Charles Zika

Shortlisted for the 2008 Katharine Briggs Award. For centuries the witch has been a powerful figure in the European imagination; but the creation of this figure has been hidden from our view. Charles Zika’s groundbreaking study investigates how the visual image of the witch was created in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. He charts the development of the witch as a new visual subject, showing how the traditional imagery of magic and sorcery of medieval Europe was transformed into the sensationalist depictions of witches in the pamphlets and prints of the sixteenth century. This book shows how artists and printers across the period developed key visual codes for witchcraft, such as the cauldron and the riding of animals. It demonstrates how influential these were in creating a new iconography for representing witchcraft incorporating themes such as the power of female sexuality, male fantasy, moral reform, divine providence and punishment, the superstitions of non-Christian peoples and the cannibalism of the new world. Lavishly illustrated and encompassing in its approach, The Appearance of Witchcraftis the first systematic study of the visual representation of witchcraft in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will give the reader a unique insight into how the image of the witch evolved in the early modern world.

Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-century Europe

The Appearance of Witchcraft

Giovanni Tarantino

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe

Feeling Exclusion

Jennifer Spinks

In late medieval and early modern Europe, textual and visual records of disaster and mass death allow us to encounter the intense emotions generated through the religious, providential and apocalyptic frameworks that provided these events with meaning. This collection brings together historians, art historians, and literary specialists in a cross-disciplinary collection shaped by new developments in the history of emotions. It offers a rich range of analytical frameworks and case studies, from the emotional language of divine providence to individual and communal experiences of disaster. Geographically wide-ranging, the collection also analyses many different sorts of media: from letters and diaries to broadsheets and paintings. Through these and other historical records, the contributors examine how communities and individuals experienced, responded to, recorded and managed the emotional dynamics and trauma created by dramatic events like massacres, floods, fires, earthquakes and plagues.

Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700

"Feeling Exclusion investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe"--

Cathy Leahy

Europe experienced great turmoil between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bitter religious conflicts, war and other disasters such as plague and famine generated deep anxieties and were increasingly read as divine punishments or warnings that the Last Days were imminent. Artists gave expression to these fears in a range of extraordinary images that are analysed in depth in this publication. Illustrations of the Apocalypse, as well as images of skeletons personifying Death, and of physically deformed creatures, extreme natural phenomena and diabolical witches were all manifestations of the sense of impending social and religious crisis. Lavishly illustrated with works by artists including Albrecht Drer, Jacques de Gheyn II and Stefano della Bella, The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster provides a fascinating insight into the art, culture and turbulent times in later medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe.

Charles Zika

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