At their completion, at some time between 1244 and 1254, Cardinal Conti’s fresco decorations extended across every available wall in Santi Quattro Coronati’s great hall, from the floor level to the tops of the ribbed vaults, and even across the jambs of the doors and windows (Figure 1.1). At present, less than half of the original wall paintings remain intact. Preserved are portions of the south bay vault and the upper halves of all six walls; however, the paintings that covered the north bay vault and the lower halves of the walls are lost. In light of such lacunae, it is remarkable that the paintings which do remain offer a relatively clear sense of the mural program’s thematic focus as a whole. A quick scan of the preserved frescoes reveals a unified system of knowledge organized into distinct subunits. In the south bay, the months of the year and the personified seasons represent knowledge of time, the stars and planets painted on the vault represent cosmological knowledge, and images of the liberal arts in the lunettes represent knowledge of the ancients as preserved and disseminated through institutionalized education (Figures 1.2–1.4). In the north bay, the cycle of virtues and vices represents moral, historical, and theological knowledge, while the images of Roman antiquities represent the city’s material heritage and the idea of Rome as a site of Christian triumph over paganism (Figures 1.5–1.7). This program of images constitutes a “pictorial encyclopedia” in the sense that its combined treatment of temporal, cosmological, historical, moral, and educational themes approximates the diversity of subject matter and organizational logic found in textual encyclopedias of the medieval period. While comparable iconographic programs were executed in sculpture for the façades of French cathedrals in the twelfth century, Conti’s great hall is one of the earliest fresco programs to feature encyclopedic knowledge.

This chapter reads Richard II’s garden scene in the context of early modern debates about sacramentalism and the created world. The garden scene reveals its awareness of these debates and the ways in which they occurred in genres both high (learned tracts, printed books) and low (oral cultures, cheap print). The gardener demonstrates his political and theological sophistication through his hands-on knowledge of gardening. In the same way, ordinary people off-stage participated in their culture’s most urgent controversies through popular genre that were frequently dismissed by their social betters.

Chapter 1 analyzes Palladio’s design for Villa Pisani in relation to ancient and Renaissance architectural theory, local building practice, and his own written and built works. Although Palladio’s approach to typology was more flexible than generally understood, the building is recognizably a hybrid of a villa and a palace, which can be linked to Alberti’s conception of the suburban residence (hortus suburbanus).

Chapter 1 opens with a description of the different peoples of the Americas in 1492 and the earliest contacts with Europeans, and outlines the process of Spanish penetration and settlement. It then explores indigenous reactions to Europeans at first contact, and analyzes the roots of the apotheosis of Europeans in Spanish America, arguing that it is misleading to distinguish too sharply between religious and rational considerations, and indicating that native peoples did not bow before the strangers as gods. The chapter then shifts the focus to the intellectual framework employed by Europeans to situate native peoples within a European worldview (European Mythology of the Indies I). Europeans interpreted indigenous peoples according to their own mythological concepts, such as the myth of the Earthly Paradise, the myth of the Reconquest of Jerusalem, the myth of the Marvelous East, and the myths of the Classical Tradition. The chapter ends with a summary of Spanish expansion into the Pacific.

The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Vitruvius’s theory of architecture as art and science as well as the Reformation and the rise of print spurred a “figural turn” in architectural culture and the advent of a new genre of architectural images. In northern Europe, four institutions – artist guilds, publishers, masons’ lodges, and courts – acted as the key contexts for the figural turn. Artists began to specialize in forming architectural images, thereby making inroads into architectural professions and enriching the conventional practices of architectural design with new artistic and scientific modes of visual research. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, façade paintings by Wendel Dietterlin and Hans Holbein the Younger, and printer Bernhard Jobin’s collaborations with builder Daniel Specklin to form scientifically informed architectural prints all exemplify the figural turn. So, too, did Dietterlin’s botanically rich mural for the Strasbourg Masons and Stonecutters, as well as an empirically conceived, microcosmic interior Dietterlin made for the Duke of Württemberg. By the middle of the sixteenth century, artists and natural philosophers had introduced empirical visual research methods to northern Europe’s developing culture of architectural images, setting the stage for Dietterlin’s seminal Architectura.

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Chapter 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

Lord Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth, arriving in Ireland in 1633, unified disparate Ireland into opposition, culminating in his 1641 impeachment, trial, and execution in London. Months later, Ulster and then Ireland more broadly, rose in rebellion. Milton’s first published prose works, including his formative anti-prelatical tracts precede and follow the Ulster Rising. Increasingly Milton addresses Ireland, and the Rising. In James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Milton finds an Irish interlocutor, and foil.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.

This study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, the book recreates the worlds and dilemmas of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, while mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, and a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, these actions were those of everyday and extraordinary individuals who were important intellectual actors in the early modern Atlantic world. They reckoned in their daily lives with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. They discussed ideas about slavery and freedom with Black kin, friends, and associates in the sites where they lived and across vast distances, sometimes generating spheres of communication that stretched across the early modern Atlantic world. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of the early modern Atlantic. This introduction provides an outline of the book’s main argument, methodology, and the six chapters and the coda that follow.

Beginning with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the chapter maps the history of Renaissance glass mirror-making from the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon to seventeenth-century Paris. It also offers a typology of Renaissance mirror types across the decorative arts and scientific instruments of the period. Further, it considers the idea of the mirror as an agent of light, reflection, and illusion across a range of cultural domains, comprising folklore, myth, and literature.

Chapter 1 explains the theoretical framework deployed throughout the book, largely drawn from the companion volume, Unearthly Powers. Above all, this means explaining the two forms of religiosity – immanentism and transcendentalism – and how they related to each other. While immanentism is a default or universal strand of human life, transcendentalism defines what is distinctive about the religions of salvation that emerged from the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE. These world religions also contained an immanentist element, however, even as they produced reform movements that insisted on the transcendentalist dimension. These modes also gave rise to two different means by which rulers could be sacralised: divinised kingship (immanentism) and righteous kingship (transcendentalism). The chapter then fleshes out a tripartite model for ruler conversion: (1) religious diplomacy often first induced rulers to favour foreign missionaries; (2) immanent power, or supernatural assistance in this life, tended to be crucial in convincing them to make a change of allegiance, and (3) the Christianisation of their realms was linked to its capacity to enhance their authority. Lastly, the themes of cultural glamour and intellectual appeal are introduced.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

Major spent his career in a strategic borderland where knowledge was embroiled in long-running territorial disputes. Competing princes built collections, laboratories, and intelligence-gathering networks in attempts to strengthen the resources of the land and their hold upon it. Their rival attempts to found global colonies and establishing long-distance trading networks entangled tightly with their global collections. The Gottorf dukes intended the new university to be another fixture of a state-building apparatus that already included glassworks, a chymical laboratory, extensive gardens, a celebrated collection, a planetarium, and an impressive library. These nearby facilities offered the University of Kiel sophisticated resources. They also illustrated the dangers of intertwining knowledge tightly with use. The shifting political situation allowed and even required scholars to seek beyond a single patron for support. This setting can illuminate Major’s attempts to defend academic independence, to develop audiences across rival states and a broader public, and to develop "unprejudiced" approaches.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

Caroline Randall Williams’ 2019 collection reorients the biographical speculation surrounding the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets toward the woman who has been advanced as their inspiration, focusing on her instead of on Shakespeare, to help embody black women’s often-obscured history in the west.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.