front cover of The Key of Green
The Key of Green
Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture
Bruce R. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From Shakespeare’s “green-eyed monster” to the “green thought in a green shade” in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” the color green was curiously prominent and resonant in English culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among other things, green was the most common color of household goods, the recommended wall color against which to view paintings, the hue that was supposed to appear in alchemical processes at the moment base metal turned to gold, and the color most frequently associated with human passions of all sorts. A unique cultural history, The Key of Green considers the significance of the color in the literature, visual arts, and popular culture of early modern England.
Contending that color is a matter of both sensation and emotion, Bruce R. Smith examines Renaissance material culture—including tapestries, clothing, and stonework, among others—as well as music, theater, philosophy, and nature through the lens of sense perception and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, Smith offers a highly sophisticated meditation on the nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion that will resonate with students and scholars of the early modern period and beyond. Like the key to a map, The Key of Green provides a guide for looking, listening, reading, and thinking that restores the aesthetic considerations to criticism that have been missing for too long.
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front cover of Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England
Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England
Nandini Das
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Following the model of Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period. In many cases, the concepts, preconceptions, and debates that they embody – or sometimes subsume – came to play formative roles in the articulation of identity, rights, and power in subsequent periods. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the development of issues of identity, belonging, and human mobility.
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The Kindness of Strangers
The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
John Boswell
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.
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front cover of Kinship, Language, and Prehistory
Kinship, Language, and Prehistory
Per Hage and the Renaissance in Kinship Studies
Doug Jones
University of Utah Press, 2010

A chronicle of the renaissance in kinship studies, these seventeen articles pay tribute to Per Hage, one of the founding fathers of the movement and long-time faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. With mathematician Frank Harary, Hage pioneered the use of graph theoretical models in anthropology, a systematic analysis of diverse cognitive, social, and cultural components that provides a common technical vocabulary for the entire field. Anthropological studies have benefited from quantitative evaluation, particularly kinship, which is newly appreciated for its application to all social sciences. The chapters of this book, some original works by the contributors and some unpublished Hage material, attest to the importance of the continual study of kinship.

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front cover of Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence
Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence
Emanuele Lugli
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence.

In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological practices.
 
By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with hair, Lugli foregrounds hair’s association to death and gathers insights about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions about the entanglement of politics and desire.
 
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