Search results for ""Author Bronwen Wilson""

Examines how mechanisms of change and conversions harrowed and transformed early modern people and their worlds Brings forward the history of made things and the history of practices as a new way of understanding the social and political dimensions of early modern conversion (mostly religious conversion but also bodily, sexual, and machine-to-human kinds of transformation) Engenders a multidisciplinary approach to conversion as a process of change including history, art and architectural histories, literary studies, and philosophy Focuses on the 16th and 17th centuries with case studies of conversion machines that operated in England, New Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, France, and islands in the Mediterranean Develops accounts of systems and mechanisms for attracting converts, and for managing, manipulating, and staging conversions Individual chapters focus on literary works such as Hamlet, The Temple by George Herbert, and L'Isle des Hermaphrodites; works of art and architecture by Jacopo Ligozzi and Claudio de Arciniega, and thinkers such as Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz Individual chapters focus on spaces, movement, visions, sensory experiences, material, spiritual, and bodily transformations that are highly self-aware and inventive things Concludes with a pairing of philosophical chapters on what machines cannot do" and on "human conversion machines" Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements, and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical things at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain, and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation. The book does not seek to mechanize conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. But we maintain that conversion of all kinds must unfold in ecologies that include politics, law, religious practice, the arts, and the material and corporeal realms. Shifting the focus from subjectivity toward the operations of governments, institutions, artifices, and the body, the contributors to the volume consider how early moderns suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, sometimes were able to realize themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments, and experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies. "

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The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays that explore the material qualities of early Dutch art to reveal ways new forms of visual imagery solicit a beholder’s involvement. Explores how descriptive pictures during the early modern Dutch art period operated as social things and were designed to pleasurably engage the eye and prompt discussion and debate Shows how these works potentially raised ethical and political questions about the interconnectedness of engaging with pictures and the material world Represents a major contribution to the field of early modern Netherlandish art and to general debates about the status and functions of descriptive art Features essays addressing a variety of aspects of the field, from the historiography of Dutch art to closely attentive readings of particular works Crafts an original theoretical framework by applying recent insights about the making of early modern publics and the study of material things to the analysis of Netherlandish art

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Taking into account the destructive powers of globalization, Making Worlds considers the interconnectedness of the world in the early modern period. This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. The volume advances questions about the history of globalization by focusing on how the expansion of global transit offered possibilities for interactions that included the testing of local identities through inventive experimentation with new and various forms of culture. Case studies show how the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models on other parts of the world unleashed unprecedented forces of invention as institutionalized powers came up against the creativity of peoples, cultural practices, materials, and techniques of making. In doing so, Making Worlds offers an important rethinking of how early globalization inconsistently generated ongoing dynamics of making, unmaking, and remaking worlds.

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