Dr Suzanna Ivanič (Kent University) presented CEMS 2nd seminar for 2023 on 16th May. The title of Suzanna’s presentation, “Religion, Magic, and Science revisited: A Material Approach to the Everyday” is available on CEMS You Tube channel.

Presentation Overview

“Religion, Magic, & Science Revisited: A Material Approach to the Everyday” looks at two groupings of category labels. In the last decades these category labels have been deeply interrogated as they apply to the early modern period: first, ‘religion, magic, and science’, and second, ‘nature and culture’. Yet these categories continue to shape early modern narratives; museums store and label once powerful objects as mere amulets; and debates continue to circle around ‘what magic is’ in the period. In the study of the everyday, it is particularly clear that this is problematic. Early modern men and women were less concerned with labelling what they were doing, than in engaging with objects and actions to create change in the world around them. This paper argues that through an ecologically grounded material approach, we can re-evaluate these debates regarding the early modern period from an everyday perspective. Its focus is on how early modern people understood the world around them — from natural matter to crafted objects — and how that informed their everyday practices and spiritual lives. Through an examination of the varied uses of chalcedony in Prague around 1600, it starts to piece together an understanding of what might be called ‘early modern materiality’ — a worldview of human relationships with non-human things that was specific to the period: culturally and historically shaped.