Notes on the Contributors
Wietse de Boer
is the Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. His research focus is Italian religious and cultural history between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. His publications include The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001; Italian translation, 2004) and Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent (2021), as well as eight edited volumes, including Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, co-edited with Christine Göttler (2013); Jesuit Image Theory, co-edited with Karl A.E. Enenkel and Walter S. Melion (2016); La ghianda e la quercia. Saggi per Adriano Prosperi, co-edited with Vincenzo Lavenia and Giuseppe Marcocci (2019); and The Eschatological Imagination: Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800), co-edited with Christine Göttler (2024). His current book project, The Windows of the Soul: Sensory Culture and Religious Conflict in Early Modern Italy, is in an advanced stage of preparation.
Tara Hamling
is Reader in Early Modern Studies in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the visual arts and material culture of early modern Britain, with particular interest in the cultural impact of the Reformation. She is author of Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (2010) and (with Catherine Richardson) A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (2017). She is co-editor of Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (2010) and Art-Reformed: Reassessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts (2007).
Jenny Körber
is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of European History and a Member of the Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. Prior to this, she was a scientific museum assistant (Volontariat) and curator at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2020–2022). In 2017 she was a Junior Research Fellow at Harvard University. She obtained her Ph.D. at Humboldt University of Berlin with a study on the media use of the early modern Jesuit order. The monograph was published in 2024 with Böhlau under the title Innere Bilder – äußere Schau. Studien zum Mediendispositiv des frühneuzeitlichen Jesuitenordens. She is currently working on her habilitation project on the relationship between genealogy and heraldry in the arts and crafts of the early modern period. A further book publication includes Die Welt im Dorf. Wege des Exotischen in die Peripherien des 18. Jahrhunderts (2024, co-edited with Markus Friedrich).
Judith Lipperheide
is a Ph.D. candidate (M.A. Hamburg 2019) at the University of Hamburg specialising in early modern European history. Her research is concerned with the history of religious cultures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with a special emphasis on the history of the Society of Jesus. Her Ph.D. project is titled “Gemeinsam einsam? Die Maisons de retraite der Jesuiten in Frankreich im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert”. She is a member of the research unit Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period at the University of Hamburg. Within this project, Lipperheide’s research focuses on processions as intermedial practices.
Cosima Macco
holds a Master of Arts in Interreligious Studies from the University of Heidelberg. She is a research assistant at the Heidelberg Ecumenical Institute in the project Geistliche und himmlische Heimat im darstellenden Handeln christlicher Konfessionskulturen, funded by the DFG – German Research Foundation. She is currently preparing her dissertation project. Her research interests include ecclesiology, interreligious dialogue and Christian and Jewish philosophy of religion and devotional literature.
Franziska Schreiber
has been a research and teaching assistant in the Department of Francophone and Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock since April 2022. She passed her first state examination in French, history and German in 2020. Currently, Schreiber is working on a doctoral thesis provisionally titled “La voix de la dévotion – Stimmdiskurse und Gendering im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Frankreich”. Her research is part of a larger project by the DFG – German Research Foundation which explores interdiscursive regimes of voice in French and Italian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Voix und Parole – Interdiskursive Stimm-Régimes in der französischen und italienischen Betrachtungsliteratur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts).
James Simpson
is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Reform and Cultural Revolution, volume 2 in the series Oxford English Literary History (2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (2010); and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (2019).
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art. His books are: Nuremberg, A Renaissance City, 1500–1618 (1983); German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520–1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (1994); Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (2002); The Northern Renaissance (2004, with several reprints and a Greek translation in 2005); The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (2006); Dürer (2012); Albrecht Dürer and the Embodiment of Genius: Decorating Museums in the Nineteenth Century (2020); Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire (2022); Albrecht Dürer’s Afterlife (2024); editor, New Perspectives on the Art of Renaissance Nuremberg: Five Essays (1985); editor, Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany (2014); co-editor with Larry Silver, The Essential Dürer (2010; paperback 2011); and Introduction to Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton Classic Edition (2005).
Stephanie Wodianka
is currently Chair of French and Italian Literature at the University of Rostock, a position she has held since 2010. Her Ph.D. thesis, at the University of Giessen, was on meditation on death in seventeenth-century meditative literature (Betrachtungen des Todes. Formen und Funktionen der meditatio mortis in der europäischen Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts, 2004). From 2002 to 2009, she was a research assistant at the University of Giessen, with a focus on memory cultures, especially modern myth in film and literature. The position culminated in the book Zwischen Mythos und Geschichte: Ästhetik, Medialität und Kulturspezifik der Mittelalterkonjunktur (2009). Wodianka’s research interests focus on the intersections between literature and other arts and media, as investigated in the book Nord(ro)mania – constructions du Nord par le Sud roman – costruzioni del Nord dal Sud romanico (co-edited with Karen Struve, 2021). She is currently leading a research project funded by the DFG – German Research Foundation on the conceptualisations of voice in meditative literature in France and Italy (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).
Katharina Worms
is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg and researcher in the project Gesamtedition der Werke Paul Flemings, funded by the DFG – German Research Foundation. She was formerly FONTE Visiting Professor of Women Authors of the Early Modern Period at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, Berlin. Her area of expertise is epic poetry of the early modern period in the German lands (Latin and vernacular), baroque drama, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein and Paul Fleming. Other research interests include the poetry of Sibylla Schwarz and other women authors of the early modern period. Her monograph Anmerckungen – Die Selbstkommentare Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein zu seinen Trauerspielen was published in 2024 by De Gruyter and she co-edited a special issue for the German literature journal Daphnis (“Das carmen heroicum in der frühen Neuzeit. Zur Gattungsgeschichte epischer Versdichtungen im deutschen Kulturraum”, Daphnis 46 (2018) 1–326, edited with Uwe Maximilian Korn and Dirk Werle).