NEER Research Cluster

Supernatural powers and social relations in early modern Europe

MEMBERS

Dr Sarah Ferber (Queensland) - Coordinator
Dr Jacqueline Van Gent (UWA) - Coordinator
Dr Dolly Mackinnon (Melbourne)
Leigh Penman (Postgraduate, Melbourne)
Dr Peter Sherlock (Melbourne)
Professor Charles Zika (Melbourne)

DESCRIPTION

This cluster will explore possibilities for future collaborative research on projects situated in the fields of religious and cultural history for the late medieval and early modern period in Europe. Its scholarly goal is to refine the terms of reference for this field of scholarship by identifying shared themes. The cluster seeks to strengthen inter-institutional research collaboration within Australia and with European and British scholars.

EVENTS (INCLUDING MEETINGS AND WORKSHOPS)

Conferences and symposia:

July 2008: Australian Historical Association Conference (in collaboration with the Religious History Society of Australia), funded Keynote Speaker, Professor Alexandra Walsham, "The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland".

July 2008: Australian Historical Association Conference, NEER Panel on witchcraft (Connell, Kent, Ferber).

July 2008: Peter Sherlock, Australian Historical Association Conference, panel on the dead with Helen Macdonald and Michael Pickering

2008: Charles Zika presented papers as follows:

"Images in Service of the Word: The Witch of Endor in the Bibles of Early Modern Europe" (Bildgebrauch und Bildfunktion im Medium der Graphik). Symposium at Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, April 2008.

"Witchcraft and European History: Changing Perspectives over Thirty Years". Seminar, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, May 2008.

"Medieval Magicians as People of the Book". Imagination, Books & Community in Medieval Europe Conference, State Library of Victoria, May 2008.

"Visualising Disorder: the Power of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe". Keynote address at Symposium "Unglaublich, Unheimlich, Magisch: Intimations of Evil in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe", Centre for European Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Heidelberg, June 2008.

"The Biblical Witch of Endor in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts". ANZAMEMS Conference, University of Tasmania, December 2008.

PUBLICATIONS

Broomhall, Susan and Jennifer Spinks, Representing Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: History, Art, and Cultural Tourism (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).

Spinks, Jennifer, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth Century Germany (London: Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming).

Spinks, Jennifer, "Monstrous births and Counter-Reformation visual polemics: Johann Nas and the 1569 Ecclesia Militans". Sixteenth Century Journal (forthcoming).

Broomhall, Susan and Jennifer Spinks, "Finding Rembrandt? Place, history, experience, and the individual". Dutch Crossing (forthcoming)

Broomhall, Susan and Jennifer Spinks, "Interpreting Place and Past in Dutch Touristic History". Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (forthcoming).

Broomhall, Susan and Jennifer Spinks, "Representing women's labour at the dawn of the Golden Age: Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburg's Old and New Trades (c.1594-c.1612)". Cultural and Social History (forthcoming).

Spinks, Jennifer, "Jakob Rueff's 1554 Trostbuchle: a Zurich physician explains and interprets monstrous births". Intellectual History Review 18.1 [Special issue on Humanism and Medicine in the Renaissance edited by Susan Broomhall and Yasmin Haskell] (2008): 41-59.

Harmes, Marcus, "Orthodox Puritans and Dissenting Bishops: The Reformation of the English Episcopate,�c.1580-1610", Comitatus: a Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 39, September 2008, 199-219.

Mack, Phyllis, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Sherlock, Peter, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Ferber, Sarah, "The Abuse of History? Identity Politics, Disordered Identity and the 'Really Real' in French Cases of Demonic Possession" in Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall (eds), Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 29-41

Penman, Leigh, "A Second Christian Rosencreuz? Jakob Bohme's Disciple Balthasar Walther (1558-c.1630) and the Kabbalah. With a Bibliography of Walther's Printed Works", in Western Esotericism: Selected Papers Read at the Symposium on Western Esotericism held at Abo, Finland, on 15-17 August 2007. (Scripta instituti donneriani Aboensis, XX). T. Ahlback, ed. (Abo, Finland: Donner Institute, 2008), pp. 154-172.

Penman, Leigh, "'Ein Chiliast aus Steyr'. Wolfgang Mantler Buecherneues", (Vienna: Mantler, 2008), 28-29.

Zika, Charles, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Routledge: London & New York, 2007).

GRANTS ACHIEVED

Michael Pickering: Ernst Mach Stipendium (Austria).

Dolly MacKinnon: Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne Grant Scheme: University of Melbourne Career Interruption (Career Enhancement) Fellowship $15,000 to be held in the Faculty of Music in 2008. Project title: "Music's Medicinal Notes: A cultural history of harming and healing the mind and body, c.1000 - c.2008".

Jennifer Spinks: Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship 2009 - 2012, School of Historical Studies, The University Of Melbourne, 75% research and 25% teaching.

Charles Zika, Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks: ARC Discovery Project 2009-2012, "Reading the signs: disaster, apocalypse and demonology in European print culture, 1450-1700".

Jennifer Spinks: 2009 Fellowship (three months), Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel, Germany.

Jennifer Spinks: 2008 Grete Sondheimer Fellowship (two months), The Warburg Institute, London.

Maryse Simon: Grant from the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris (from 1st November 2008).

Maryse Simon: Fellowship Marie Curie Actions - Intra-European Fellowship - at the University of Oxford, History Faculty�from 6th European Community Framework Program of the European Commission (Oct 2006-Oct 2008).

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Judith Bonzol: Lecture on "'The other sort of Witches': cunning folk as healers of supernatural illness in the early modern England", at "The Devil in Society in the Pre-Modern World", Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 17-18 October 2008.

Sarah Ferber: Lecture on "Madeleine de Flers and the trouble with ecstasy", at "The Devil in Society in the Pre-Modern World", Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 17-18 October 2008.

Peter Sherlock: Appointed as Dean of the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne College of Divinity, beginning 30 June 2008.

Peter Sherlock: Presented paper at the biennial ANZAMEMS Conference 2008, University of Tasmania.

Marcus Harmes: "The Suffering of the bishops: the downfall and resurrection of the English episcopate in the later seventeenth century", presentation paper at Staff History Seminar Series, University of Queensland, September 2008.

Marcus Harmes: "The Emperor Domitian and the obedience of Christianity to the late-Roman state", presentation at the Australian Early Medieval Association Fifth Annual Conference, Australian Catholic University, October 2008.

Marcus Harmes: "The Reformation of the Episcopate: bishops in England 1630-1690", presentation at the biennial ANZAMEMS conference, University of Tasmania, December 2008.

Marcus Harmes: "The representation of episcopal power in an age of persecution, 1640-1680", presentation at the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group symposium, University of Western Australia, May 2008.

Alexandra Walsham: Relics and Remains, conference, Sept. 10-12, 2008, University of Exeter.

Michael Pickering: "Dead or Alive?: The Medwedia 'vampire' exhumations of 1732, and differing perceptions of incorruptible bodies in early eighteenth-century Europe". Australian Historical Association Conference.

Charles Zika: The Roland H. Bainton Book Prize 2008 for History/Theology: Honourable Mention (= runner-up); The Katharine Briggs Award 2008: Runner-up.