The early modern world was as enigmatic as it was dynamic. New epistemologies and technologies, open controversies about the world and afterworld, encounters with various cultures, and numerous forms of entertainment wetted the appetite for ever-new sensational experiences, an emerging visual language, and different social constellations. Thaumaturgy, the art of making wonder, was the historical term under which many of these forms were subsumed: encompassing everything from magic lanterns to puppets to fireworks, and deliberately mingling the spheres of commercial entertainment, art, and religion. But thaumaturgy was not just an idle pastime but a vital field of cultural and intercultural negotiation. This Element introduces this field and suggests a new form of historiography-media ecology-which focuses on connections, formations, and transformations and takes a global perspective.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was one of the main centers of media in Europe. These media included newspapers, pamphlets, news digests, and engravings. Early Modern Media and the News in Europe brings together fifteen articles dealing with this early news industry in relation to politics and society, written by Joop W. Koopmans in recent decades. They demonstrate the important Dutch position within early modern news networks in Europe. Moreover, they address a variety of related themes, such as the supply of news during wars and disasters, the speed of early modern news reports, the layout of early newspapers and the news value of their advertisements, and censorship of books and news media.

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way - not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

Through a multidisciplinary collection of case studies, this book explores the effects of the digital age on medieval and early modern studies. Divided into five parts, the book examines how people, medieval and modern, engage with medieval media and technology through an exploration of the theory underpinning audience interactions with historical materials in the past and the real-world engagement of a twenty-first century audience with medieval and early modern studies through the multimodal lens of a vast digital landscape. Each case study reveals the diversity of medieval media and technology and challenges readers to consider new types of literacy competencies as scholarly, rigorous methods of engaging in pre-modern investigations of materiality. Essays in the first section engage in the examination of medieval media, mediation, and technology from a theoretical framework, while the second section explores how digitization, smart technologies, digital mapping, and the internet have shaped medieval and early modern studies today. The book will be of interest to students in undergraduate or graduate intermediate or advanced courses as well as scholars, in medieval studies, art history, architectural history, medieval history, literary history, and religious history.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information, social and economic developments, and religion, including chapters on Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam.

The papers in this collection offer new perspectives on Scottish early-modern literature and letters that invite the revision and expansion of previous selections of critical choices. They introduce less familiar writers and texts, investigating contexts and interrogating continuities of time, genre and culture. Moving across traditional disciplinary boundaries, they relate literature to the world of letters and the late-medieval to the Enlightenment, laying bare the outline of complex literary and cultural patterns that link courtly to popular, Gaelic to Lowland, Scotland to England as well as Continental Europe. The collection thus becomes more than the some of its parts and assumes conceptual importance, demonstrating that a view from the edge can be as informative and stimulating as one from the imagined centre.

Taking the reader back to the early modern period, this book addresses the works of Shakespeare, and asks how historical texts might be seen to interplay with identity. Beginning with Stephen Greenblatt's illuminating essay, questions are raised about how we come up with "important" historical texts, how we use educational and cultural institutions to maintain their primacy, and what the costs of this can be. Several of the essays look at ways of defining "the self" in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the working-through of these notions in various writings. Others tell us about how people traveled and the effects of travel on selfhood - how they dressed, how they celebrated special occasions, and how they thought of work and pleasure. The authors reflect on recent methodological concerns and adapt them to new issues in historically-oriented literary and cultural studies. They offer important contributions to new directions in scholarship. The book emerges from a symposium held at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, to celebrate the work of Stephen Greenblatt. Drawing on Greenblatt's methodologies, contributors examine strategies by which we "know" ourselves through our relationships with the past.

A book written in honour of the Tudor historian Joe Salvin with contributions from 14 highly regarded scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. It covers the interplay between the state, sovereign and society suitable for students and academics interested in early modern English history.