Search results for ""Author Mary E. Barnard""

Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the "new poetry" of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire. Mary E. Barnard's study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso's poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.

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A Poetry of Things examines the works of four poets whose use of visual and material culture contributed to the remarkable artistic and literary production during the reign of Philip III (1598–1621). Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Juan de Arguijo, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza cast cultural objects – ranging from books and tombstones to urban ruins, sculptures, and portraits – as participants in lively interactions with their readers and viewers across time and space. Mary E. Barnard argues that in their dialogic performance, these objects serve as sites of inquiry for exploring contemporary political, social, and religious issues, such as the preservation of humanist learning in an age of print, the collapse of empires and the rebirth of the city, and the visual culture of the Counter-Reformation. Her inspired readings explain how the performance of cultural objects, whether they remain in situ or are displayed in a library, museum, or convent, is the most compelling.

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