Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World

This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World investigates for the first time how seismic religious changes, a dramatic rise in the availability and consumption of goods, and new global connections transformed the nature and experience of religious material life.[-][-]This edited volume is the first work to engage with religious materiality comparatively across the early modern world. It demonstrates how artefacts can provide their own bodies of material evidence about the nature of early modern religious practice and belief - and the nature of religious change - that can test, or even run counter to conventional, text-based narratives. Across twelve chapters this volume offers an unprecedented survey of early modern religious materiality in all its diversity. It brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of areas of expertise, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. At the same time, the volume emphasizes cultural encounter and exchange. In keeping with broader trends in the history of religion, the studies range from the use of objects prescribed by religious authorities to interactions with religious matter in the context of everyday lay beliefs Table of Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I – Meanings 1. Wax versus Wood: The Material of Votive Offerings in Renaissance Italy 2. The Substance of Divine Grace: Ex-votos and the Material of Paper in Early Modern Italy 3. Powerful Objects in Powerful Places: Pilgrimage, Relics and Sacred Texts in Tibetan Buddhism 4. Myer Myers: Silversmith in the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Ledger Part II – Practices 5. Christian Materiality between East and West: Notes of a Capuchin among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire 6. The Materiality of Death in Early Modern Venice 7. Living with the Virgin in the Colonial Andes: Images and Personal Devotion 8. ‘Watching myself in the mirror, I saw ʿAlī in my eyes’: On Sufi Visual and Material Practice in the Balkans Part III – Transformations 9. Religious Materiality in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II 10. The Reformation of the Rosary Bead: Protestantism and the Perpetuation of the Amber Paternoster 11. Magical Words: Arabic Amulets in Christian Spain 12. Mesoamerican Idols, Spanish Medicine: Jade in the Collection of Philip II Epilogue Index

Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World investigates for the first time how seismic religious changes, a dramatic rise in the availability and consumption of goods, and new global connections transformed the nature and experience of religious material life.