{"product_id":"disharmony-of-the-spheres-the-europe-of-holbeins-ambassadors","title":"Disharmony of the Spheres","description":"\u003cp\u003eAnxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe’s changing identity, Jennifer Nelson reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFocusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media—including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes—Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbein’s famously complex double portrait \u003ci\u003eThe Ambassadors\u003c\/i\u003e, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon’s measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann’s modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus’s eclectic \u003ci\u003eAdages\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDisharmony of the Spheres\u003c\/i\u003e is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarefully researched and engagingly written, \u003ci\u003eDisharmony of the Spheres\u003c\/i\u003e will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Pennsylvania State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54029201899864,"sku":null,"price":38.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780271083414.jpg?v=1771332329","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/disharmony-of-the-spheres-the-europe-of-holbeins-ambassadors","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}