Personalia
Ulinka Rublack. Born in Tübingen, Germany, in 1967. Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University.
Descartes Theme Group Fellow (Jan, Feb, March 2017)
Thinking through Matter
Research Question
My work will focus on different types of matter in early modern Europe and asks how they evoked or expressed affect.
Project Description
Early modern cultures of ingenuity expressed themselves in relation to material knowledge. My projects tries to chart this knowledge and how it was made and communicated in relation to a range of materials – such as colour or feathers – and in connection with dress. I understand dress as complex, sculptural artefact in this period, and a key tool of symbolic communication. How was it loaded with affective meaning and what meanings did materiality itself afford? My project tries to create a dialogue between material culture and the history of emotions, especially in relation to Protestant milieus.
Selected Publications
The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother, Oxford: Oxford University Press October 2015. Observer Book of the Year.
Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Oxford University Press: 2010, Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for History 2011, which recognizes the best book published in English during the preceding year in any historical field from 1450-1660, and Finalist of the Cundill Prize, the world’s largest non-fiction history book award, which recognizes outstanding history books accessible to the wider public.
ed, with Maria Hayward, The First Book of Fashion, London: Bloomsbury 2015.
‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, Past & Present, June 2013.