An interdisciplinary group of scholars applies the reinterpretive
concept of visual culture to the English Renaissance. Bringing attention
to the visual issues that have appeared persistently, though often
marginally, in the newer criticisms of the last decade, the authors
write in a diversity of voices on a range of subjects. Common among
them, however, is a concern with the visual technologies that underlie
the representation of the body, of race, of nation, and of empire.
Several essays focus on the construction and representation of the human
body--including an examination of anatomy as procedure and visual
concept, and a look at early cartographic practice to reveal the
correspondences between maps and the female body. In one essay, early
Tudor portraits are studied to develop theoretical analogies and
historical links between verbal and visual portrayal. In another,
connections in Tudor-Stuart drama are drawn between the female body and
the textiles made by women. A second group of essays considers issues of
colonization, empire, and race. They approach a variety of visual
materials, including sixteenth-century representations of the New World
that helped formulate a consciousness of subjugation; the Drake Jewel
and the myth of the Black Emperor as indices of Elizabethan colonial
ideology; and depictions of the Queen of Sheba among other black women
present in early modern painting. One chapter considers the politics of
collecting. The aesthetic and imperial agendas of a Van Dyck portrait
are uncovered in another essay, while elsewhere, that same portrait is
linked to issues of whiteness and blackness as they are concentrated
within the ceremonies and trappings of the Order of the Garter.
All of the essays in Early Modern Visual Culture explore the social
context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts
are produced and consumed. They also explore how those artifacts--and
the acts of creating, collecting, and admiring them--are themselves
mechanisms for fashioning the body and identity, situating the self
within a social order, defining the otherness of race, ethnicity, and
gender, and establishing relationships of power over others based on
exploration, surveillance, and insight.
