Hauptseminar: Early modern material culture in the Baltic Sea region

Things have a history: They embody the past. Under the heading of “material culture”, scholars debate how the far-reaching changes of the early modern period impacted their use and perception. This class will explore such debates and investigate the material culture of the Baltic Sea region. In the Early Modern period, this region was deeply affected by cultural contact, transfer, and entanglement. Practices related to material culture, such as trading, collecting, and displaying, can help us understand what held the region together – but also how it connected with other regions. The material culture of the early modern period discloses specificities of the Baltic Sea region as well as its global interrelations.

Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (eds.), The Object Reader, London 2009; Julia A. Schmidt-Funke (ed.), Materielle Kultur und Konsum in der Frühen Neuzeit, Cologne 2019; Ulrike Gleixner and Marília dos Santos Lopes (eds.), Things on the Move – Dinge unterwegs. Objects in Early Modern Cultural Transfer, Wolfenbüttel 2021.