Call for Papers or Proposals
Posted: 07/16/2025
Posted by: Association of Print Scholars
Expires: 07/25/2025
CFP: Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture
Renaissance Society of America
San Francisco ,
United States
Abstracts due: 07/25/2025
Conference date: 02/19/2026
APS Sponsored Call for Papers:
Renaissance Society of America, Feb 19-21, 2026, San Francisco
Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture
Positioned at the intersection of visual and textual culture, print played a critical role in shaping both imagined and institutional responses to magic, witchcraft, and the occult. Its advent in fifteenth-century Europe enabled the widespread circulation of texts and images concerning magic and witchcraft, ranging from demonological treatises and legal handbooks to illustrated broadsides, sensational pamphlets, and works of art by renowned early modern artists. Far from signaling a “decline” in magical thinking, this proliferation of printed material suggests a redefinition of the boundaries of magic, both as a practice and as a conceptual category. Print culture served simultaneously to document, disseminate, and delimit magical knowledge. It reflected emerging interests in classifying popular beliefs, integrating occult ideas into new natural philosophies, and asserted control over invisible forces through the apparatus of increasingly centralized religious and political authorities.
Organized in conjunction with the Cunning Folk: Early Modern Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, this panel invites papers that explore how magic, witchcraft, and the occult were represented and contested through print. We welcome contributions that address a wide range of magical topics across early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. This can include papers that address the interplay between image and text in constructing magical authority, articulating fear or fascination, and/or legitimizing its control. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
● Witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural in broadsides, ballads, and newsprints
● The aesthetics and materiality of grimoires and printed books of magic
● Relationships between the print culture of magic and painting, decorative arts, architecture, or other visual forms
● The printed/published visual rhetoric of witchcraft and demonology and its relationship to state or ecclesiastical power, including trials and punishment
● The representation of cunning folk and popular healing in print
● Artists and publishers as mediators of magical or occult imagery
● Magic, race, and colonial knowledge systems in transatlantic print culture
● Archival gaps and historiographical challenges in the study of printed magic
● New interpretations of specific witchcraft prints or illustrated books
● Presentations on exhibitions, curatorial activities, archival/library initiatives, conservation projects, or other museum practice with objects related to this theme
Papers should be in English and a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Presenters at any stage of their career are welcome to apply.
Please send the following materials to Sara Frier at sfrier23@stanford.edu, by August 1, 2025:
• Paper title and abstract (400 word max) with a summary of key conclusions
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025. For any questions, feel free to contact Sara Frier.
Renaissance Society of America, Feb 19-21, 2026, San Francisco
Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture
Positioned at the intersection of visual and textual culture, print played a critical role in shaping both imagined and institutional responses to magic, witchcraft, and the occult. Its advent in fifteenth-century Europe enabled the widespread circulation of texts and images concerning magic and witchcraft, ranging from demonological treatises and legal handbooks to illustrated broadsides, sensational pamphlets, and works of art by renowned early modern artists. Far from signaling a “decline” in magical thinking, this proliferation of printed material suggests a redefinition of the boundaries of magic, both as a practice and as a conceptual category. Print culture served simultaneously to document, disseminate, and delimit magical knowledge. It reflected emerging interests in classifying popular beliefs, integrating occult ideas into new natural philosophies, and asserted control over invisible forces through the apparatus of increasingly centralized religious and political authorities.
Organized in conjunction with the Cunning Folk: Early Modern Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, this panel invites papers that explore how magic, witchcraft, and the occult were represented and contested through print. We welcome contributions that address a wide range of magical topics across early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. This can include papers that address the interplay between image and text in constructing magical authority, articulating fear or fascination, and/or legitimizing its control. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
● Witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural in broadsides, ballads, and newsprints
● The aesthetics and materiality of grimoires and printed books of magic
● Relationships between the print culture of magic and painting, decorative arts, architecture, or other visual forms
● The printed/published visual rhetoric of witchcraft and demonology and its relationship to state or ecclesiastical power, including trials and punishment
● The representation of cunning folk and popular healing in print
● Artists and publishers as mediators of magical or occult imagery
● Magic, race, and colonial knowledge systems in transatlantic print culture
● Archival gaps and historiographical challenges in the study of printed magic
● New interpretations of specific witchcraft prints or illustrated books
● Presentations on exhibitions, curatorial activities, archival/library initiatives, conservation projects, or other museum practice with objects related to this theme
Papers should be in English and a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Presenters at any stage of their career are welcome to apply.
Please send the following materials to Sara Frier at sfrier23@stanford.edu, by August 1, 2025:
• Paper title and abstract (400 word max) with a summary of key conclusions
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025. For any questions, feel free to contact Sara Frier.