Brepols Online Books Other Miscellanea Archive v2016 - bobar16miot

Over the course of the fifteenth century easel paintings edged out tapestries, frescoes and wood inlay pictures on the walls of private dwellings. Millions of such paintings were produced in the period 1450-1800, in all shapes and sizes, and across the whole range of prices. Who bought them? How were they distributed? What place did they occupy among other "luxury" possessions? Such questions seem to require that visual culture be treated as an integral part of family spending and commercial pursuits. This volume is the outcome of a four-year collaboration between art historians, economists, social historians and museum professionals from the US, Australia and Europe; its aim was to map the new ground identified by these and related questions, in local contexts, but with comparative and longitudinal concerns constantly in mind. The result is an entirely new matrix of the business and artistic interactions through which visual cultures in early modern Europe were formed. The editors, Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, an economist and an art historian, have collaborated across their disciplines for ten years. Here they have interspersed participants' essays with brief connecting observations, to produce a text that respects disciplinary expertise while making connections across locations and across time. Much has been written about European paintings; but how markets in paintings emerged, who they served, what roles and institutions were developed that enabled them to function effectively, and how exchange affected visual preferences, have not been studied in such a deliberately wide-angled, comparative way. Mapping Markets is not only a book about paintings, but a compendium of cross-disciplinary methods and insights. It charts the state of research in this trans-disciplinary field, identifies gaps, and poses questions for scholars and students wishing to pursue further the issues raised here.

The thirteen articles in this volume deal with the Neo-Latin emblem book after the birth of the genre with Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (1531). While the interest in emblematics has grown considerably during the last decades, the seminal Neo-Latin production has received relatively little attention. In Mundus Emblematicus an international team of experts in the field makes this part of the emblem tradition accessible to a broad scholarly audience. The articles cover a variety of emblem books published at the time, ranging from influential humanist collections (for instance those by Achille Bocchi, Hadrianus Junius, or Joachim Camerarius) to alchemist (Michael Maier) or religious emblems (such as the books of the Calvinist Théodere de Bèze, or the Jesuit Herman Hugo). In each paper subjects dealt with include the historical context of the work and its makers, the relation between word and image, the structure of the collection as a whole, and the emblematic game (intertextuality in word and image). Moreover, several articles explore the interaction between the emblem and connected literary phenomena, like the commonplace-book, the fable or the use of commentaries. All papers are in English and all examples from Latin texts are translated.

Together, these articles show the variety within the Neo-Latin emblem production, thus challenging traditional approaches of the emblem. As such Mundus Emblematicus contributes towards a more comprehensive view of the forms and functions of the genre as a whole

Until the 19th century very large areas of Western Europe were subject to some degree to common rights, where individual users collectively managed resources such as pasture and wood which were central to the agrarian economy. Much scholarship has focused on the dissolution of these rights and the effects of the enclosure of common land on society and agricultural productivity. In contrast, this volume seeks to assess in a comparative framework the long-term management of the common lands and the relative success of strategies in providing the resources sought by the rural population. Chapters covering northern and southern England, France, the Netherlands, Flanders, Sweden and northern and southern Germany examine the institutional and legal framework of commoning, the resources available and their value, the sustainability of practices, and policies of inclusion and exclusion among the group of commoners. Building on the theoretical insights of recent works on commonly managed resources, this volume, the result of an international collaboration in the CORN network, provides a series of detailed historical studies and is the first major work to address this central aspect of the agrarian economy in a comparative European context.

The history of marriage in Western Europe, because of its peculiarities when viewed in a global setting, compels attention. This volume examines rural marriage patterns in the long run, relating these to changing economic conditions in the North Sea area, from c. 1400 to the present. More than thirty years after Hajnal's path-breaking publication it presents a state of the art as regards the study of the European Marriage Pattern in Ireland, Scotland, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia. By examining different forms of rural economy such as peasant farming, capitalist farming, prot-industry and other systems of production with differing implications for marriage and family formation, demographic and economic mechanisms emerge more clearly. Turning from description to explanation, a complex of interacting factors which regulate the formation of new households is identified and new directions into the research of this phenomenon are promoted. This volume comprises 11 article-chapters and introduction and conclusion and is the result of international collaboration from members of the CORN network. It is a work of richness, subtlety and historical depth, which makes essential reading for those interested in the evolution of marriage patterns, in the distant past and in more recent times.