Demons and witches examined in UQ seminar

The History of the Eye: Demons, Witches, and Visual Deception in 16th and 17th-Century Europe will be discussed at a University of Queensland seminar on Monday, July 8.

Professor of Early Modern Cultural and Intellectual History at the University of Wales (Swansea) Professor Stuart Clark will be guest speaker at the seminar.

It will be held from 10am to 12 noon at the Library Conference Room, floor 1, Social Sciences and Humanities Library, St Lucia.

Seminar organiser Dr Sarah Ferber said books about witchcraft usually turned out to be about many other things as well — both in terms of their content and context and in terms of their intellectual presuppositions.

“They were certainly not just about the legal prosecution of witches in the courts,” she said.

“Professor Clark’s paper will explore one aspect of the wider intellectual life of early modern demonology — its relationship to the history of the senses, and in particular, the extent to which it raised fundamental questions about the reliability and reality of visual experience.

“What were the implications of allowing the devil the power to interfere in the visual process and create delusions that were indistinguishable from true phenomena? The witchcraft debates of the 16th and 17th centuries gave intellectuals the opportunity to discuss the workings of the human mind and of human perception — especially the power of the imagination, the force and effects of mental disturbances like melancholy, the nature of dreams, the difference between the waking and sleeping states, the operation of the senses, and, above all, the possibility of sensory delusion and paradox.”

Professor Clark was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. His book Thinking With Demons (Oxford UP, 1997) won the Royal Historical Society`s Gladstone History Prize for 1997.

Media: for further information, contact Dr Sarah Ferber (email: s.ferber@uq.edu.au, telephone 07 3365 6668).