Rethinking the Baroque

The question of what we as scholars, educators, and students do with these fragments is one of the many perplexing ones raised by this stimulating volume.' CAA Reviews 'Hill's purpose in assembling such a vibrant and diffuse collection of essays on the baroque was to 'trouble the smooth waters of a linear historicism' (p. 91), and this collection certainly succeeds in doing that Together, the essays offer a stimulating demonstration of the breadth of approach currently being taken in relation to the baroque.' Seventeenth Century . Winner, Paul Mellon Centre Publication Grant 'The baroque - the concept, not the period - has had a paradoxical destiny in the last few decades. We can no longer speak of the past in confident positivist terms and are only too cognizant that, like Walter Benjamin, we are blindly collecting shards of history for our own use. Prudently shunned by academic historians of seventeenth-century European art and culture, it reemerges regularly -

In recent years the idea of ?baroque? or ?the baroque? has been seized upon by scholars from a range of disciplines and the term ?baroque? has consequently been much in evidence in writings on contemporary culture, especially architecture and entertainment. A gulf has arisen. On the one hand, there are scholars who are deeply immersed in historical period, who shy away from abstraction, and who have remained often oblivious to the convulsions surrounding the term ?baroque?; on the other, there are theorists and scholars of contemporary theory who have largely ignored baroque art and architecture. This book explores what happens when these worlds mesh. Rather than attempting to provide a survey of baroque as a chronological or geographical conception, the essays here attempt critical re-engagement with the term

She has published widely on seventeenth-century Italian architecture, including Invisible City: the architecture of devotion in aristocratic convents in baroque Naples. Helen Hills is Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK. She is the editor of Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2003) and co-editor o