Jennifer Spinks

Interpreting place and past in narratives of Dutch heritage tourism

This essay examines the role of place in creating and supporting heritage tourism narratives, through a case study of the Netherlands. Focusing on late medieval and especially early modern cities including Amsterdam, Gouda, Leiden and Haarlem, it explores the significance of place to the kinds of historic narratives that can be told, and analyses the ways in which tourism providers ask tourists to utilise place as evidence for interpretations of the past. We articulate the meanings underpinning these uses and readings of place and past, arguing that tourism may be an important context through which historians can reconsider their own understandings about the past.

Wondrous Monsters: Representing Conjoined Twins in Early Sixteenth-Century German Broadsheets

In sixteenth-century Europe widely circulated broadsheets regularly reported the birth of physically monstrous children and animals, often regarded as signs of Gods wrath and important heralds of misfortune. A negative understanding of these births has consequently dominated studies of the phenomenon. Yet a number of pre-Reformation publications represent such births, both textually and visually, in positive terms. Three cases of conjoined twins born in the German towns Worms, Ertingen, and Tettnang around 1500 demonstrate how children perceived as monstrous could nonetheless be viewed in a sympathetic light, interpreted as positive political omens, and even represented in the guise of the infant Christ.

Karlstadt's Wagen: The First Visual Propaganda for the Reformation

Wittenberg reformer Andreas Karlstadt is notorious as one of the Reformation’s most hard-line iconoclasts, yet in collaboration with artist Lucas Cranach he created the first piece of evangelical visual propaganda. Karlstadt was the mastermind behind the “Wagen” broadsheet of 1519, which did not depict or refer to Martin Luther. Cranach’s woodcut of wagons, horses and men travelling to Heaven and to Hell was executed with vigour and skill. But the obscure iconography devised by Karlstadt failed to communicate key ideas, and his theologically complex, awkwardly worded texts chaotically swamped the imagery. The broadsheets set off heated debate in print. Above all, inflamed Karlstadt’s conflict with Johannes Eck, who would become the enemy of both Karlstadt and Luther; a conflict also played out in the famous Leipzig debate of 1519. This essay reveals for the first time the scope and depth of the broadsheet’s aims, failures, and significance for Reformation visual culture.

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.

Civil War Violence, Prodigy Culture and Families in the French Wars of Religion

Prodigy collections, also known as wonder books, are important but little-used sources for understanding the experience of violence in France during the Wars of Religion. Authors Pierre Boaistuau, Jean de Marconville, Francois de Belleforest and Simon Goulart included many stories of violence and cruelty in their wonder books, with a notable focus upon violence within families and toward children. Civil war impacted upon community and family connections, and these authors sought to generate strong emotional responses in their articulation of a brutally disordered world on a wider scale. While prodigies are often understood in terms of natural phenomena like floods, earthquakes and monstrous births in recent scholarship, this essay argues that human violence forms a crucial element of early modern prodigy culture.

The Southern Indian “Devil in Calicut” in Early Modern Northern Europe: Images, Texts and Objects in Motion

AbstractFor sixteenth-century Europeans, the so-called demon and idol known as the “devil in Calicut” vividly epitomized the town of Calicut on India’s Malabar coast. Ludovico di Varthema’s textual invention of the devil in 1510 was rapidly followed by a range of visual images that circulated in print. This article explores how and why the most persistent and vigorous images of this devil emerged from Reformation and Counter-Reformation northern Europe. It further proposes that aspects of the visual and material culture of southern India—and specifically metal sculptures and coins—should be mined in order to better understand the European creation of the “devil in Calicut” and its constant reinvention and circulation. The article argues that the devil maintained its polemical usefulness to a northern European world view in which the heresy of non-Europeans mattered a great deal, but so too did religious changes in Europe that were shaping views about idolatry, materiality, and the role of religious images.

Histoires prodigieuses (édition de 1561). Edition critique (review)

possessions such as the seventeenth-century Dutch maps of Brazil, maps of towns and cities produced as souvenirs, statements of civic pride, or for administrative uses. Also included are maps used to define ownership, such as Thomas Holme’s A Map of the Settled Part of Pennsylvania (1687–88) or Francis Hill’s A map and description of all ye lands belonging to Richard Bridger Esqr in ye Parish of Worminghurst (1707). There is a fascinating chapter on the maps used to decorate Dutch homes that is of particular use for art historians looking at the work of painters such as Vermeer or de Hooch. One of the few books discussed is the enormous Klencke Atlas – the largest atlas in the world, standing at 176 cm – presented to Charles II of England by Amsterdam in 1660. Also included are a couple of contemporary maps by the British artists Grayson Perry and Stephen Watter. The latter produced a fascinatingly personal visual description of London in 2008. There are also images of maps being used, including the wonderful ballet dance with a balloon globe performed by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940). This is a book to be pored over, filled with insightful observations about the many functions maps perform and the impact these have on their display and design. The quality of the reproductions also lends these images to close perusal. Both books together provide a welcome reminder of the variety of maps that have been produced and their equally varied uses. They also reveal possible avenues for further research, while the wealth of images means that these are generous visual introductions to this fascinating field.

Representing Female Labour at the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age: Isaac Claesz. Van Swanenburg's Old and New Trades (c.1594-c.1612)

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of womens labour in the series of paintings by Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburg known as the Old and New Trades (c.1594–c.1612). Earlier studies have focused upon van Swanenburgs realistic depiction of the Leiden textiles trade but had little to say about his innovative representation of women at work. This article contends that van Swanenburg presents women alongside men as economic and moral contributors to the new sayes industry – both as low-status labourers as well as participants in trade – and as such contributes to ongoing reassessments of the representation of gender in Dutch Golden Age art.

Jakob Rueff's 1554 Trostbüchle: A Zurich physician Explains and Interprets Monstrous Births

Taylor and Francis Ltd RIHR_A_282017.sgm 10.1080/174969 0701819368 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 08rnational So ety for Intellectual History 8 0 000200 Jenn ferSpinks jspi ks@unim lb du.au In 1554, the Zurich physician and playwright Jakob Rueff published a German-language book on the generation and birth of children titled Ein schön lustig Trostbüchle von den Empfengknussen und Geburten der Menschen. This article examines Rueff’s innovative interest in monstrous births and their physical causes; his sources; his appeal to an unusually broad audience; and the capacity of demons to generate offspring. The article concludes with an examination of one important case, the 1547 monster of Krakow, and the ways in which Rueff’s approach to it was distinct from that of authors writing immediately in his wake. In the last several decades there has been a considerable growth of interest in the monstrous as an important element of the cultures of medieval and early modern European societies. The monster was not merely a marginal figure, but one that was richly symbolic and often utilized to represent and debate issues of morality, religion and politics, thereby putting them into concrete and easily grasped terms. In their recent and extraordinary study of the history of wonder, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park return to the theme of their ground-breaking 1981 Past and Present article on monstrous births. They revise their earlier view that interpretations of monstrous births had progressed in a teleological fashion from a religious, or ‘superstitious’, system to one that was based on new scientific principles and a desire to observe and classify.1 Instead, they describe a world in which scientific and religious explanatory systems co-existed throughout the early modern period. Their work, along with an earlier study by Jean Céard on prodigies in sixteenth-century culture, has deeply influenced a large new body of research on the political, cultural and religious