Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture

Christine Gottler is Associate Professor of the history of early modern European art at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her many publications include "Die Kunst des Fegefeuers nach der Reformation" (1996); forthcoming is her "Last Things: Art and Religious Practice in the Age of Reform." Wolfgang Neuber is Professor of early modern German and Neolatin literature at the Free University in Berlin. He has published extensively on early modern travel accounts (including "Fremde Welt im europaischen Horizont," 1991) and is currently preparing a book on spirits and spectres."

Investigating the meanings and uses of "spiritus" in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields - natural philosophy, theology, music, literature and the visual arts - this book revisits the ambivalent history of a central ancient concept in a period of crisis and change.

Acknowledgments Notes on the Editors of this Volume List of Contributors Preface: Vapours and Veils: The Edge of the Unseen, Christine Gottler & Wolfgang Neuber 1. Poltergeist the Prequel: Aspects of Otherworldly Disturbances in Early Modern Times, Wolfgang Neuber 2. Fire, Smoke and Vapour. Jan Brueghel's 'Poetic Hells': 'Ghespoock' in Early Modern European Art, Christine Gottler 3. Movable Feasts of Reason: Description, Intelligence, and the Excitation of Sight, Bret Rothstein 4. Images in the Air: Optical Games, Magic and Imagination, Sven Dupre 5. Material Gazes and Flying Images in Marsilio Ficino and Michelangelo, Berthold Hub 6. Spirits of Love: Castiglione and Neoplatonic Discourses of Vision, Wietse de Boer 7. 'Painting's Enchanting Poison': Artistic Efficacy and the Transfer of Spirits, Thijs Weststeijn 8. 'Singe the Enchantment for Sleepe': Music and Bewitched Sleep in Early Modern English Drama, Sarah F. Williams 9. Bilder des Unsichtbaren: Robert Fludds Konzeption des Weltgeistes, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann 10. Sympathy in Eden: On Paradise with the Fall of Man by Rubens and Brueghel, Paul J. Smith 11. Dizzying Visions: St. Teresa of Jesus and the Embodied Visual Image, Rose Marie San Juan 12. Spirit as Intermediary in Post-Cartesian Natural Philosophy, Justin E. H. Smith 13. The Motions of Laughter: Allegory and Physiology in Walter Charleton's Natural History of the Passions (1674), Dawn Morgan 14. Ghosts in the Machine: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, Rowe's Friendship in Death and the Early Eighteenth-Century Invisible World, Jennifer Frangos 15. Die Geburt des Kunstwerks durch den Geist der Proportion: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt und seine Charakterkopfe, Axel Christoph Gampp List of Illustrations Index Nominum