Early Modern Visual Culture Research Articles

Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases & Early Modern Culture; <br>Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England; <br>John Donne's Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture

Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases & Early Modern Culture; <br>Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England; <br>John Donne's Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture

John Donne's poetry and early modern visual culture

This study argues the thesis that John Donne's poetry, already well-served by the insightful close readings of earlier generations of scholars, can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual culture. It points out that the focus on visual culture allows for a non-monolithic, flexible reading of Donne's verse, in part because it acknowledges that while the complexity of his religious identity has been well-explored, the complexity of his secular interest has perhaps been less thoroughly examined. Since a study of early modern visual culture is deeply concerned with the vicissitudes of the image, both religious and secular, such a context serves to integrate what in Donne sometimes invites polarity.Focused on close readings of several poems, the study is in two parts. On the one hand, it examines the visual culture of early modern England and argues that reading Donne's poetry enhances our understanding of how that culture actually operated when looked at through the experience of a practicing poet. On the other, it looks at Donne's verse and argues that reading that against the visual culture through which it participated adds a dimension to that verse that would otherwise be less accessible to us. Ann H. Hurley is Professor of English at Wagner College.

Written Texts--Visual Texts: Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Written Texts-Visual Texts: Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan Marcia Yonemoto Written Texts-Visual Texts: Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan. Edited by Susanne Formanek and Sepp Linhart. Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005. 368 pages. Hardcover €68.50/$95.00. Reading this lavishly illustrated volume on the rich and varied history of early modern visual and print culture, one is struck by how seldom continental European scholarship on Japan finds its way into the mainstream of the English-language Japanese-studies [End Page 107] literature. This is most regrettable, especially for students of the pre- and early modern periods, for European "japanologists" seem to devote relatively more scholarly energy to the pre-Meiji period than do their counterparts in the United States. It is a rare treat to see a collection of thirteen essays devoted entirely to early modern cultural history, and both the editors and publisher of the present volume have done a great service by bringing the essays in Written Texts-Visual Texts to an English-reading audience. The volume consists mostly of translations of essays published in German by the same editors a decade ago as Buch und Bild als gesellschaftliche Kommunikationsmittel in Japan einst und jetzt (Vienna: Literas, 1995). Some of the 1995 pieces have been omitted and several new ones added for this edition. Like most essay collections, the quality of the contributions varies, as do their interpretive and methodological frameworks, but in general, Written Texts-Visual Texts succeeds in enriching our understanding of the integration of text and image in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods (for reasons they do not adequately explain, the editors define "early modern" as the period between 1770 and 1880). The first four chapters in the book, which are among the collection's most substantial, fall under the somewhat vague heading "Modes of Reading Written and Visual Texts." Ekkehard May, who has published pioneering work in German on Tokugawa print culture, gives a straightforward overview of the integration of visual and written texts in Tokugawa literature in "Books and Book Illustrations in Early Modern Japan." He argues that the trend of incorporating the visual and the written began in Japan's classical era with the emergence of illustrated narrative picture scrolls (emakimono), flourished during the early modern period in various genres of published vernacular fiction, and continues to characterize Japanese literature to this day in the form of the ubiquitous manga comics. In a concise and sweeping conclusion, he proposes that the central (if not the only) reason for this durable integration lies in "the Japanese system of mixed scripts," in which "ideograms in their role as an optical code meet with the indigenous Japanese syllable script, which, in its turn, is a primarily phonetic code; thus, in many cases, purely phonetic renderings are not sufficient to transmit the complete information contained in a given text" (p. 43). Japanese readers, May argues, have over a long period of time become conditioned to the simultaneous apprehension of verbal and pictorial discourses. In the second chapter, "The Illustrated Household Encyclopedias That Once Civilized Japan," Yokoyama Toshio presents a summary of several decades' worth of his research on the encyclopedic texts known as setsuyōshū, which he translates as "compilations for [household] economy" or "compilations for occasional use" (p. 47). Setsuyōshū began as simple kanji dictionaries, but evolved into encyclopedias covering a wide range of information, including proper language usage, etiquette, geography, history, mathematics, cooking, first aid, the calendar, ritual observances, and more. In the seventeenth century setsuyōshū began to be used by educated commoners who increasingly had occasion to write formal correspondence. Yokoyama is most interested in the "civilizing" functions of early modern setsuyōshū, namely, the ways in which they defined for readers the "essential cornerstones of their national identity" by providing information about Japan, its land, and its people and "add[ed] refinement to their daily lives" by offering education in proper "manners, taste, morals, and beliefs" (pp. 50-51). By combining computer-aided analysis of the wear patterns on the pages of setsuyōshū with background information about their owners, Yokoyama argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, highly...

Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance Europe

1Jesus College, Oxford Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance Europe PeterEricksonClarkHulse PhiladelphiaU. of Pennsylvania P. 2000403£44 Paperback£19.50

Classicism, Enlightenment and the ‘Other’: thoughts on decoding eighteenth–century visual culture

Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ‘message’. The nineteenth–century Idealist notion of ‘art’, by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre–Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century’s use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi‐layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment’s dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ‘image–texts‘ of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ‘other’ into a self–reflexive and self–critical Enlightenment ideology.

Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (review)

Journal Article Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, eds. Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Get access Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Edited by Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pp. 405. Illus. $27.50 paper. Richard C. Mccoy Richard C. Mccoy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 53, Issue 4, Winter 2002, Pages 572–573, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2003.0031 Published: 01 December 2002

Early modern visual culture: representation, race, and empire in Renaissance England

Early modern visual culture: representation, race, and empire in Renaissance England

"Surrounded with Brilliants": Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England

This essay considers the relation between miniature portraits and the artifacts (such as snuffboxes and jewelery) in which they were commonly incorporated in England in the eighteenth century. Taking into account issues of material culture, court ritual and protocol, and questions of the performative human body within historically specific social and political environments, I argue for a holistic approach to the phenomenon of the portrait-object as a way of opening up avenues toward a better historical understanding of portraiture's functions and of the interactive relationship among imagery, three-dimensional objects, and the gendered body in early modern visual culture.

“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England

This essay considers the relation between miniature portraits and the artifacts (such as snuffboxes and jewelery) in which they were commonly incorporated in England in the eighteenth century. Taking into account issues of material culture, court ritual and protocol, and questions of the performative human body within historically specific social and political environments, I argue for a holistic approach to the phenomenon of the portrait-object as a way of opening up avenues toward a better historical understanding of portraiture's functions and of the interactive relationship among imagery, three-dimensional objects, and the gendered body in early modern visual culture.