This book offers sustained analysis of the semiotics of coins, is interdisciplinary, and considers early modern Europe as a centre of global trade. This is the first book to focus on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in the arts of the early modern period. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europes impressive power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes paired essays by interdisciplinary scholars organised around five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. A thought-provoking Afterword focused on an American contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.
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7 | (6) |
| Acknowledgments |
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13 | (2) |
| Introduction: Embodying Value |
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15 | (32) |
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Power and Authority in the Mint |
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1 Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos's Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594 |
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47 | (32) |
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2 Scaling the World: Allegory of Coinage and Monetary Governance in the Dutch Republic |
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79 | (28) |
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Jessica Stevenson Stewart |
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Currency and the Anxieties of Global Trade |
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3 Market Stall in Batavia: Money, Value, and Uncertainty in the Age of Global Trade |
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107 | (24) |
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4 Beyond the Mint: Picturing Gold on the Rijksmuseum's Box of the Dutch West India Company |
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131 | (24) |
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5 The Heft of Truth: Inwardness and Debased Coinage in Shakespeare's Plays |
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155 | (24) |
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6 Identity, Agency, Motion: Taylor's Twelvepence and the Poetry of Commodity |
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179 | (24) |
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Coins in and out of Circulation |
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7 Margarethe Butzbach and the Florin Extorted by Blows Coins Securing Social Bonds in Fifteenth-Century Germany |
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203 | (24) |
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8 Centring the Coin in Jacob Backer's Woman with a Coin |
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227 | (26) |
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9 Accounting Faith and Seeing `Ghost Money' in Masaccio's Tribute Money |
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253 | (20) |
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10 Monetary Transactions and Pictorial Gambles in Georges de La Tour |
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273 | (26) |
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| Afterword: The Work of Art: The Installations of Kelli Rae Adams |
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299 | (10) |
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| Index |
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309 | |
Natasha Seaman is Professor of Art History at Rhode Island College. She is the author of Hendrick ter Brugghen and the Theology of the Image. Reinventing Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht (Ashgate 2012) and several articles relating to the work of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Joanna Woodall is Professor of Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in Netherlandish visual culture during the age of global expansion. Her recent publications have focused on love and money, and sometimes the exchange between the two. Sebastian Felten (PhD, Kings College London) is a historian of finance, science, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. His current focus is on money as a social technology and knowledge work in early modern mining. Jessica Stewart (PhD, UC Berkeley) works on the history of collecting and the intellectual cultures of reception. Her research focuses primarily on the visual cultures of international trade in the early modern world. She serves as the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships at UC Berkeley. Angela Ho is Associate Professor at George Mason University and the author of Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention (2017). Her current research focuses on the economic and artistic exchanges between the Dutch East India Company and various Chinese groups in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Carrie Anderson is an Associate Professor of Art History at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her primary area of research is the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, within which she focuses on themes related to intra- and intercultural diplomacy and gift exchange. Rana Choi is currently working on turning her dissertation, Erich Auerbach and His Interlocutors: A Comparison of Literary Critical Methodologies, into a book, as well as a second book that is an application of these methodological insights in Shakespearean Figurations. Heather Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and teaches early modern literature, literary theory, and writing pedagogy and practice. Her research interests include early modern religious and political writing, early modern women writers, affect theory, and pedagogy. Allison Stielau is Lecturer in Early Modern Art at University College London. Her research focuses on object cultures in early modern northern Europe. Roger J. Crum is Professor of Art History at the University of Dayton. Formerly President of the Italian Art Society and a Board member of the College Art Association, Crum has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Universitys Villa I Tatti. Dalia Judovitz is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor Emerita of French at Emory University.Her particular interests are subjectivity, representation, and art in the early modern period, and modern aesthetics. The most recent of her six books is Georges de La Tour and the Enigma of the Visible (2018).
