Professor Ulinka Rublack FBA
Ulinka Rublack was born in Tübingen in 1967 and studied in Hamburg and Cambridge. She completed her PhD in Cambridge under the supervision of the late R.W. Scribner, was awarded the Faculty´s Prince Consort Medal, elected as Junior Research Fellow at St John's College in 1994 and offered a lectureship at Cambridge University in 1996. She has taught at the History Faculty ever since, was elected as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1999, appointed to a chair in 2013 and elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. In 2018 the Humboldt- and Thyssen Foundations jointly awarded her a life-time achievement award for outstanding research and fostering academic exchange, the Reimar-Lüst Prize. In 2019, her work as a historian and her book The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler´s Fight for His Mother were recognised with Germany´s most prestigious prize for historians, awarded every three years, the Deutsche Historikerpreis. Rublack has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture as well as on methodological concerns. Her work has been translated into seven languages, including Arabic and Chinese. Rublack has worked together with visual artists, musicians, designers and film-makers to translate her research into other media, and her book about Johannes Kepler has inspired a major novel.
Her most recent book is Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global Age, a study of the new relationship between art, collecting and commerce between 1500-1650, as the European art market became more integrated and new tastes for global rarities surged. It argues that this was an age in which successful artists behaved more like merchants and merchants more like creatives. It has been reviewed by Jenny Uglow for the New York Review of Books as "an outstanding portrayal of the merchant as a creative agent and a remarkable contribution to the history of the European art market as a whole".
Rublack is currently working on a global history of dress and fashion, entitled The Triumph of Fashion. In March 2024, she delivered the first Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures at the Central European University in Vienna, and these will be published in 2025.
Rublack´s current work focuses on the impact of the rise of consumerism in the early modern world, and on changes in material and religious cultures. She has recently completed a book on European art and society, entitled Dürer in the Age of Wonder: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World, to be published with Oxford University Press and Klett Cotta, in German. She is currently working on a new book, The Triumph of Fashion, which charts the rise of fashion in different parts of the globe from 1300 onwards.
Her previous monographs include Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Early Modern Europe, also published by Oxford University Press, which explores the relation between dress and identities in the period, won the Bainton Prize and was one of six books nominated for the Cundill Prize, the largest non-fiction history book prize in the world.
Her monograph, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother has inspired a unique interdisciplinary opera project - see the website Keplerstrial.com. The opera was performed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in November 2017. The book has also inspired a film script by director Michael Hoffman and Roland Walters, and the film is produced by Sympathetic Ink.
Ulinka Rublack has supervised PhD students from the UK, the US, Switzerland, Italy, Poland and New Zealand. Her PhD students have worked on topics including food in the Reformations in England; gender, embodiment and dress in France; the history of aristocratic dress in England; weight and the body in Reformation Germany; dress and the lifecycle in early modern Prague; the visualisation of dress in early modern courts; German visual culture at a Calvinist court; the history of religion and material culture in Prague; Reformation music; gender as category in understandings of the German witch-craze; costume books; London's clothing culture; and the role of armour in Renaissance Florence. She has mentored doctoral research on the memory and material culture of the Battle of Lepanto. She has sponsored post-doctoral work on the history of disability in early modern Europe and mentored post-doctoral work on the role of confession in the German Catholic Renewal as well as the cultural history of hair in the early modern period. Ulinka Rublack has supervised MPhil students on a wide variety of topics ranging from pilgrimage in the Catholic Renewal to purses in German dress. Interested graduates are very welcome to get in touch with her to discuss considered proposals.
Ulinka Rublack teaches for outline paper O5 on the early modern world, she contributes to the Specified Subject on The Material Culture of the Early Modern World, runs a Special Subject on German Renaissance Visual Culture, and contributes to the MPhil in Early Modern History.
Rublack has been a full member of five European research networks, and was co-investigator of a Swiss National Foundation Grant (2016-18) to explore the relationship of materiality, objects and emotional communities in the early modern world, https://www.materializedidentities.com/. In the course of this project, she had a Renaissance feather headdress reconstructed and the process documented on film (see link).
She has been visiting scholar at the Maison de l'Homme, Paris, and in 2017 was Descartes Fellow at NIAS as well as Senior Visiting Fellow at the Leibniz Institute in Mainz and at the Herzog August library Wolfenbüttel. During the academic year 2021-2, Rublack was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin.
She has co-curated the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge exhibition 'Treasured Possessions' and curated its exhibition 'A Young Man's Progress' (March - September 2015), which resulted from her collaboration with an artist and fashion designer in response to Renaissance fashion images.
Ulinka Rublack chaired the UK's and Republic of Ireland´s German History Society. She serves on the editorial boards of History Today, The Historical Journal and Fashion Theory. She is co-editor of various book series and has served on the editorial board of German History for many years. She regularly reviews international grant applications.
Rublack has repeatedly lectured at the Hay Literary Festival and other public venues, and has delivered a range of keynote and public lectures at conferences and institutes, including museums, in Europe, the US, and Peru. She has taken part in BBC radio programmes including In Our Time (on Kepler, on Dürer, and on The Thirty Year´s War), Free Thinking (on Luther) and Beyond Belief.
Contact
Tags & Themes
St John's College
Cambridge CB2 1TP
Office Phone: 01223 3 38682
Key Publications
Monographs:
Dürer´s Coats: Material Cultures of Renaissance Recognition, The Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures, Central European University Press, Vienna (2025).
Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World, Oxford University Press (2023) and Klett Cotta, Germany (2nd ed. 2024).
The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler´s Fight for His Mother, Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 2015, shortlisted 2017 British Society for the History of Science Dingle Prize; Observer book of the Year, awarded Historiker-prize; translated into Chinese, Italian, Hungarian, Arabic, Czech and German, 5th edition 2019, paperback January 2020.
Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press: October 2010, 384 pp, winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize 2011, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society, USA, and Finalist for the Cundill Prize, the largest global history non-fiction prize, awarded in Canada; German edition forthcoming in 2022.
Reformation Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (New Approaches to European History) February 2005, 280pp; second, substantially revised edition 2017; for a previous German edition see below
The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Studies in Social History Series, ed. Keith Thomas) May 1999, 284 pp, shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award 2000; Paperback version February 2001; for a previous German edition see below
Die Reformation in Europa, Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, December 2003, 278 pp, 2nd ed. 2006
Magd, Metz oder Mörderin? Frauen vor frühneuzeitlichen Gerichten, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, March 1998
Geordnete Verhältnisse? Ehealltag und Ehepolitik im frühneuzeitlichen Konstanz, Constance: Universitätsverlag, December 1997
Edited Books:
Protestant Empires: Globalising the Protestant Reformations, Cambridge University Press: 2020.
The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, Oxford: Oxford University Press December 2016; 37 contributors.
Hans Holbein, The Dance of Death, London: 2016 Penguin Classics.
A Concise Companion to History, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, 451 pp, paperback September 2012, German translation by S. Fischer Verlag, 2nd ed. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Chinese translation by Shanghai Joint Publishing Co LTD
Gender in Early Modern German History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Past and Present Series) November 2001, 308 pp, paperback ed. October 2010
Jointly edited:
with Giorgio Riello and Maria Hayward, A Revolution in Colour: Natural Dyes and Dress in Europe, c.1400-1800, London, Bloomsbury, September 2024.
Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burghart, Christine Göttler, Ulinka Rublack eds., Materialized Identities: Objects and Affects in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. OPEN ACCESS project volume of a Swiss National Foundation funded research project https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50499
Giorgio Riello, Ulinka Rublack eds., The Right to Dress. Sumptuary Legislation in a Global Perspective, 1300-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, ppb 2020.
Ulinka Rublack, Maria Hayward ed., The First Book of Fashion: The Books of Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz, London: Bloomsbury, October 2015.
Edited Special Issues:
Joint editor (with Kat Hill) of the German History Special Issue 3/2024 on Material Cultures and Community in the Holy Roman Empire
Joint editor (with Mary Fulbrook) of the German History Special Issue 3/2010 on Ego-Documents in German History, with an Introduction, ‘In Relation: The ”Social Self” and Ego-Documents’, pp.263-272
Sole editor of German History Special Issue 1/1999 on Gender in Early Modern German History, with an Introduction, pp.1-8
Other Publications
Recent Journal Articles:
‘Craft, Labour and Cabinets of Curiosities: Rethinking the Body of the Artisan’, German History, 202/2023, 30pp, open access https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/41/3/337/7161148
`Befeathering the European: Feathers and the Material Renaissance´, American Historical Review, 1/2021, 19-53.
with Stefan Hannss, `Knowledge Production, Image Networks, and the Material Significance of Feathers in Late Humanist Heidelberg´, Renaissance Quarterly, 74/2, 2020, 412-453.
‘Renaissance Dress, Cultures of Making, and the Period Eye’, Special Issue edited by Pamela H. Smith on New Directions in Making and Knowing, West 86th, 23/1, 2016, 6-34
‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, Past & Present, 5/2013, 41-84.
Recent chapters in books:
`Knowing the Market: Hans Fugger´s Affective Economies´, in Inger Leeman, Anne Goldgar eds., Knowing the Market: Affective Economies in Early Modern Europe, Routledge 2021.
`Performing America: Feather-work and Affective Politics at the Württemberg Court´, in Burghartz, Burghart, Göttler, Rublack eds., Materialized Identities, 2021.