Renaissance Invention

“Lia Markey has assembled an excellent team of scholars to guide us through a close, careful, and well contextualized reading of Johannes Stradanus’s series of prints from the late 1580s known as the Nova Reperta, some of the most evocative and emblematic images of the early modern era.” —Paula Findlen, author of Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World

“Lia Markey has assembled a remarkable roster of contributors to tease meaning from one of early modern Europe’s most noteworthy print series. Renaissance Invention leaves no doubt that Stradanus’s Nova Reperta was a pictorial game-changer that continues to resonate across disciplines. In our present age, this exploration of replicative and other technologies shows us why history is important.” —Susan Dackerman, author of Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
 

"Markey and her colleagues must be congratulated for a work of lasting scholarship on a neglected but significant series of prints that represents the major changes wrought during the early modern epoch." —Larry Silver, The Burlington Magazine

"Certainly, these images, as Markey, Greene, and the other catalog contributors emphasize, address what we have come to call 'innovation' and 'globalization.' Therein also lies their evil shadow, lurking just off the page, or sometimes right on it . . . in Stradanus’s images we glimpse a kind of engineering with imperial rather than cosmological ambitions. We have premonitions of innovation and globalization, those rough beasts slouching toward modernity." —Jessica Riskin, New York Review of Books