The Universal Baroque

Drawing on sources in six languages and touching on the visual arts, architecture, music, and literature, this study frees the word "baroque" from being a term of periodization into a descriptor for a network of ideas, words, plants, arts, and energies. This new mapping offers a hybridity of the arts of Ibero-America as a way of re-examining the arts of the British Isles and Ireland. It challenges the modern idea of "capitals of culture," whose international culture fused the local and the international to the degree that remote settlements--in Peru and Bolivia, a castle in Aberdeenshire, or an Episcopal Palace in what is now Serbia--functioned as cultural centers as important as Madrid or London.