Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Jennifer Spinks is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Her work often concerns print culture and contested religious identities in northern Europe, and her publications include Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (2009). Dagmar Eichberger teaches Late Medieval and Early Modern Art History in Trier and Heidelberg and is academic coordinator of artifex. She is co-editor of Civic Artists & Court Artists (with Philippe Lorentz) and Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe (with Shelley Perlove).

• IntroductionScholarship, Friendship and Border-Crossing Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger Part I: Supernatural Agency and Communities of BeliefThe Collaboration From Hell: A plague strike force at S. Pietro in Vincoli, RomeLouise MarshallThe Demonic Possession of Richard Dugdale Brian P. LevackSalem 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 MacKinnonPart II: Religion and Cultural Authority“It is a great disgrace for our city”: Archbishop Antoninus and heresy in Renaissance FlorencePeter HowardEndor and Amsterdam: The image of witchcraft as a weapon in the political arena Hans de WaardtDeep Down in Spirituality: Efforts of seventeenth-century New Netherlanders to access God Donna MerwickParaluther: Explaining an unexpected portrait of Paracelsus in Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum vitae Lutheri (1601) Leigh T. I. PenmanPart III: The (Un)natural World “Making feast of the prisoner”: Roger Barlow, Hans Staden and ideas of New World cannibalism Heather DaltonSigns 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 BroomhallDe Profundis: Linear Leviathans in the Lowlands Larry SilverThe Ferocious Dragon and the Docile Elephant: The unleashing of sin in Rembrandt’s Garden of Eden Shelley PerlovePart IV: Artefacts and Material Culture Salience and the Snail: Liminality and incarnation in Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (c. 1470) Patricia SimonsLuther Relics Lyndal RoperThe Art of Making Memory: Epitaphs, tables and adages at Westminster AbbeyPeter SherlockThe Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic relics and Protestant polemic in post-Reformation England Alexandra WalshamIndex

“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.