Full Description
In bringing together work on optic theory, ethnography, and the visual cultures of Christianity, this volume offers a sense of the richness and the complexity of early modern thinking about the human eye. The seven case studies explore the relationship between vision and knowledge, taking up such diverse artifacts as an emblem book, a Jesuit mariological text, Calvin's Institutes, Las Casas's Apologia, Hans Staden's True History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and an exegetical painting by Herri met de Bles. Argued from different disciplinary perspectives, these essays pose crucial questions about the eyes, asking how they were construed as instruments of witnessing, perception, representation, cognition, and religious belief.
Contributors include: Tom Conley, Walter Melion, José Rabasa, Lee Palmer Wandel, Michel Weemans, Nicolás Wey Gómez, and Neil Whitehead.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Editors
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Introduction, Lee Palmer Wandel
The Politics of Light: Al-Kindī's Optics and the Vindication of the American Tropics in Bartolomé de las Casas's Apologética historia sumaria (1527-1561), Nicolás Wey Gómez
A Topographer's Eye: From Gilles Corrozet to Pieter Apian, Tom Conley
The Ethnographic Lens in the New World: Staden, De Bry, and the Representation of the Tupi in Brazil, Neil L. Whitehead
Depicting Perspective: The Return of the Gaze in Codex Telleriano-Remensis (c.1563), José Rabasa
John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne on the Eye, Lee Palmer Wandel
Quel rapport entre une partie de jeu de paume et le roi David? Analogie et Exégèse Visuelle dans le David et Bethsabée de Herri met de Bles, Michel Weemans
'Quae lecta Canisius offert et spectata diu': The Pictorial Images in Petrus Canisius's De Maria Virgine of 1577/1583, Walter S. Melion
Index Nominum
