1. The object-based concept is original and will attract attention across various disciplines. Because the volume is multidisciplinary and most essays are interdisciplinary, the books will speak to a wide academic readership. 2. The collection of essays not only narrates the lives of various early modern objects, but also urges authors to reflect on key questions about objects, the Material Turn, and interdisciplinarity. As such, it provides new object-based knowledge and historical insights but can also be read as a state of scholarship. 3. This book is an initiative of the Amsterdam Centre of Studies in Early Modernity (UvA), one of the largest academic communities of specialists in early modernity. It is rare for such groups to collectively publish. Because the book is based on a monthly lecture series, the authors were able to gather, hear each other speak, and to discuss history, our various disciplines and interdisciplinarity in preparation of this publication. As such, the book promises to be well thought out and to showcase the best interdisciplinary research about early modernity has to offer. How did objects move between places and people, and how did they reshape the Republic’s arts, cultures and sciences?
‘Objects’ were vitally significant for the early modern Dutch Republic, which is known as an early consumer society, a place famous for its exhaustive production of books, visual arts and scientific instruments. What happens when we push these objects and their materiality to the centre of our research? How do they invite us to develop new perspectives on the early modern Dutch Republic? And how do they contest the boundaries of the academic disciplines that have traditionally organized our scholarship?
In Objects, Commodities and Material Cultures, the interdisciplinary community of specialists around the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of Early Modernity innovatively explores the diverse early modern world of objects. Its contributors take a single object or commodity as a point of departure to study and discuss various aspects of early modern art, culture and history: from natural objects to consumer goods, from knowledge instruments to artistic materials. The volume aims to unravel how objects have moved through regions, cultures and ages, and how objects impacted people who lived and worked in the Dutch Republic.
