Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World

Suzanna Ivanic is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on religion and material culture in central Europe and she has published on religious material culture and on travelogues in early modern Bohemia. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious materiality of seventeenth-century Prague.Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. While she has published on many different aspects of religion, her recent work has focused especially on the material culture of devotion. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Andrew Morrall is Professor of Early Modern Art and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. He has written widely on the visual and material culture of the Reformation and, most recently, on urban craft productions and the Kunstkammer. His publications include Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg.

• Introduction - Editors Part I - Meanings 1. Wax versus wood: the material of votive offerings in Renaissance Italy - Mary Laven 2. The substance of divine grace: Ex-votos and the material of paper in early modern Italy - Maria Alessandra Chessa 3. Powerful objects in powerful places: pilgrimage, relics and sacred texts in Tibetan Buddhism - Hildegard Diemberger 4. Myer Myers: Silversmith in the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Ledger - Vivian B. Mann Part II - Practices 5. Christian materiality between East and West: Notes of a Capuchin among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire - John-Paul Ghobrial 6. The materiality of death in early modern Venice - Alexandra Bamji 7. Living with the Virgin in the Colonial Andes: Images and personal devotion - Gabriela Ramos 8. 'Watching myself in the mirror, I saw 'Ali in my eyes': On Sufi visual and material practice in the Balkans - Sara Kuehn Part III - Transformations 9. Religious materiality in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II - Suzanna Ivanic 10. The Reformation of the rosary bead: Protestantism and the perpetuation of the Amber Pater Noster - Rachel King 11. Magical words: Arabic amulets in Christian Spain - Abigail Krasner Balbale 12. Mesoamerican idols, Spanish medicine: Jade in the collection of Philip II - Kate E. Holohan Epilogue - Caroline Walker Bynum Index

"This volume is a fine example of what the material turn in historical studies can produce. All of the essays are framed as historical rather than theoretical projects and proceed by historicizing materiality within the coordinates of time and place. The prose is uniformly clear and lends the book to classroom use. Readers will benefit from the authors’ careful attention to the material characteristics of the artifacts and practices they study. All of the essays teach in one way or another that matter matters. What things are made of, how they are made, and how people used them come to the fore to demonstrate the difference that the material turn makes in historical work."- David Morgan, Duke University, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXIV, No. 2, 2021