Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,057
result(s) for
"renaissance reformation"
Sort by:
The Copernican question
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this \"long sixteenth century,\" from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed.
eBook
Global Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century Prague
The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions of seventeenth-century Prague burghers were religious objects that had come from exotic lands, such as a “coconut” rosary and a ruby and diamond “pelican in her piety” jewel. These objects were made in multiple locations and traded to satisfy a new demand for items that could aid and display devotion as well as act as markers of wealth and confessional identity. Through this study of religious objects, Central Europe is revealed to be an important locale to the global history of the early modern period.
Journal Article
Ester, a Missing Clasp, and Jewish Pawnbroking Networks in Renaissance Prague
In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.
Journal Article
Illuminating Methods, Picturing Instruments: Tycho Brahe's Instrumental Images
This article considers the function of twenty-two hand-colored prints of mathematical instruments in Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Instruments of the renewed astronomy; 1598), a hand-painted presentation treatise dedicated to Emperor Rudolf II and conferred on a network of individuals connected to the imperial court in Prague. Although the accompanying text communicates the instruments’ use and composition, the images demand close inspection because they articulate Brahe's observationally driven astronomy. They do so through structured, repeated, and consecutive representations; through expanded viewer access, achieved by adhering to multiple perspectives; through the juxtaposition of colors, which focuses attention on the heads of the instruments (the part that does the measuring); and through the use of gold paint, which emphasizes the head and brings to mind the very metallic nature of the instruments. Much like an astronomer taking multiple measurements of cosmological phenomena, these images allow viewers and readers, as they leaf through the pages of the treatise, to become virtual participants in Brahe's instauration of astronomy.
Journal Article
