Dr Jenny Spinks, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture

“Divided Emotions, Radical Religions and Apocalyptic Expectations in the Sixteenth-Century Augsburg ‘Book of Miracles’”, Jenny Spinks (The University of Manchester)

Date: Monday, 8 December 2014
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: The University of Melbourne, Room 209, Old Arts Building
Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mXldZpqTU6AgaRQB27Y08SO7jAAzMfFpTJezXGufadg/viewform

Sixteenth-century printed and manuscript wonder books compiled reports of comets, floods, earthquakes, monstrous births, and other terrifying and extraordinary phenomena. Such compendia appeared in great numbers after 1556, and German-language wonder books were produced most commonly in Switzerland and in northern German lands. Some wonder books also appeared before the mid-1550s, and in other German regions, although these are works that have received much less attention and analysis. This paper will examine a recently-discovered and richly illustrated manuscript wonder book that was produced in Augsburg in the late 1540s, during a period of intense religious and political division within the city around the 1548 Augsburg Interim. German-language wonder books generally reflect Lutheran or Swiss Protestant approaches to the interpretation of the natural world and the coming Last Days (which could evoke both joy and fear). Possibly uniquely, parts of this Augsburg manuscript instead draw upon Anabaptist and other radical Reformation sources. Lurid colour images are paired with terse texts that warn the reader of how often such events occur close to home. This paper will situate the manuscript in a wider context of disappointed apocalyptic expectation, fearful reports of prodigies across print and manuscript sources, divided communal experiences of religion, and the contested emotional meanings of wonders in this context.


Jenny Spinks is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at The University of Manchester, and was previously an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and CHE Associate Investigator at The University of Melbourne. Her publications include Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (London, 2009), and – co-edited with Cathy Leahy and Charles Zika – the exhibition catalogue The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster (Melbourne, 2012). She is currently writing a study of sixteenth-century northern European wonder books, and is also working towards a 2016 co-curated exhibition titled Magic and the Expanding Early Modern World at the John Rylands Library, Manchester.