Familiar Bodies: Dwelling with Spirits in Early Modern Saxony

In this talk, Dr. Nummedal begins with a “superstitious and suspicious” object confiscated from a group of women in a Saxon mining town in 1696 as a point of entry into broader questions about “familiar bodies,” that is, the embodied spirits that dwelled among humans in 16th- and 17th-century Northern Europe. Familiar bodies, she argues — dwelling in the interstices between demonology, alchemy, natural history, and biology — expose concepts of generation, (dis)ability, and heritable qualities that have profound stakes for understanding both the early modern period and the renewed interest in ontology within the humanities today.