Ariella Minden // Media Literacies in Early Modernity
Media Literacies in Early Modernity seeks to understand the role of media in the creation, adjudication, and comprehension of works of art, architecture, and material culture between 1400 and 1700. These three centuries were inflected by significant political, social, technological, and cultural changes including the advent of the printing press in Europe, the rise of an open art market, new approaches to scientific inquiry, the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter Reformation, and colonial expansion and violence. 
Each of these factors generated intense dialogues and motivated substantial reconsideration of how objects were wrought used and conceived. Using the concept of media literacy as referring to the critical ability of both creators and consumers to recognize how media were mobilized to make meaning, this project seeks to attune us to how the interrogation of media took place at different registers, among diverse actors, and was mobilized to myriad socio-cultural and political ends.
[Caption: Unknown artist, St. Luke Painting the Virgin in His Studio, 17th century, Tecamac, Parroquia San Lucas Xolox. Source: https://colonialart.org/essays/the-print-in-the-painting-1]