Charles Zika

The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals by Jean Crépy and Laurent Bordelon: Redirecting Emotion through Ridicule

This chapter explores how witchcraft beliefs in the early eighteenth century often succumbed to growing scepticism and increasingly became objects of parody and ridicule. It focuses on an etching of the French printmaker Jean Crepy, appended to a 1710 satiric novel by the Parisian author, Laurent Bordelon, The Story of the Extravagant Imaginations of Monsieur Oufle. Crepy redirected the disgust and fear that dances at Sabbath rituals previously aroused, by parodying an influential etching created a century earlier by the Polish artist Jan Ziarnko. He transformed Ziarnko’s lascivious and threatening dancers into somersaulting acrobats, and thereby attempted to persuade readers that Sabbath rituals were simply foolish delusions created in the imagination of people like Monsieur Oufle, his name an anagram for le fou, a fool.

The Witch of Endor Before the Witch Trials

In the sixteenth century the biblical story of the Witch of Endor and her raising of the prophet Samuel for King Saul became one of the key texts in demonologies to demonstrate the existence of witches and condemn their necromancy and fortune telling. By the later seventeenth century, the witch of Endor had become one of the most common visual codes for the practice of witchcraft. The purpose of this essay is to explore the many visual images of the story that appear before the period of epidemic witch trials in the sixteenth century. It will survey the manuscripts where these images appeared; the extent to which they drew on the early textual discourse of this woman as ventriloquist, sorcerer, master of demonic illusion and trickster; the critical texts for its transmission; the nature, extent and timing of changes in the woman’s representation from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries; and the break-down of long-standing continuities in the later sixteenth century when this female figure became the Witch of Endor.

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

This collection brings together historians, art historians, and literary specialists in a cross-disciplinary collection shaped by new developments in the history of emotions.

Introduction: Rethinking Disaster and Emotions, 1400–1700

This chapter explores the relationship between natural disaster, apocalypse, emotions and time through a number of pamphlets in the late sixteenth-century collection of the Zurich pastor, Johann Jakob Wick. Zika argues that in early modern Europe the Apocalypse provided a potent meaning-making system for the collective emotional impact and social disruption caused by disaster, and also helped establish an emotional state that reinforced the conviction that the End Time had either arrived or was imminent. The imminence of the Apocalypse sometimes also stimulated strong feelings of being out-of-time, a new dimension in which linear time had collapsed and could be both lengthened and shortened. As a result emotions often became more intense and also conflicted, and the meaning and memory of disaster could be transformed.

Disaster, Apocalypse, Emotions and Time in Sixteenth-Century Pamphlets

This chapter explores the relationship between natural disaster, Apocalypse, emotions and time through a number of pamphlets in the late sixteenth-century collection of the Zurich pastor, Johann Jakob Wick. Zika argues that in early modern Europe the Apocalypse provided a potent meaning-making system for the collective emotional impact and social disruption caused by disaster, and also helped establish an emotional state that reinforced the conviction that the End Time had either arrived or was imminent. The imminence of the Apocalypse sometimes also stimulated strong feelings of being out-of-time, a new dimension in which linear time had collapsed and could be both lengthened and shortened. As a result emotions often became more intense and also conflicted, and the meaning and memory of disaster could be transformed.

The Cruelty of Witchcraft: The Drawings of Jacques de Gheyn the Younger

The witchcraft images of the early seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Jacques de Gheyn II, depict the activities of witches as imaginative fantasy, and stand out for the extreme cruelty and violence they display. This chapter explores the reasons for these new emphases. Although De Gheyn used his skills in depicting nature to heighten the impact of his images, his intellectual networks make clear that they were not meant to represent social reality. Rather, they represent the beliefs of witches themselves, whose imaginations (following theorists like Weyer and Scot) had become disordered through compromised humoral flows. They are also works of artistic imagination that communicate the inability of witches to weep, to feel compassion and empathy, one of the defining characteristics of Christianity through this period.