Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Studies in Medieval & Reformation Thought, 91)

"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."--BOOK JACKET Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Acknowledgements 18 Preface 20 Introduction: Demons and Histories 24 Chapter One Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century 44 Chapter Two Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and Occult Philosophy 92 Chapter Three Agrippa of Nettesheim and his Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany 122 Chapter Four Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany 178 Chapter Five The Reformation Jubilee of 1617: Appropriating the Past in European Centenary Celebrations 220 Chapter Six Fears of Flying: Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality in Sixteenth-Century Germany 260 Chapter Seven She-man: Visual Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality 292 Chapter Eight Dürer’s Witch, Riding Women and Moral Order 328 Chapter Nine The Wild Cavalcade in Lucas Cranach’s Melancholia Paintings: Witchcraft and Sexual Disorder in Sixteenth-Century Germany 356 Chapter Ten Body Parts, Saturn and Cannibalism: Visual Representations of Witches’ Assemblies in the Sixteenth Century 398 Chapter Eleven Fashioning New Worlds from Old Fathers: Reflections on Saturn, Amerindians and Witches in a Sixteenth-Century Print 434 Chapter Twelve Cannibalism and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Reading the Visual Images 468 Chapter Thirteen Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft Literature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius 504 Chapter Fourteen Writing the Visual into History: Changing Cultural Perceptions of Late Medieval and Reformation Germany 546 Chapter Fifteen Nuremberg: The City and its Culture in the Early Sixteenth Century 576 Index of Names 608 Index of Places 616 Index of Subjects 619 Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 628