Early Modern Circle
(Photograph: Andrew Stephenson)
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.