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On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.
On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.
Abstract
The early modern reception of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (1542) is extensive and has been studied in detail. There are, however, four texts that reproduce part of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative that have been overlooked: the first Italian and Spanish editions of Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores (1520) and two works by Belleforest. An examination of these volumes provides a fuller geography of reception of the Relación and reveals a chronology of intellectual transformation that precedes that examined by other scholars.
Abstract
This paper explores the meaning of heraldry for sixteen- and seventeenth-century German publishers and artists, and how they represented their own positions within frameworks bound by tradition and heritage. By examining the introductions, prefaces, and other textual evidence in printed heraldic guides by Johann Siebmacher and other notable printer/creators who produced encyclopedic catalogues of familial, municipal, and ecclesiastical armorial bearings, we can investigate how the expansion of Germanic heraldry and printing innovations made these works accessible to a larger audience.
Abstract
Some of the genres in which the notion of virtues comprising the human character was propagated most profoundly were (1) the German Fürstenspiegel whose mostly burgher authors portrayed their vision of a ruler’s desirable virtues and (2) the funeral orations, in which the preacher took stock of how far a ruler had come in this noble and necessary endeavor of lifelong self-improvement. Sometimes the authors used illustrations, including emblems, to enhance the figures of speech they had used in their oratory to illustrate their points. The funeral orations delivered during the funerals of Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Austria-Tirol (1628–1662) and his brother Archduke Sigismund Franz (1630–1665) by Ernst Bidermann SJ (†1688) show the use of emblems both in the text and in illustrations for depicting the ideal figure of a ruler based on the personal characteristics of Ferdinand Karl and Sigismund Franz.
Abstract
This study traces the mobility of a narrowly focused emblematic topos across remote geographies for approximately 150 years. The emblem pictura of the open book with a sword (or a helmet) has been consistently employed in various configurations to communicate the importance of strength and learning for good governance. This emblem motif and its variations are followed first northward, from Altdorf and Nürnberg to the Baltic regions, and then in an entirely new trajectory westward, across the Atlantic to the colony of Pennsylvania. Beginning with the Altdorf prize medallions in the late 1570s, this chronology of emblematic mobility concludes with the first known emblems in the American colonies. The “afterlives” of these emblems are remarkable, and their mobility attests to their successful translation across various media, social and political contexts, and vast distances. In stark contrast to this geographic diversity, the semantic stability of these emblems is striking.