Notes on the Contributors
Monica Azzolini
teaches the history of science at the University of Bologna. She has published widely on the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance astrology, and the formation and circulation of scientific knowledge, with particular emphasis on the relationship between orality and the written word, and the use of scientific illustration. In recent years her interest has shifted to the underground: she has explored the relationship between natural disasters and the cult of the saints during the Counter-Reformation. She is currently working on a history of the underground in early modern Italy. She is the author of The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan (2013).
Matteo Al Kalak
is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity and of the Churches at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has conducted research on religious history with particular attention to religious non-conformism. His books include Gli eretici di Modena: fede e potere alla metà del Cinquecento (2008); Il riformatore dimenticato: Egidio Foscarari tra Inquisizione, concilio e governo pastorale (1512–1564) (2016); Mangiare Dio: una storia dell’eucarestia (2021), and The Heresy of the Brothers: A Heterodox Community in Sixteenth-Century Italy (2022 [2011]). Further publications include several edited volumes and scholarly articles on the Inquisition, the Council of Trent, and the confraternities between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age.
Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
is a Privat Dozent and Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the culture of the long Reformation with a particular interest in the late poetry of John Milton. She is the author of Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford: 2011) and two co-edited collections of essays: What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? (Tübingen: 2017), and Words, Books, Images and the long Eighteenth-Century: Essays for Allen Reddick (Amsterdam: 2021).
Luke Holloway
is a postgraduate student at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He graduated in History at the University of Warwick in 2022, and his research interests lie in early modern British and European history, focusing especially on religion, print, and society. He has recently co-authored research exploring Methodist correspondence networks and beliefs in the supernatural during the eighteenth century.
Martha McGill
is a historian of early modern supernatural beliefs. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, and the Warburg Institute, London. Since 2018 she has been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, working on a project entitled “Bodies, Selves and the Supernatural in Early Modern Britain”. She is the author of Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland (2018) and co-editor (with Julian Goodare) of The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (2020).
Walter Melion
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he directed the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (Emory’s institute for advanced study in the humanities) between 2017 and 2023. He is author of three monographs and a critical edition of Karel van Mander’s Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting, co-author of two exhibition catalogues, editor or co-editor of more than twenty-five volumes, and has published more than one hundred articles. Melion is editor of two book series: Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History and Lund Humphries’ Northern Lights. He was elected Foreign Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. He is president emeritus of the Sixteenth Century Society, current president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and a board member of the Print Council of America.
Mia M. Mochizuki
is a historian of Northern Renaissance and Baroque art (Ph.D., Yale University, 2001). She retired from teaching after holding tenured professorships at New York University Institute of Fine Arts and NYU Abu Dhabi, the Graduate Theological Union and Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Her eight books – including the prizewinning Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm (2008), Dawn of a Global Age (2017), The Nomadic Object (ed., 2018), Jesuit Art (2022), and Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity (ed., 2023) – have treated the reformation of Dutch art, the global Netherlandish print, artistic exchange between Japan and the West, Jesuit visual culture, and the Northern landscape.
Laurent Paya
holds a Masters Degree in Landscape Architecture from the Agrocampus Ouest (Angers, France) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France). As chief engineer of the Ministry of Agriculture, he teaches landscape architecture and garden design. As an associate researcher, he conducts research on art history at the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance and the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Université Montpellier III, France). His fields of research are the aesthetics of garden, ornament, decor and town in the early modern period. He has published a series of articles about the elaboration and the circulation of artistic, scientific and technological knowledge of the socialization of nature. He is the author of Gouverner les plantes des parcs et jardins de plaisir au temps des humanistes (2024).
Raphaèle Preisinger
received her Ph.D. degree in Art History and Media Theory from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2012. She is currently Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator of the research project “Global Economies of Salvation: Art and the Negotiation of Sanctity in the Early Modern Period”, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), at the University of Zurich. While her current research centres on the global circulation of images and objects in the early modern period, she maintains a major focus on image and piety in the Middle Ages. Her first book is entitled “Lignum vitae”: Zum Verhältnis materieller Bilder und mentaler Bildpraxis im Mittelalter (2014).
Aviva Rothman
is Inaugural Dean’s Associate Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. She earned her Ph.D. in History at Princeton University, and was formerly a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of science with a particular focus on the astronomical and physical sciences of early modernity. Her first book, The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession and Community, was published in 2017, and her second, The Dawn of Modern Cosmology: Copernicus to Newton (2023) is an anthology of edited and newly translated texts on the Copernican Revolution for the Penguin Classics series.
Minou Schraven
is senior lecturer at Amsterdam University College and associate fellow of the Amsterdam School for Religious History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is member of the research consortium “Mobile Matters of Religion. Devotional and Sacred Objects in the Early Modern World” at the University of Regensburg, and contributor to the project “Mapping Religious Heritage in Amsterdam”, http://religieuserfgoed.amsterdam. A specialist in early modern art history and material culture, she has published widely on early modern funeral apparati, the ritual uses of coins and portrait medals, festival culture and processions, and the display of human remains in museums, especially issues of lifelikeness and likeability. The chapter on Juana de la Cruz is part of her current book project Blessed and Indulgenced Objects in Early Modern Catholic Worlds. Materiality, Mobility and Anxiety.
Anna-Claire Stinebring
is Assistant Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A specialist in early modern Northern European art, she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to starting at The Met, she most recently served as Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at The Frick Collection. She is the co-author, with Salman Toor, of Bruegel’s Three Soldiers (2024), a volume in the Frick Diptych Series.
Jane Tylus
is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, where she also has a teaching appointment at the Divinity School. She is the author of Siena, City of Secrets; Reclaiming Catherine of Siena; and Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance, and with Karen Newman co-edited Early Modern Cultures of Translation. She has translated the poetry of Gaspara Stampa and Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici, as well as Dacia Maraini’s recent novel, Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza. Her book “Who Owns Literature?” is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press’s Elements series. Tylus served as General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance from 2013–22.