Disharmony of the Spheres

Anxious 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 Europes 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. Focusing 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 mediaincluding paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabesNelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbeins famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthons measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmanns modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmuss eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts. Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.