Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe

Cultural exchange, the dynamic give and take between two or more cultures, has become a distinguishing feature of modern Europe. This was already an important feature to the elites of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it played a central role in their fashioning of self. The cultures these elites exchanged and often integrated with their own were both material and immaterial; they included palaces, city-dwellings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, dresses and jewellery, but also gestures, ways of sitting, standing and walking, and dances. In this innovative and well-illustrated volume all this lively exchange is traced from Bruges, Augsburg and Istanbul to Italy; from Italy to Paris, Amsterdam, Dresden, Novgorod and Moscow; and even from Brazil to Rouen. This volume, which reveals how a first European identity was forged, will appeal to cultural and art historians, as well as social and cultural anthropologists.

Preface; Cultural exchange and cultural transfer in early modern Europe: a theoretical perspective and examples Bernd Roeck; 1. The Baltic ceramic market 1200-1600: measuring Hanseatic cultural transfer and resistance David Gaimster; 2. Between Italy and Moscow: cultural crossroads and the culture of exchange Evelyn Welch; 3. Netherlandish painting and early Renaissance Italy: artistic rapports in a historiographical perspective Bernard Aikema; 4. Cultural transfer between Venice and the Ottomans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Deborah Howard; 5. Wandering objects, migrating artists: the appropriation of Italian Renaissance art by German courts in the sixteenth century Barbara Marx; 6. The dressed body: the moulding of identities in sixteenth-century France Isabelle Paresys; 7. Clothing and cultural exchange in Renaissance Germany Ulinka Rublack; 8. Gesture and comportment: diversity and uniformity Dilwyn Knox; 9. The exchange of dance cultures in Renaissance Europe: Italy, France and abroad Marina Nordera; 10. Dancing in the Dutch Republic: the uses of bodily memory Herman Roodenburg; 11. Imaginations of overseas cultures in Western European pageants, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Johan Verberckmoes; Bibliography.