Editor

Paula Findlen (Ubaldo Pierrotti Professor of Italian History and Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University, USA)

Introduction

Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 is a collection of 17 essays edited by Findlen, which explores what we can learn about the early modern world by studying its things and their meanings and how these change over time, from culture to culture and across geographic locations. The geography of objects is a central theme to the collection as a whole which, without trying to be comprehensive, covers everything from still-life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age to clothing of the Ottoman Empire, artisanal inventories from 17th-century Florence to artefacts collected by the Shogun in Tokugawa Japan, furniture from Georgian England to ginseng in Ming China. The temporally and culturally diverse set of examples is employed to illustrate that the ‘history of material culture is one of the most productive areas in which to develop intersecting narratives of the past, some of them local and comparative, others cross-cultural, transnational, and global’ (p. 6). By juxtaposing these case studies, the volume encourages the reader to look beyond the confines of their own subject matter and consider the value that cross-cultural comparisons of material culture may have. Findlen is especially successful in this endeavor in her introduction, because by looking to all these vastly different geographic areas, she identifies global patterns of early modern consumption, circulation, and use. The world of early modern goods is firmly established as an essential element in the study of global history.

Key words

Early modern

Publisher: Routledge (March 2021)

ISBN:9781138483149