Notes on the Contributors
Ivana Bičak
is an English literary scholar working on satire and science in the early modern period. Currently she is a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Most recently she pursued a project at the University of Exeter, funded by the Wellcome Trust and entitled ‘Early Modern Satire of Experimental Medicine in Spain (1493–1700).’ Her research interests include satires of the early Royal Society in London and the Anatomy House in Copenhagen. She has published articles in Renaissance Studies, The Seventeenth Century, and Milton Quarterly.
Maarten Delbeke
is Professor in the history and theory of architecture at the Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich. Formerly he taught at Ghent University and the University of Leiden. He works on the history and theory of architecture and the visual arts in Italy, France, and the Low Countries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and he is active as an architecture critic. Among other activities, he is the author of Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome (2012) and the co-editor of Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture: A Critical Reconsideration (with Matthew L. Cohen, 2018), The Baroque in Architectural Culture 1880–1980 (with Andrew Leach and John Macarthur, 2015), Translations of the Sublime (with Caroline van Eck, Stjin Bussels, and Jürgen Pieters, 2012), and Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays (with Evonne Levy and Steven Ostrow, 2006).
Willem Frijhoff
studied and worked for fifteen years at the EHESS in Paris. He held the chair of history of mentalities of pre-industrial societies at Erasmus University Rotterdam (1993–1997), and of early modern history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1997–2007). In 1990 he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded an honorary doctorate (history of education) at the University of Mons-Hainaut in 1998, and is the 2011 recipient of the Descartes-Huygens Award for Franco-Dutch Scientific Cooperation. Since his retirement he is visiting professor on the G.Ph. Verhagen chair in humanities (cultural history) at Erasmus University. He chaired the Dutch research program ‘Cultural Dynamics’ (NWO, 2003–2014). His research focuses on religion, memory, identity, education, and language in (early modern) history. His books in English include Embodied Belief (2002), 1650: Hard-won Unity (2004), Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (2007), and Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity (2017). With Catherine Secretan (CNRS) he has edited the Dictionnaire des Pays-Bas au Siècle d’Or (2018), of which a Dutch version will be published in 2021.
Natacha Klein Käfer
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD under the Erasmus Mundus Programme Text and Event in Early Modern Europe with a joint degree from the University of Kent and the Freie Universität Berlin. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Forschungszentrum Gotha (Germany) and the Johns Hopkins University (USA). Her main research interests are early modern healing practices, folklore, alchemy, and witchcraft.
Mia Korpiola
is Professor of Legal History at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku (Finland). Her research interests include a variety of topics ranging from medieval family and criminal law to legal literacy and velocipede law in modernising Finland. She is the author of Between Betrothal and Bedding (2009) and (co-)editor of several volumes including Regional Variations in Matrimonial Law and Custom in Europe, 1150–1600 (2011), The Svea Court of Appeal in the Early Modern Period: Historical Reinterpretations and New Perspectives (2014), Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200–1600 (2018), Dying Prepared in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe (2018), and Legal Literacy in Premodern European Societies (2019).
Mathieu Laflamme
is a PhD candidate in early modern history under the co-supervision of Sylvie Perrier (Université d’Ottawa | University of Ottawa) and Sylvie Mouysset (Framespa, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès). His research focuses on the history of ordinary sexuality in eighteenth-century Toulouse based on the study of pregnancy complaints filed at the municipal justice of the capitouls.
Hang Lin
is currently Professor of History at Hangzhou Normal University, China. He holds an MA and PhD in Chinese history from the University of Würzburg, Germany, and was formerly a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg. His research interests focus on the cultural and social history of imperial China, history of printing, and book culture in early modern China, and archaeology and material culture of Inner and North Asia. With Giovanni Ciotti, he co-edited Tracing Manuscripts in Time and Space through Paratexts (2016).
Walter S. Melion
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004 and currently directs the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. In addition to a four-part monograph on Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003, 2005, 2007, 2014), and exhibition catalogues on scriptural illustration and on religious allegory in Dutch and Flemish prints of the 16th and 17th centuries (2009 & 2019; digital edition forthcoming), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (2009). He is co-editor of more than twenty volumes, most recently Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700 (2019), Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets and Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, and Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Landscape, 1500–1700 (2020). He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. In 2016, he received 2016 Disinguished Scholar Award of the American Catholic Historical Association. Melion is president emeritus of the Sixteenth Century Society. He was elected president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art in 2021.
Hélène Merlin-Kajman
is Professor Emerita of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Alumna of the Fontenay-aux-Roses ENS, she obtained agrégation. She began teaching in higher education in 1989 and became a professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1998. She was a visiting professor at Rutgers University (USA), at the University of Cambridge (UK), at Indiana University (USA), and at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She has directed and co-directed seminars at the International College of Philosophy and at the EHESS. Between 1998 and 2010, Hélène Merlin-Kajman was the head of the research centre Cercle 17–20. In her research, she currently focuses as much on the heritage of modernity as on that of “classicism”, trying to combine a contextual historical investigation with a theoretical reflection on survival. She created a movement which intends to provide researchers, teachers, and creators with a ‘transitional’ space meant to provide literature and the arts with a springboard to fulfil their societal role, in accordance with the ancient thoughts which linked certain cultural practices with a form of therapy.
Anne Régent-Susini
is Professor of French Literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She specialises in early modern French literature, especially religious and moral discourse, rhetoric, polemics, and the writing of history. Among the books she has authored are L’Éloquence de la chaire (2009) and Bossuet et la rhétorique de l’autorité (2011). She also co-edited volumes such as Universal History and the Making of the Global (2018, with Hall Bjornstad and Helge Jordheim) and Éditer les œuvres complètes (XVIe et XVIIe siècles) (2019, with Philippe Desan).
Marian Rothstein
is professor emerita, Carthage College. Her expertise and research centres on Early-Modern French prose fiction. She is the author of The Androgyne in Early-Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender (2015); Charting Change in Renaissance French Thought and Culture (ed. and contributor) (2006); Reading in the Renaissance: “Amadis de Gaule” and the Lessons of Memory (1999); Life in Renaissance France (ed. and trans.) (1977, 1979).
Thomas Max Safley
is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, 1550–1620 (1984), Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (1996), Matheus Miller’s Memoirs: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century (2000), Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (2005), Kinder, Karitas und Kapital (2009/2011), and Family Firms and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: The Business, Bankruptcy and Resilience of the Höchstetters of Augsburg (2019). He has edited several volumes of essays, including A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World (2011), The History of Bankruptcy: Economic, Social and Cultural Implications in Early Modern Europe (2013), and Labor before the Industrial Revolution (2018). He has co-edited The Cultural History of Work, vol. 3, The Renaissance, 1450–1650 (2018).
Valeria Viola
(PhD, MPhil, B.Arch.) is an Art teacher with experience in both architectural practise and research. She worked as an architect with specialisation in restoration (1997–2015), taught Art-related subjects at different levels of education (2005–2016), and published nine essays on baroque architecture (1999–2015). In 2020, Viola completed her PhD programme in History of Art and Architecture at the University of York (UK), with a thesis on the interconnections between architecture, devotion, and family life in Baroque Palermo. The results of her research were shared through five essays, nine conferences, and three seminars (2018–2020). In 2018, Viola organised an international conference on Baroque, in collaboration with the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of Palermo, and she co-edited its proceedings in the book La Sovrabbondanza nel Barocco (2019).
Lee Palmer Wandel
is the WARF Michael Baxandall and Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the author of Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (1990); Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (1995); The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (2006); The Reformation: Towards a New History (2011); and Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion (2016). She has edited Facing Death (1996) with Howard Spiro and Mary Curnen; History Has Many Voices: In Honor of Robert McCune Kingdon (2003); Early Modern Eyes (2009) with Walter S. Melion; Im Ringen um die Reformation: Kirchen und Prädikanten, Rat und Gemeinden in Augsburg (2011) with Rolf Kiessling and Thomas Max Safley; A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (2014); Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image (2015) with Walter S. Melion; and Quid est Sacramentum? On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400–1700 (2019) with Walter S. Melion and Elizabeth Pastan.
Heide Wunder
Dr. phil., professor of Early modern social and constitutional history at Kassel University (until 2004). Research interests: Agrarian history, social history, and gender history. Publications: Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland (1986); Er ist die Sonn‘, sie ist der Mond. Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (1992; English: He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon. Women in Early Modern Germany, 1998).