Early Modern History

Durante las últimas tres décadas ha tenido lugar una constante reinterpretación historiográfica de las relaciones entre Italia y la Monarquía de España a lo largo de la Edad Moderna. La fortaleza de los nexos políticos entre la sociedad política hispana con el Estado de Milán y los reinos de Nápoles y Sicilia se fundamentaba en la legitimidad dinástica de unos soberanos compartidos, si bien tales lazos no fueron los únicos en reforzar la imagen de un pasado común. La vinculación entre los espacios hispano e italiano se fomentó por medio de canales diplomáticos y de redes financieras, por la sempiterna -y convulsa- reciprocidad con la Roma pontificia o, incluso, mediante la consolidación de un hinterland cultural italiano en Europa, impulsado en parte gracias a la presencia de la Monarquía de España por todo el continente.

THE JEWS IN ITALY DURING THE LONG RENAISSANCE

The University of Maryland (College Park), Johns Hopkins, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the Italian Research Program of National Interest-PRIN 2015 The Long History of Anti-Semitism, and the International Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents & Radicalism – EMoDiR  have organized an exciting series of three conferences during 2018–20 on the history of Jews in Italy during what is called the “long Renaissance.”

These meetings seek to explore forms of cooperation, imitation, exchange, alliance, and  interaction between Jews and Christians in early modern Italy. The research project seeks to challenge the traditional paradigm that looks at the history of Christian-Jewish interactions only through the prism of anti-Semitism. We seek to demonstrate strategies of coexistence between different religions and cultures, strategies that helped to shape early modern European political and social history and were instrumental in defining what has been defined as modernity.

The first conference on “Sabbateanism in Italy and its Mediterranean Context” will be hosted in Rome on January 20-22, 2019. Participants will investigate the Sabbatean excitement and the movement’s activities in Italy. Others will address the aftermath of this messianic movement in later generations on the Peninsula. We hope to broaden the conversation in several ways, first through consideration of other millenarian preaching and excitement among Jews during the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. Also participants have been encouraged to compare Sabbateanism with millenarian and heretical movements among Christians and Muslims in Italy, in the Mediterranean, and in Europe more widely. The conference will go beyond the enthusiasts themselves to describe the various types of reaction they elicited—whether celebration or suppression, passive disregard or active discipline

The second conference on “State Building and Minorities: Jews in Italy” will be held at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, May 5–7, 2019 and will focus particularly on the social history of Italian Jews and their interaction with the Christian society.  We want to investigate the reasons that lead Italian princes and republics to refuse the Spanish policy on Jews (expulsion), in favour of an ‘Italian way’ (concentration in ghettos) of structuring Christian-Jewish relations. Our aim is principally to insert the study of Jewish institutions, norms and behaviours into the broader context of Italian and Mediterranean history.

The third conference will be held in Jerusalem in January 2020 and deal with “Translations and Traditions: Mobilities of the Early-Modern Bible.” This meeting will move the focus to the intellectual and material culture of Italian Jews. We seek to cast light on the deep influence exercised by Jews in intellectual and material transformations that are considered typical of Italian Renaissance: philosophy and esotericism, printing and book culture, literature, music, artistic and non-artistic objects, figurative arts, housing and styles of living, religion and spirituality, trajectories of wealth and poverty, artistic patronage and antiquarianism.

Traditionally, the Renaissance has been understood as a strictly Western phenomenon, a period of cultural and technological ‘advancement’ inspired by humanism and antique revival. European art and the wider world 1350–1550 takes a different approach. Informed by the latest scholarship in the field of art history, it explores the significance of the movement of knowledge, ideas and objects for the visual culture of Europe, against the backdrop of a global competition for power and resources.

The book investigates famous works of art from a new perspective, taking account of the complex relationships that bound Europe together with Asia, America and Africa. It also considers lesser-known objects such as ceramics, textiles and featherwork which were widely imported into Europe. Considering a range of geographical contexts from Spain to India, it explores European visual culture in the light of trade, colonisation, conversion and cultural exchange. Individual chapters examine the altarpiece in a global context; cultural encounters on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas; European collections of non-European objects; and Venice’s engagement with the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Mamluk Sultanate.

European art and the wider world is the first textbook to consider the Renaissance in the context of global art history. It will appeal to undergraduate art history students as well as a general readership eager to look at canonical works from a new perspective.