a public reckoning with gender violence in art can revitalize the field of art history.Contributors to this timely volume amplify the voices and experiences of victims and survivors depicted throughout history, critically engage with sexually violent images, open meaningful and empowering discussions about visual assaults against women, reevaluate how we have viewed and narrated such works, and assess how we approach and teach famed works created by artists implicated in gender-based violence. Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer includes contributions by the editors as well as Veronica Alvarez, Indira Bailey, Melia Belli Bose, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ria Brodell, Megan Cifarelli, Monika Fabijanska, Vivien Green Fryd, Carmen Hermo, Bryan Keene, Natalie Madrigal, Lisa Rafanelli, Nicole Scalissi, Hallie Rose Scott, Theresa Sotto, and Angela Two Stars. It is sure to be of keen interest to art history scholars and students and anyone working at the intersections of art and social justice.

Painting has long dominated discussions of Netherlandish art. Yet in the sixteenth century, sculpture was held in considerably higher regard than painting, especially in foreign lands. This beautifully illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of sixteenth-century Netherlandish sculpture, and it opens an important window onto the works and milieu of these artists. Netherlanders dominated the sculptural world of northern Europe. They made the most prestigious tombs and altarpieces, alabaster reliefs, and boxwood collectables for patrons throughout Iberia, France, and Central Europe. Even in Italy they exerted a formidable presence; the most famous sculptor in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century was Giambologna, a Fleming who spent the greater part of his career in Florence. A great many of these artists immigrated to foreign courts--so many that the history of Netherlandish sculpture in the second half of the sixteenth century plays out largely abroad. Netherlandish carvers and casters relocated to what are today Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Ukraine. Sculpture, more so than painting, was an essential tool in discourses of power.Offering an essential new perspective on a fascinating period in art history, Actors Carved and Cast will appeal to scholars of sculpture and all those interested in Northern Renaissance art.

Renaissance sculptor Pietro Torrigiano has long held a place in the public imagination as the man who broke Michelangelo's nose. Indeed, he is known more for that story than for his impressive prowess as an artist. This engagingly written and deeply researched study by Felipe Pereda, a leading expert in the field, teases apart legend and history and reconstructs Torrigiano's work as an artist. Torrigiano was, in fact, one of the most fascinating characters of the sixteenth century. After fighting in the Italian wars with Cesare Borgia, the Florentine artist traveled across four countries, working for such patrons as Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands and the Tudors in England. Toriggiano later went to Spain, where he died in prison, accused of heresy by the Inquisition for breaking a sculpture of the Virgin and Child that he had made with his own hands. In the course of his travels, Torrigiano played a crucial role in the dissemination of the style and the techniques that he learned in Florence, and he interacted with local artisanal traditions and craftsmen, developing a singular terracotta modeling technique that is both a response to the authority of Michelangelo and a unique testimony of artists' mobility in the period.As Pereda shows, Torrigiano's life and work constitute an ideal example to rethink the geography of Renaissance art, challenging us to reconsider the model that still sees the Renaissance as expanding from an Italian center into the western periphery.

By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, ElochukwuUzukwu uses the framework of this "ancient" Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large--a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied to the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism.Even while enslaved, Uzukwu argues, the Kongo people served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world, and without their support, the European missions in the region would have failed. A cutting-edge contribution to the political history of Catholicism in Africa, Memorializing the Unsung offers concrete advantages to researchers in a wide variety of fields.

Born into one of the wealthiest families in Philadelphia and raised and educated in that vital center of eighteenth-century American Quakerism, Anne Emlen Mifflin was a progressive force in early America. This detailed and engaging biography, which features Anne's collected writings and selected correspondence, revives her legacy.Anne grew up directly across the street from the Pennsylvania statehouse, where the Continental Congress was leading the War of Independence. A Quaker minister whose busy pen, agile mind, and untiring moral energy produced an extensive corpus of writings, Anne was an ardent abolitionist and social reformer decades before the establishment of women's anti-slavery societies. And at a time when most Americans never ventured beyond their own village, hamlet, or farm, Anne journeyed thousands of miles. She traveled to settlements of Friends on the frontier and met with Native Americans in the rough country of northwestern Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada. Our Beloved Friend provides a unique window onto the lives of Quakers during the pre-Revolutionary era, the establishment of the New Republic, and the War of 1812.

Alan Mintz (1947-2017) was a singular figure in the American Jewish literary landscape. In addition to publishing six authoritative books and numerous journal articles on modern and contemporary Jewish culture, Mintz contributed countless reviews and essays to literary journals, including the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and the Jewish Review of Books. Scattered in miscellaneous volumes and publications, these writings reveal aspects of Mintz's scholarly personality that are not evident in his monographs. American Hebraist collects fifteen of Mintz's most insightful articles and essays. The topics range from the life and work of Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon--including a chapter from Mintz's unfinished literary biography of that author--to Jewish and Israeli literature, the Holocaust, and a rare autobiographical essay. The chapters are introduced and contextualized by Mintz's longtime colleague and friend David Stern, who opens the book by tracing the arc of Mintz's intellectual career; the volume concludes with a personal essay and remembrance written by Beverly Bailis, the last student to complete a doctorate under Mintz's direction.Brimming with erudition and intriguing biographical notes, American Hebraist provides new insights into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most important scholars of modern Hebrew literature. Students and scholars alike will benefit from this essential companion to Mintz's scholarship.

In this penetrating biography of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, S. Scott Rohrer takes readers deep into the intellectual world of a leading loyalist who defended monarchy, rejected rebellion and democracy, and opposed the American Revolution.Talented, hardworking, and erudite, this Anglican minister from New Jersey possessed one of the Church of England's most outstanding minds. Chandler was an Anglican leader in the 1760s and a key strategist in the effort to strengthen the American church in the years preceding the Revolution. He headed the campaign to create an Anglican bishopric in America--a cause that helped inflame tensions with American radicals unhappy with British policies. And, in the 1770s, his writings provided some of the most trenchant criticisms of the American revolutionary movement, raising fundamental questions about obedience, subordination, and rebellion that undercut Whig assertions about republicanism and popular control. Working from Chandler's library catalog and other primary sources, Rohrer digs into Chandler's political and religious beliefs, exploring their origins and the events in British history that shaped them.An intriguing and thoughtful reappraisal of a consequential figure in early American history, this biography will captivate students, scholars, and lay readers interested in politics and religion in Revolutionary-era America.