Notes on the Contributors
Guy Claessens
obtained his PhD in Classics at the University of Leuven; his dissertation studies the Renaissance reception of Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. His current research focuses on the reception of Proclus’ natural philosophy from the fifteenth century onward and on Renaissance commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus. He has published several articles on Neoplatonic concepts of imagination and matter in the Renaissance. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at the University of Leuven.
Sander de Boer
obtained his PhD in philosophy in 2011 at Radboud University (Nijmegen); his dissertation is on Soul and Body in the Middle Ages: A Study of the Transformations of the ‘scientia de anima’ c.1260–c.1360. He is co-editor, with Paul Bakker and Cees Leijenhorst, of Psychology and the Other Sciences: A Case of Cross-Disciplinary Interaction 1250–1750 (Leiden: 2012). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen (Faculty of Philosophy), where he continues to work mainly on the history of philosophical psychology.
Ralph Dekoninck
is Professor of Art History at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and a co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). His research focuses on early modern image theories and practices, specifically in their relation to Jesuit spirituality; Baroque festival culture; and art in seventeenth-century Antwerp, especially engraving. His publications include Ad Imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: 2005) and La vision incarnante et l’image incarnée. Santi di Tito et Caravage (Paris: 2016). He is also editor or co-editor of Relations artistiques entre l’Italie et les anciens Pays-Bas (16e–17e siècles) (Turnhout: 2012); (with Myriam Watthee-Delmotte) L’idole dans l’imaginaire occidental (Paris: 2005); (with Agnès Guiderdoni) Emblemata sacra. The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Illustrated Sacred Discourse (Turnhout: 2007); (with Agnès Guiderdoni and Nathalie Kremer) Aux limites de l’imitation. L’ut pictura poesis à l’épreuve de la matière (Amsterdam: 2009); (with Agnès Guiderdoni and Walter Melion) Ut pictura meditatio. The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700 (Turnhout: 2012); (with Agnès Guiderdoni and Emilie Granjon) Fiction sacrée. Spiritualité et esthétique durant le premier âge moderne (Leuven: 2013); (with Michel Lefftz and Caroline Heering) Questions d’ornement (XVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Turnhout: 2014); and (with Brigitte d’Hainaut-Zveny) Machinae spirituales. Les retables baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et en Europe (Brussels: 2014).
Christine Göttler
is Professor emerita of Art History at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern (Switzerland). Her research interests concern collecting practices, the interactions between various arts (including the so-called alchemical arts), and the visual and spatial imagery of interiority and the imagination. She has published widely on diverse topics ranging from Reformation iconoclasm, post-Tridentine spirituality, and the relationship between art, nature, and the senses, to historical aspects of early modern artists’ materials (wax, copper, papier-mâché). Her most recent books include Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout: 2010); (with Sven Dupré), Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts (London – New York: 2017); (with Mia M. Mochizuki), The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (Leiden: 2017); and (with Karl A.E. Enenkel), Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures. She is currently preparing a monograph on Hendrick Goltzius’s Allegory of the Arts (1611) in the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Agnès Guiderdoni
is a Senior Research Associate at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium) and Professor of Early Modern Literature at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), where she is a co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). A scholar of seventeenth-century French literature, she specializes in emblematic literature and the field of figurative representations (imago figurata). She has published many articles on these topics, as well as on theoretical aspects of text-image relations. Among her publications are the co-edited volumes (with Walter Melion and Ralph. Dekoninck) Ut pictura meditatio. The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700 (Leiden: 2012) and (with Ralph Dekoninck and Emilie Granjon), Fiction sacrée. Spiritualité et esthétique durant le premier âge moderne (Leuven: 2013). A monograph on emblemata and spirituality is in progress.
Sergius Kodera
is Dean of the Faculty of Design at New Design University, St. Pölten (Austria). Since receiving his doctorate in 1994, he has also taught Renaissance philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna. His primary fields of interest are the history of the body and sexuality, magic, and media. He obtained his Habilitation in 2004, and is the recipient of fellowships at the Warburg Institute (London), Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna), and Columbia University (New York). He has published on, and is a translator of, Renaissance authors such as Marsilio Ficino, Fernando de Rojas, Niccolò Machiavelli, Leone Ebreo, Girolamo Cardano, Giovan Battista Della Porta, and Giordano Bruno. He is currently working on a book-length study in English on Della Porta.
Sybille Krämer
is Professor of Philosophy at the Free University in Berlin (Germany). Between 2000 and 2006, she was member of the German Scientific Council; from 2005 to 2008 Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; from 2007 to 2013 Member of the European Research Council; and from 2010 to 2016 member of the Senat of the German Research Foundation. She has held guest professorships in Zurich, Lucerne, Graz, Vienna, and Tokyo and is a doctor honoris causa of the University of Linköping (Sweden). Her research areas are mathematics and philosophy in the seventeenth century; theory of mind and epistemology; philosophy of language; theory of media; and ‘diagrammatology’. Among her books are Media, Messenger, Transmission. An Approach to Media Philosophy (Amsterdam: 2015; German ed. 2008 Japanese ed. 2014) and Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie (Frankfurt: 2016); she has co-edited (with Christina Ljungberg) Thinking with Diagrams. The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition (Berlin: 2016) and (with Sigrid Weigel) Testimony/Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (London: 2017).
Barbara Obrist
holds a PhD degree in Art History from the University of Geneva. She is currently Directeur de recherché émérite at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Université Paris Diderot (Paris). She is a scholar of medieval history of science and philosophy, specializing in the history of alchemy and cosmology. Among her various books are Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique: XIVe–XVe siècles (Paris: 1982) and La cosmologie médiévale. Textes et images. I. Les fondements antiques (Florence: 2004). She is co-editor (with Irene Caiazzo) of Guillaume de Conches: philosophie et science au XIIe siècle (Florence: 2011).
Dennis L. Sepper
is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Programs in the Human Sciences in the Contemporary World at the University of Dallas (Irving, Texas, USA). Current areas of research include philosophical psychology and psychology of mind; differences between aesthetic and technical imagination; and the technicization of higher education. He is the author of Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (New York: 1988); Newton’s Optical Writings: A Guided Study (Rutgers, NJ: 1994); Descartes’s Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1996); and Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images (Dordrecht: 2013).
Aline Smeesters
is FNRS Research Associate and Professor of Latin Literature at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), where she is a co-director of the Centre for Early Modern Cultural Analysis (GEMCA). Her area of specialization is Neo-Latin literature. She has published various papers in collective volumes and international journals (Humanistica Lovaniensia, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, Renaissance and Reformation) and is the author of a book on Neo-Latin occasional poetry, Aux rives de la lumière (Leuven: 2011). She has co-edited (with Lambert Isebaert) a collective volume on Poésie Latine à Haute Voix 1500–1700 (Turnhout: 2013).
Leen Spruit
obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). He is Lecturer in Dutch Language and Literature at the Sapienza University in Rome, and since November 2016 Professor of Intellectual History at Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). His scholarly work addresses the history of cognitive psychology from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, and Catholic censorship of science and natural philosophy. His publications include a study of Bruno’s epistemology, Il problema della conoscenza in Giordano Bruno (Naples: 1988); Species intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge (Leiden: 1994–1995); and The Origin of the Soul from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. A Short Introduction (Lugano: 2014). He is the co-editor (with Ugo Baldini) of Catholic Church and Modern Science: Documents from the Archives of the Roman Congregation, part I: Sixteenth-Century Documents, 4 vols. (Rome: 2009).
David Zagoury
is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Cambridge and a Scientific Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome (Bibliotheca Hertziana). His thesis, “Fantasia” and Imagination in Art Theory from Leonardo to Lomazzo, explores the conceptions of imagination developed by artists and critics in Northern Italy during the sixteenth century. He holds degrees in Philosophy, Art History, and Law from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and received his Masters in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation on Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine (shortlisted for the AAH Dissertation Prize, 2015). In 2015, he was a scholar in residence at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence. He has also worked for the Bodmer Library in Geneva and the Musée d’Art du Valais in Sion.