Early Modern Circle

The Early Modern Circle is an interdisciplinary seminar open to interested students, academics and researchers.  The Circle meets on the third Tuesday of the month during semester, at 6:15pm.

Convenors

Catherine Kovesi
Jenny Spinks
Matthew Champion
Nat Cutter
Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow
Paige Donaghy
Charlotte-Rose Millar
Enquiries: Dr Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow shannon.gilmore@unimelb.edu.au

Programme for 2026

Wednesday 15 April

Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building, North Wing (map here)

Two PhD Candidates Showcase their Research Projects

Seeing the future in 1590s English popular print: mirrors in conjuring and mirrors of conscience
Jenny Smith (Monash University)

The future was hard to see in 1590s England, clouded by an imminent succession crisis, religious war, and widespread famine, and subject to the intervention of providence. Speculation and prognostication were outlawed, and ‘conjuring’ including scrying was also condemned on theological grounds, by Puritan preachers and popular playwrights alike. But mirrors retained authority as way to engage with the future in popular texts. News from Europe was reported as a mirror of what might happen at home. Natural disasters were interpreted as signs of apocalypse but also as mirrors of conscience: ‘a glass of correction in which [God] hath sealed not only his own glory but our good’.

Jenny Smith is a PhD student at Monash University, writing a history of the mirror as a metaphor in sixteenth-century England. Besides mirrors, she has written on topics including the fool, lunacy, and Prudence, publishing work on mirrors in counsel and on birds as a symbol of truth and dissimulation.

Witchcraft Belief in Fifteenth-Century Zurich: Intersections Between Learned and Popular Demonologies
Isabelle Moss (University of Melbourne)

This paper explores the richness and plurality of fifteenth-century witchcraft belief in the early modern city of Zurich. It examines community accusations of flying wolves, magical milking, bewitching, weather magic, and yet, this paper will argue that it is the sexual activity of witches with their demonic accomplices which proves most concerning for the Council. This exploration is used to consider the ways in which both the Zurich Council and the wider community processed the emerging threat of witchcraft in the city. In doing so, it complicates existing expectations of demonological belief and the role of demonic copulation in early witchcraft prosecutions.

Isabelle Moss is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines witchcraft in early modern Zurich, focused on the ways in which demonic copulation was conceptualised and its implications for trial proceedings.

Wednesday 20 May

Room 553, Level 5, Arts West Building, North Wing (map here)

Dr Claudio Passera (Sapienza University of Rome)

From the Republic to the Streets of Celebration: Florentine Stagecraft Masters and their Conquest of Fifteenth-Century Italian Courts

Numerous primary sources — including urban chronicles, encomiastic poems, and the correspondence of humanists, ambassadors, and princes visiting Florence during its principal festivities — attest to the high regard for Florentine craftsmen specialized in staging spectacles during the Renaissance. However, less is known about how these artists adapted theatrical mechanisms—such as the clouds and angels used in the pageants for the Patronal procession of Saint John the Baptist — to suit the celebratory aims of different patrons. This paper investigates how, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the presence of Florentine-style performances became a distinguishing and prestigious feature of the Italian princely festivals, facilitating the export of Florentine expertise in stagecraft and pyrotechnics. Aristocratic patronage, artistic diplomacy, and the initiative of the artists themselves thus transformed stagecraft — originally designed for the civic education and political communication of the Florentine Republic — into a tool for celebrating princely authority. The various strategies of this transformation are analyzed here through a comparative approach to the performance traditions of Italian Renaissance cities, trying to shed new light on their visual and urban culture.

Claudio Passera is an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) in Theatre History at Sapienza University of Rome. He obtained an MA in Italian Philology from the Catholic University of Milan in 2012 and a PhD in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Florence in 2019. From 2023 to 2025, he was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Parma for the project MUTHEA: Music, Theatre and Art in Parma at the Time of Guillaume Du Tillot (1749-1771). His research focuses on the celebration of princely power in Early Modern Italy through ceremonies, spectacles, and feasts, as well as the use of these events descriptions to promote the public image of princes.

Wednesday 19 August

Room 553, Level 5, Arts West Building, North Wing (map here)

Professor Dolly Mackinnon (University of Melbourne)

Material Culture, Scottish Eighteenth-century Music, and its Transmission by both Enslaved and Free people

Revisiting a wide range of material culture evidence, as well as archives, this paper gives voice to the recoverable activities of free and enslaved musicians in Scotland and the diaspora during the eighteenth century. By taking a different tack to traditional approaches, it demonstrates the diversity of Scottish music making, musical consumption and musical sounds, that are found around indoor tea-tables to outdoor settings, and the roles captive and freed people played in that soundscape. The result reveals a reverberation of rich and various musical skills, that demonstrates how different types of music graced the ears of audiences, both intended and unintended. It challenges the prevailing methodological canon of absence and silence about Black musicians, and offers, instead, another contribution to the new methodological approach championed by Mary Caton Lingold for the Atlantic World.

Assoc. Prof. Dolly MacKinnon, FSAScot, FRHistS, ASSAP, is an Honorary Principal Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. A cultural historian, she has published widely in medical, early modern, music, and soundscape histories including: ‘‘Madness, Creativity and Representation in Early Modern Music’" (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2027); “War and conflict” (Bloomsbury, 2023), ‘‘Hearing madness and sounding cures: recovering historical soundscapes of the asylum” (2017); ‘Slave Children: Scotland’s Children as Chattels at Home and Abroad in the Eighteenth Century’ (Boydell & Brewer, 2015); Earls Colne’s Early Modern Landscapes (Ashgate, 2014); and “‘I have now a book of songs of her writing’: Scottish families, orality, literacy, and the transmission of musical culture c.1500-c.1800” (2008).

Wednesday 16 September

Room 553, Level 5, Arts West Building, North Wing (map here)

Dr Volodymyr Mezentsev (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies)

History and Culture of Baturyn, the Capital of the Cossack State in Early Modern Ukraine

This paper surveys the history of Baturyn, the capital of the 17th-18th century Cossack Hetman state in central Ukraine, and presents the main results of its archaeological, architectural, and art-historical research in 2001-2025. It will include slides of the reconstructed lost town citadel, Western-inspired hetman palaces, and churches, and compare them with similar European baroque structures. Drawing on archaeological findings the paper will also examine the culture, lifestyle, intellectual pursuits, and artistic interests of the Cossack elite as well as the town's vibrant crafts and applied arts. Baturyn's extensive international economic and cultural contacts will be discussed to demonstrated that Cossack Ukraine and its capital constituted a distinctive part of European Christian civilisation.

Volodymyr Mezentsev, PhD, is Executive Director of the Baturyn Archaeological Project at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Toronto Office. He served as Co-Director of the Canada-Ukraine Baturyn excavations in 2001–13. Web: https://tinyurl.com/ypx3tdx2.

Wednesday 21 October

Dr Jessica O’Leary (Monash University)

Echoes of Women in Early Colonial Brazil

In this book project, I suggest that we listen for the echoes of women in the fragmented archive of colonial Brazil. Sources survive across state and ecclesiastical archives in Brazil and Portugal, as well as in missionary, literary, and artistic corpora. They represent only a small fraction of the documentation produced during colonisation, much of which disappeared or decayed over time. Yet, like all historical sources, they offer partial access to the past, and attentive reading can illuminate both what they register of women’s lives and the assumptions that shaped those representations. I use the word echoes deliberately to invoke the fate of the mythical nymph Echo, who, denied the ability to initiate speech, ‘repeats the last of what is spoken and returns the words she hears’ (Ov. Met. 3.368–369). The women of colonial Brazil doubtless spoke (and acted), yet they entered the archive largely through representations produced by men of European descent. Historians have too often equated this mediation and the scarcity of women-authored and Indigenous-authored sources with an absence of evidence about their lives. This book challenges that approach by reading male-authored representations both for the European gender expectations that shaped them and for the evidence they nevertheless provide of Indigenous women’s participation in colonial life. Across five chapters, I bring scattered sources that have rarely been read together into dialogue to examine Indigenous women’s interactions with settler and enslaved African women and men between c. 1500 and 1700. Reading across this dispersed body of evidence, I offer a new account of Indigenous women’s part in shaping colonial Brazilian society while attending to the processes that made their actions only unevenly visible in the archive.

Jessica O’Leary is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Philosophical, Historical and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. She is a gender and cultural historian of the early modern period, interested in global history and connections between people around the world.