Relics, Dreams, Voyages

Relics, dreams, voyages conjures a new cultural map of the early-modern world. Its main theme is centre and periphery, and many exiles are celebrated here: Jacobites and recusant Catholics; wandering Gaelic scholars; mercenary soldiers in Moravia and Slovenia; art dealers in c18 Rome. This book also considers centres of baroque culture outside the mainstream: exiled English Catholic Colleges in Flanders and Spain; a remote symbolic garden in rural Scotland; architectural fantasies from an isolated circle at Birr in the midlands of Ireland. It meditates on cultural transmission from Asia and the Americas to Europe: one test case is the painter Rubens, his circle of Antwerp Jesuits, and what they learned from the New Worlds. Many of the essays consider the secretive cultures of exiled or persecuted British Roman Catholics, including the pseudo-relics constructed in Antwerp for the posthumous cult of Mary Queen of Scots, and the triumphal procession of a vandalised statue at the exiled English College in Valladolid. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the subtle, sometimes secret patterns of baroque culture worldwide. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from "China to Peru."