This 2007 volume reveals how a first European identity was forged from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Cultural exchange played a central role in the elites' fashioning of self. The cultures they exchanged and often integrated with included palaces, dresses and jewellery but also gestures and dances.

Cultural exchange, the dynamic give and take between two or more cultures, has become a distinguishing feature of modern Europe. This was already an important feature to the elites of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and it played a central role in their fashioning of self. The cultures these elites exchanged and often integrated with their own were both material and immaterial; they included palaces, city-dwellings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, dresses and jewellery, but also gestures, ways of sitting, standing and walking, and dances. In this innovative and well-illustrated 2007 volume all this lively exchange is traced from Bruges, Augsburg and Istanbul to Italy; from Italy to Paris, Amsterdam, Dresden, Novgorod and Moscow; and even from Brazil to Rouen. This volume, which reveals how a first European identity was forged, will appeal to cultural and art historians, as well as social and cultural anthropologists.