Preternature V1:2: Anomalous Ethnographies (<i>Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural</i>)

Preternature V1.2 offers a rich and varied investigation of some of the strange and wonderful monsters and oddities that colonised the minds—and the world—of Europeans from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This issue features five scholarly essays that offer new and innovative examinations of subjects ranging from Italian monsters to literary fairies, from Jewish vampires to Livonian werewolves. What is the connection between fairies and gypsies in the mind of the author(s) of the seventeenth-century “Spanish Gypsy”? Why were Renaissance artists in Italy so interested in depicting what they termed “monsters”? And why were some of the princely courts obsessed by dwarves—to the point of including them in the art they commissioned? What should we make of a sixteenth-century Jewish story of a creature that seems to bear many of the hallmarks of a vampire? And why was Livonia the center of a veritable werewolf tourist industry in the seventeenth century? The collection is rounded out with a study of four spells from around 1600 that purport to bind and constrain fairies, and by seven extended book reviews that examine some of the latest scholarship in this new and burgeoning field. —Richard Raiswell, Editor of Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (http://preternature.org)