Overview

This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.

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Reviews

This volume is a fine example of what the material turn in historical studies can produce. All of the essays are framed as historical rather than theoretical projects and proceed by historicizing materiality within the coordinates of time and place. The prose is uniformly clear and lends the book to classroom use. Readers will benefit from the authors' careful attention to the material characteristics of the artifacts and practices they study. All of the essays teach in one way or another that matter matters. What things are made of, how they are made, and how people used them come to the fore to demonstrate the difference that the material turn makes in historical work. - David Morgan, Duke University, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, No. 2, 2021

Author Information

Suzanna Ivanic is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on religion and material culture in central Europe and she has published on religious material culture and on travelogues in early modern Bohemia. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious materiality of seventeenth-century Prague. Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. While she has published on many different aspects of religion, her recent work has focused especially on the material culture of devotion. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Andrew Morrall is Professor of Early Modern Art and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. He has written widely on the visual and material culture of the Reformation and, most recently, on urban craft productions and the Kunstkammer. His publications include Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg.

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