Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Erscheinungsjahr 2003
ISBN: 978-90-04-12560-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 91, 608 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 1099 g

Reihe: Studies in Medieval and Reform

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery.
The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zika, Charles

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologische Disziplinen Religionspsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Religionssoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionssoziologie und -psychologie, Spiritualität, Mystik
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Kirchengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface

Introduction: Demons and Histories

1. Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century
2. Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and Occult Philosophy
3. Agrippa of Nettesheim and his Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany
4. Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany
5. The Reformation Jubilee of 1617: Appropriating the Past in European Centenary Celebrations
6. Fears of Flying: Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality in Sixteenth-Century Germany
7. She-man: Visual Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality
8. Dürer’s Witch, Riding Women and Moral Order
9. The Wild Cavalcade in Lucas Cranach’s Melancholia Paintings: Witchcraft and Sexual Disorder in Sixteenth-Century Germany
10. Body Parts, Saturn and Cannibalism: Visual Representations of Witches’ Assemblies in the Sixteenth Century
11. Fashioning New Worlds from Old Fathers: Reflections on Saturn, Amerindians and Witches in a Sixteenth-Century Print
12. Cannibalism and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Reading the Visual Images
13. Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft Literature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius
14. Writing the Visual into History: Changing Cultural Perceptions of Late Medieval and Reformation Germany
15. Nuremberg: The City and its Culture in the Early Sixteenth Century

Index of Names
Index of Places
Index of Subjects

Über Autor(innen)

Charles Zika is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on magic, religion, witchcraft and visual culture in the sixteenth century, which includes Johannes Reuchlin und die okkulte Tradition der Renaissance (Thorbecke, 1998) and edited Dürer and his culture (Cambridge, 1998).