Early Modern Global Materials, Materiality, and Material Culture
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2025) | Viewed by 2800
Special Issue Editor
Interests: 17th and 18th century Netherlands; arts of early modern northern Europe and Italy; early modern prints and material culture; gender and collecting
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Interpretive object-based inquiry has experienced a reinvigoration through the study of materials and materiality using the disciplinary approaches of Material Culture. This “material turn” (Riello, 2022) has opened new ways of thinking about objects and images that focus on the physical properties of thingness (Brown, 2001) and how people form connections to objects and use them as mediators in larger networks (LaTour, 2005). ‘Early Modern Global Materials, Materiality, and Material Culture’ welcomes scholarship that takes as a point of departure Michael Yonan’s assessment that material culture and materiality can be considered “a thing with specific physical characteristics that interact with a range of conceptual ones.” Researchers are invited to consider the richness that is inherent in the material object, through a variety of methodological approaches; recent studies have looked at the global circulation of material objects as cultural interlocutors. An exploration of sensory responses to or interactions with the object, conservation issues that speak to the object’s temporal nature, workshop practice and materials, or the physical uses of the object may be among the questions that probe its material nature, function, and meanings. Art historical submissions that address objects from the global Early Modern period, broadly defined as c. 1400–1800, are welcome.
Dr. Michelle Moseley-Christian
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- early modern
- global
- materiality
- material culture
- materials
- sensory object
- temporality
- haptic response
- physical object
- art history
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