Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, the book argues that person as early moderns understood it was an "experimental" phenomenon--at once a given of experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience.
In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture—particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and…