1st Edition
Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period
Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.
1. Introduction: Audiences and Reception: Readers, Listeners, and Viewers
Mitzi Kirkland-Ives
2. To Compliment a Musical Friend: Amateur Musicians and Their Audiences in France, ca. 1650–1700
Michael A. Bane
3. Elizabethan Audience Gaze at History Plays: Liminal Time and Space in Shakespeare’s Richard II
Murat Öğütcü
4. The Commedia dell’Arte from Marketplace to Court
Rosalind Kerr
5. Spreading the Word: Theatre, Religion and Contagious Performances
J. F. Bernard
6. "Sedicious" Sermons: Preaching, Politics, and Provocation in Reformation England, 1540–1570
Brian L. Hanson
7. The Rotterdam Inquisitor and the False Prophet of Antwerp: Religious Disputation and Its Audiences in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries
David L. Robinson
8. Relational Performances and Audiences in the Prologue of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis
Jonathan M. Newman
9. George Turberville, Constancy and Plain Style
Melih Levi
10. "Assi de doctos como de indoctos": A Poet-Translator Discovers His Audience in the Spain of Philip II
Richard H. Armstrong
11. Female Audiences and Translations of the Classics in Early Modern Italy
Francesca D’Alessandro Behr
12. Women Are from Venus: Addressing Female Agency with Classical Allegory
Helena Kaznowska
13. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s High Altarpiece for Santa Maria Novella and the Pre-Tridentine Audience of Italian Altarpieces
Sarah Cadagin
14. Guides Who Know the Way
John R. Decker
15. Beyond the Doctrine of Merit: Philips Galle’s Prints of the Sacraments and Works of Mercy
Barbara Kaminska
Biography
John R. Decker is the chairperson of the Department of the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.
Mitzi Kirkland-Ives is a professor of art history and museum studies in the Department of Art and Design at Missouri State University.
