Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Scholarship, Friendship and Border-Crossing

Part 1 Supernatural Agency and Communities of Belief

Chapter 1 The Collaboration from Hell: A Plague Strike Force at S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

Chapter 2 The Demonic Possession of Richard Dugdale

Chapter 3 Salem Girls (1692): Problems of Gender and Agency

Chapter 4 “Ringing of the Bells by Four White Spirits”: Two Seventeenth-Century English Earwitness Accounts of the Supernatural in Print Culture

Part 2 Religion and Cultural Authority

Chapter 5 “It is a Great Disgrace for Our City”: Archbishop Antoninus and Heresy in Renaissance Florence

Chapter 6 Endor and Amsterdam: The Image of Witchcraft as a Weapon in the Political Arena

Chapter 7 Deep Down in Spirituality: Efforts of Seventeenth-Century New Netherlanders to Access God

Chapter 8 Paraluther: Explaining an Unexpected Portrait of Paracelsus in Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum Vitae Lutheri (1601)

Part 3 The (Un)natural World

Chapter 9 “Making Feast of the Prisoner”: Roger Barlow, Hans Staden and Ideas of New World Cannibalism

Chapter 10 Signs that Speak: Reporting the 1556 Comet across French and German Borders

Chapter 11 Disorder in the Natural World: The Perspectives of the Sixteenth-Century Provincial Convent

Chapter 12 De Profundis: Linear Leviathans in the Lowlands

Chapter 13 The Ferocious Dragon and the Docile Elephant: The Unleashing of Sin in Rembrandt’s Garden of Eden

Part 4 Artefacts and Material Culture

Chapter 14 Salience and the Snail: Liminality and Incarnation in Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (c. 1470)

Chapter 15 Luther Relics

Chapter 16 The Art of Making Memory: Epitaphs, Tables and Adages at Westminster Abbey

Chapter 17 The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England

Index of Names and Places