Jennifer Spinks is a cultural historian of northern Europe and a full-term Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions. She returned to The University of Melbourne in 2017 as Hansen Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, having completed four years as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at The University of Manchester. She has published books, edited collections, articles and essays on the polemical dimensions of European print culture, on apocalyptic beliefs and on wonders and disasters, amongst other topics. She has a strong interest in the use of visual culture as historical source material, and has been involved in a number of exhibition projects. These include the 2012 exhibition The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which she co-curated with Petra Kayser, Cathy Leahy and Charles Zika, and the 2016 exhibition Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, co-curated with Sasha Handley. Together with Sasha Handley, she established a research cluster on Embodied Emotions in the History department at the University of Manchester.
Jenny recently co-edited a collection of essays with CHE Chief Investigator Charles Zika emerging from a CHE-sponsored 2012 event on disaster, death, apocalypse and the emotions in early modern Europe. She is also writing a study of ‘books of wonders’ and religious identity in sixteenth-century northern Europe. She is particularly interested in the emotionally rich manner in which phenomena like earthquakes, comets, fires, monstrous births and floods were circulated across religious and linguistic borders during periods of religious upheaval, and how violence took on prodigious characteristics in this environment. She is also working on a separate project about the ways that sixteenth-century northern Europeans circulated and anxiously deployed (mis)representations of religious material cultures and ecstatic rites in India for domestic European audiences. The latter research has been supported by CHE: Jenny worked on the Calicut ‘devil’ as an Associate Investigator with the Centre in 2012, and on the concept of the juggernaut as an Early Career International Research Visiting Fellow with the Melbourne node of CHE for two months in 2015.
Contact
jspinks@unimelb.edu.au
Research
Violent Emotions and Religious Polemic: Southern Indian Religious Cultures in the Sixteenth-Century Northern European Imagination
Natural Disasters and Apocalyptic Anxiety: The Wick Collection
Selected recent and forthcoming relevant publications
Edited Books
Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, eds. Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700. Series: ‘Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Jennifer Spinks, Sasha Handley and Stephen Gordon, eds. Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World. Exhibition catalogue. Manchester: John Rylands Library, 2016. 28 pp. Available online.
Cathy Leahy, Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, eds. The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster. Exhibition catalogue. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2012. viii + 88 pp.
Journal Articles
Jennifer Spinks, Sasha Handley and Stephen Gordon. ‘Curating Magic at the John Rylands Library: The 2016 exhibition “Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World”’. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 92.1 (2016): 105–14.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘The southern Indian “Devil in Calicut” in early modern northern Europe: Images, texts and objects in motion’. Journal of Early Modern History 18.1-2 (2014): 15–48. [Special issue: Science, New Worlds and the Classical Tradition, 1450–1800, ed. Surekha Davies].
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Print and polemic in sixteenth-century France: the Histoires prodigieuses, confessional identity, and the Wars of Religion’. Renaissance Studies 27.1 (2013): 73–96.
Book Chapters and Entries
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Wonders of Nature.’ In Emotions in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction edited by Susan Broomhall. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Civil War Violence, Prodigy Culture and Families in the French Wars of Religion’. In Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700, edited by J. Spinks and C. Zika, pp. 113–34. Series: ‘Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Introduction: Rethinking Disaster and Emotions, 1400–1700.’ In Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700, edited by Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, pp. 1–17. Series: ‘Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Jennifer Spinks, Sasha Handley and Stephen Gordon. Jointly-written catalogue entries. In Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World, edited by Jennifer Spinks, Sasha Handley and Stephen Gordon. Exhibition catalogue. Manchester: John Rylands Library, 2016. Available online.
Entries: ‘Introduction: A Brief History of the Supernatural in Europe, 1400–1800’ (Spinks, Gordon, Handley; pp. 2–5); ‘The Stereotypical Witch?’ (Spinks, Gordon; pp. 8–9); ‘Magic, Nature and the Body’ (Handley, Gordon; pp. 10–11); ‘Supernatural Spaces and Vulnerability’ (Handley, Gordon, Spinks; pp. 12–15); ‘Diabolical Fears and Battles’ (Spinks, Gordon; pp. 16–19); ‘Mechanical Magic and Sceptical Approaches’ (Handley, Spinks; pp. 20–21); ‘Supernatural Encounters’ (Gordon, Handley, Spinks; pp. 22–23); ‘Magical Books’ (Gordon; pp. 24–26).
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Signs that Speak: Reporting the 1556 comet across French and German borders’. In Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: An album amicorum for Charles Zika, edited by Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger, pp. 212–39. Series: ‘Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions.’ Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika. ‘The four horsemen: an introduction’. In The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster, edited by Cathy Leahy, Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, pp. 1–13. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2012. Each author = 50%.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Monsters and heavenly signs: looking for the Last Days’. In The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster, edited by Cathy Leahy, Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika, pp. 47–61. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2012.
Selected presentations
Jennifer Spinks. ‘New Worlds, Old Fears: Possession Cases from Japan and the Americas in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, Third International Conference of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions ‘The Future of Emotions/Conversations Without Borders’, The University of Western Australia, 14–15 June 2018.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Wondrous Objects: Visionary Signs of Christ’s Passion in the Skies of Early Modern Germany’, ‘Devotion, Objects and Emotion, 1300‒1700’ symposium, UMelb, 16‒17 March 2018.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Possession, Power Relations and the Global Supernatural in Northern European Demonologies’, ‘Powerful Emotions/Emotions and Power’ conference, University of York, UK, 28‒29 June 2017.
Jennifer Spinks. ‘Books, Rings, Rituals and Difficult Objects’, Melbourne-Manchester 'Emotions and Material Culture' collaborative workshop, 5‒6 July 2017, The University of Manchester