Description
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship on these themes, and thus pays tribute to the ground-breaking work of Charles Zika. Seventeen interdisciplinary essays offer new insights into the materiality and belief systems of early modern religious cultures as found in artworks, books, fragmentary texts and even in Protestant ‘relics’. Some contributions reassess communal and individual responses to cases of possession, others focus on witchcraft and manifestations of the disordered natural world. Canonical figures and events, from Martin Luther to the Salem witch trials, are looked at afresh. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how cultural and interdisciplinary trends in religious history illuminate the experiences of early modern Europeans. Contributors: Susan Broomhall, Heather Dalton, Dagmar Eichberger, Peter Howard, E. J. Kent, Brian P. Levack, Dolly MacKinnon, Louise Marshall, Donna Merwick, Leigh T.I. Penman, Shelley Perlove, Lyndal Roper, Peter Sherlock, Larry Silver, Patricia Simons, Jennifer Spinks, Hans de Waardt and Alexandra Walsham.
Trade Review“a fitting tribute to the career of a pathbreaking scholar.” Michael D. Bailey, Iowa State University. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Fall 2016), pp. 1048-1049.
Table of ContentsIntroduction Scholarship, Friendship and Border-Crossing Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger Part I: Supernatural Agency and Communities of Belief The Collaboration From Hell: A plague strike force at S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome Louise Marshall The Demonic Possession of Richard Dugdale Brian P. Levack Salem Girls (1692): Problems of gender and agency E. J. Kent “Ringing of the bells by four white spirits”: Two seventeenth-century English earwitness accounts of the supernatural in print culture Dolly MacKinnon Part II: Religion and Cultural Authority “It is a great disgrace for our city”: Archbishop Antoninus and heresy in Renaissance Florence Peter Howard Endor and Amsterdam: The image of witchcraft as a weapon in the political arena Hans de Waardt Deep Down in Spirituality: Efforts of seventeenth-century New Netherlanders to access God Donna Merwick Paraluther: Explaining an unexpected portrait of Paracelsus in Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum vitae Lutheri (1601) Leigh T. I. Penman Part III: The (Un)natural World “Making feast of the prisoner”: Roger Barlow, Hans Staden and ideas of New World cannibalism Heather Dalton Signs that Speak: Reporting the 1556 comet across French and German borders Jennifer Spinks Disorder in the Natural World: The perspectives of the sixteenth-century provincial convent Susan Broomhall De Profundis: Linear Leviathans in the Lowlands Larry Silver The Ferocious Dragon and the Docile Elephant: The unleashing of sin in Rembrandt’s Garden of Eden Shelley Perlove Part IV: Artefacts and Material Culture Salience and the Snail: Liminality and incarnation in Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (c. 1470) Patricia Simons Luther Relics Lyndal Roper The Art of Making Memory: Epitaphs, tables and adages at Westminster Abbey Peter Sherlock The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic relics and Protestant polemic in post-Reformation England Alexandra Walsham Index
