The Universal Baroque

‘The nation-state is the enemy of the baroque.’ This is the point of departure of this radical, even revolutionary, re-examination of the cultural history of the early-modern world. Drawing on sources in six languages, many of them hitherto unavailable to the English-speaking reader, and touching on the visual arts, architecture, music and literature, this study frees the word ‘baroque’ from being a term of periodisation (and too often, in English, a term of suspicion and denial) into being the descriptor for a network of circulation of ideas, words, plants, arts and energies which encompassed the totality of the early-modern world. 

This new mapping offers the hybridity of the arts of Ibero-America, the fruitful combination of the local and the international, as a way of re-examining the arts of the British Isles and Ireland, particularly the little-known Latinate high culture of seventeenth century Ireland and Scotland. It challenges also th