Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
Workshop of Gerard David, Netherlandish, ca. 1460–1523. Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1514. The visit of the Magi, or Kings, who came from the East to adore the newly born Christ Child in Bethlehem, was a popular subject for devotional paintings in the fifteenth century, when it became common to depict the youngest Magus as an African to show the universality of the Christian message. Here he and his attendant are portraits from life, and must be based on Africans the artist saw in Antwerp. The patron who commissioned the painting is shown as the kneeling King. He may have been a Portuguese merchant who was portrayed with his African servants.
Princeton University Art Museum
Series editors

Christina Lee, Princeton University
Julia Schleck, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Geographical Scope
Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia
Chronological Scope
1400 – 1700
Advisory Board

Serge Gruzinski, CNRS, Paris
Michael Laffan, Princeton University
Ricardo Padron, University of Virginia
Elizabeth Rodini, American Academy in Rome
Kaya Sahin, Ohio State University

Keywords
Global renaissance, early modern studies, world history, cross-cultural engagements, cultural translations, connected histories
Series

Connected Histories in the Early Modern World

Connected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people—Africans, Asians, Americans, and Europeans—made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s innovative approach to early modern historical scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion, appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African societies).

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