APS and print-related panels at RSA 2026
APS is sponsoring two session at the RSA Annual Convention 2026 in San Francisco from February 19–21, 2026. Visit the website for the full conference program.
Session 1: Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture
Thursday, February 19, 2026
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room A – Ballroom Level
Chair: Sarah Lent Frier, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford UniversityTWO APS-SPONSORED SESSIONS:
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 explores papers that explore how magic, witchcraft, and the occult were represented and contested through print.
Papers:
Seventeenth-Century Italian Printed Culture of Witchcraft: Circulation, Propaganda, and the Exception of the Compendium Maleficarum
– Olivia Garro, Coventry University – The British Museum
The Rhetoric of Fear: Fantasy as an Ideological Tool in Newes from Scotland
– Julie Fox-Horton, East Tennessee State University
Witchcraft, Magic, and the Absurd: Satire in Bruegel’s The Story of the Magician Hermogenes
– Michelle Oing, Pomona College
“Charmes ende belesinge”: The Source of De Gheyn’s Fortune-Tellers and Witches
– Susanne Bartels, Harvard Art Museums
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Session 2: Women Printmakers and Print Publishers in the Early Modern World I, II, III
Chairs: Emanuele Lugli, Stanford University and Rhoda Eitel-Porter, Editor, Print Quarterly
The history of early modern printmaking has long centered on male engravers and publishers, leaving the contributions of women largely overlooked and insufficiently theorized. Yet ongoing archival research and recent scholarship continue to recover names, works, and forms of labor that unsettle the conventional picture of how prints were made, circulated, and valued. Across Europe and beyond, women participated in the world of intaglio and woodcut not only as inheritors of family trades but also as brilliant amateurs or as anonymous contributors to the devotional image economy. This three-part session complicates neat distinctions between art and craft, genius and labor, public and private spheres.
Session 1/3
Thursday, February 19, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room A – Ballroom Level
Girolama Parasole’s Battles and Collaborations
– Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University
Elisabetta Catanea Parasole “Bergamasca”: A Female Printmaker of Pattern Books for Lace During the Counter-Reformation
– Sara Baccanelli, PhD Candidate in History of Art, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
Bologna Intagliatrice
– Babette Bohn, Texas Christian University
Session 2/3
Thursday, February 19, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room A – Ballroom Level
On the Slopes of Vesuvius: Teresa Del Po and Scientific Knowledge-Making in Seventeenth-Century Naples
– Alessia Silvi, PhD Student, Stanford University
Teresa del Po (1649–1713) and Representations of Seventeenth-Century Women
– Audrey Lin, Emory University. Art History PhD student
Betwixt Parchment and Print: Teresa del Pò’s Penitent Magdalene at the National Gallery of Art
– Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Session 3/3
Thursday, February 19, 2026
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room A – Ballroom Level
Chaired by Babette Bohn, Texas Christian University
Widowhood and Women Printers in Sixteenth-Century France
– Katherine Goertz, Curator/Registrar, Art Collection; Hill Museum & Manuscript Library; Saint John’s University
Beyond the Maîtrise and the Académie Royale: Professional Women Printmakers in Paris after 1660
– Kelsey D. Martin, Private Fine Art Collection
From Obvious to Oblivion: Marritgen Muller’s Pivotal Role in Publishing House De Vergulden Passer Reassessed
– Laurien Van der Werff, Co-Chair Women of the Rijksmuseum and Research Associate Women of the Rijksmuseum and Print Room
Early Women Engravers, Henrietta Koenen, Samuel P. Avery, and First Wave Feminism
– Judith Brodsky, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Rutgers University and Founding Director, the Brodsky Center at PAF
Print-related sessions and papers
Iterations of Science in France and Italy
Thursday February 19, 2026 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Nob Hill 8 – Tower 3 – 6th Floor
Chair: Guy Spielmann (Georgetown University)
Paper Pleasures: Printed Games and Recreational Books During the Renaissance Period I
Thursday February 19, 2026
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 15 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor
Chair: Silvia Urbini (Fondazione Giorgio Cini)
Paper Pleasures: Printed Games and Recreational Books During the Renaissance Period II
Thursday, February 19, 2026
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Union Square 15 – Tower 3 – 4th Floor
Chair: Marco Francalanci (Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti)
Shaping Identities Through Emblems I
Thursday, February 19, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Nob Hill 2 – Tower 3 – 6th Floor
Chair: Elizabeth Harding (Herzog August Bibliothek)
Shaping Identities Through Emblems II
Thursday, February 19, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Nob Hill 2 – Tower 3 – 6th Floor
Chair: Richard Kirwan (University of Limerick)
Building and Gilding Renaissance Works
Thursday, February 19, 2026
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Continental Ballroom 3 – Ballroom Level
Chair: Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia)
Papering Devotion I: The Making of Devotion through Paper in the Early Modern World
Friday, February 20, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room D – Ballroom Level
Chair: Stuart Lingo (University of Washington, Seattle)
Venice as the Holy City I: Women Artists
Friday, February 20, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Continental Ballroom 2 – Ballroom Level
Chair: Melissa Conn (Save Venice Inc.)
Papering Devotion II: The Circulation of Devotion through Paper in the Early Modern World
Friday, February 20, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room D – Ballroom Level
Chair: Fannie Caron-Roy (Queen’s University at Kingston)
Constructing Otherness: The Image of the Other in the Netherlands (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)
Friday, February 20, 2026
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room D – Ballroom Level
Chair: Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington)
Early Modern Images and Texts II
Friday, February 20, 2026
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room A – Ballroom Level
Chair: James Clifton (Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation)
Pursuing the Curation and Circulation of Figures and Books
Friday, February 20, 2026
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Nob Hill 2 – Tower 3 – 6th Floor
Chair: Nicola Margot Courtright (Amherst College)
Bodies and Representation in Early Modern European Art
Saturday, February 21, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room B – Ballroom Level
Chair: Christian K. Kleinbub (New Foundation for Art History)
Crossing Borders: Revisiting the Netherlandish Migrant Artist
Saturday, February 21, 2026
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Franciscan Room C – Ballroom Level
Chair: Ashley D. West (Temple University)
Material Reconstruction Meets Digital Humanities: Experiments with Artificial Flowers and Ornament Prints
Workshop Session
Saturday, February 21, 2026
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square – Plaza B – Lobby Level
Chair: Jennifer Rampling (Princeton University)