Magic, Diabolism, and Global Religion in European Print Culture, 1500-1700

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This project analyses the print culture of Europe c.1500-1700 against the backdrop of the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In doing so it examines how printed books and related publications were sites of polemical exchange. The core of the project involves an analysis of 'wonder books', which were produced in great numbers and helped to shape contemporary religious anxieties and debates. These books collated and explained an extraordinary range of natural and supernatural phenomena (earthquakes, 'monstrous' births, terrible signs in the sky, diabolical creatures), and framed them in moralising and often deeply polemical terms. Most significantly, they were tools for Protestants and Catholics to use the astonishing properties of the world around them to create polemical narratives about religious conflict. These books appeared at the same time as other encyclopedic works, including cosmographies and travelogues with information on non-European lands, and demonological treatises on the activities of witches and devils. Wonder books were also closely connected to cheaper broadsheets that reported wondrous and terrifying events as part of a proto-journalistic news culture. The project will provide the first substantial analysis of how Protestants and Catholics recycled this sort of printed material across German-, French- and Dutch-speaking Europe - as well as across different religious communities - and in doing so used print in vigorous new ways. In thematic terms this study will explore, for the first time, how these publications collectively reveal increasing anxieties about the devil, witchcraft, and 'heathen' religions beyond Europe's borders, and the ways in which these anxieties shaped European's approaches to religious conflicts on their own doorsteps. Reports of magical but also diabolical practices and objects in Asia, India, the Americas and elsewhere began to appear in European printed publications in the wake of European trade-based and missionary expansion in the sixteenth century. This material intersected with new debates and reports of diabolical witchcraft in Europe, and the whole was set in a broader framework of the extraordinary yet terrifying manifestations of the natural world. In examining this material, the project will provide a new reading of the print culture of wonder books, and their tangible role in constructing and shaping different forms of religious identity in the early modern world. It will explore the extent to which this anxiety about 'others' (witches, demons, and idolatrous heathens) was partly a means of giving polemical voice to religious conflict within Europe. Research during the fellowship period will lead to innovative publications in the form of a book-length study as well as an article, and it will form the foundations for a collaborative exhibition project in early 2016 at the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The John Rylands Library is rich in printed and manuscript materials that reflect early modern cultural, intellectual and social preoccupations with magic, the supernatural, and the extraordinary properties of the physical world of Europe and beyond. This exhibition, with associated public events that will engage wide audiences and community groups, will explore how new ideas and experiences in early modern Europe prompted intensive debates about magical, diabolical and supernatural events, and about how to deal with them as individuals and societies. Religious conflicts, scientific developments, legal changes, and encounters with distant lands and peoples led to new ways of reporting, representing and debating magic and related phenomena. The exhibition will explore how beliefs in the power of magic, witchcraft, and associated phenomena persisted and adapted to changes in the early modern world. It will be supported and extended by a publication, an academic symposium, and a range of events for and by the wider public.