CHED Public Seminar -

Event Details

Date:

Thursday, 14 May 2015

Time:

4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Room:

CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4

Location:

Forgan Smith Tower

UQ Location:

Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.ched.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=220724&pid=170139

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Using Joel Robbins’ notion of “encompassment,” this talk surveys early modern learned modes of bringing fairies to order by folding them into more culturally dominant classificatory schemes. Fairies and their ilk (brownies, fauns, water-demons) provoked writers as diverse as the bishop-ethnographer Olaus Magnus, the natural magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and the radical antitrinitarian Pawel Gilowski, all of whom attempted to find a place for these anomalous beings within variously conceived Christian hierarchies. I suggest that fairies tend to defy these schemata, to escape their bounds, or rather, to destabilize them, so that intended clarification ends in greater ambiguity. They thus illustrate the tendency of demarcational excercises to exacerbate the blurred boundaries they are intended to overcome.

Michael Ostling earned his PhD in Religious Studies from the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, in 2008. His doctoral dissertation, founded on research undertaken through a Fulbright Fellowship Poland, forms the basis for his first book: Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford, 2011). Michael joined the Centre as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in July 2012, and is working on a book project tentatively titled Small Gods: Goblins, Fairies, and Demons at the Margins of Christendom.