Spencer J Weinreich
Biographic Data
| ID | 1156979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Spencer J Weinreich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Spencer J |
| FAMILY NAME | Weinreich |
| SIGNATURE | WEINREICH S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0521-306X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Rediscovery and First Publication
The Soul of Brutes
Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters
In 1627, at the height of the Bamberg witch-hunt (1595–1631), the prince-bishopric erected the Malefizhaus (“witchcraft-house”), the first cellular prison purpose-built for solitary confinement. This article recovers the history of the Malefizhaus to establish the importance of imprisonment and carceral institutions to the early modern witch-craze. The prison at once concretized the ideology of the hunt and furnished a fearsome weapon of persecut…
The Theology of Heinrich Bullinger
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Panopticon, Inc
This essay revisits Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, perhaps the foundational figure of the study of the prison, to recover a dimension of the project wholly omitted in Michel Foucault’s canonical reading in Discipline and Punish. Nowhere does Foucault mention Bentham’s insistence that the prison be run by a private contractor. With Bentham's penal theory characteristically derived from his account of human psychology, the contract and private profit…
An Infinity of Relics
John Calvin's “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe's fraudulent relics. Yet, theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while for Catholics prayer's intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in Calvin's humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus's satirical or devotional works, but to his rhetorical…
Sums Theological
From 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603-1604, 1625-1626, 1636, and 1665-1666). A bro…
Unaccountable Subjects
The first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London's Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting the narrative around the prisoners, their agenc…
Hagiography by the Book
This article probes the interplay of religious belief and early modern textual culture in Francisco Zumel's 1588 vita of Peter Nolasco. Like many hagiographers before and after, Zumel drew on earlier saint's lives to supply missing details; to choose his diverse set of sources, however, turned to bibliomancy, opening Laurentius Surius's hagiography collection De probatis sanctorum historiis at random. The intersection of divination and compilatio…
Roy Porter Student Prize Essay How (Not) to Survive a Plague
Early modern medicine favoured flight as the best prophylactic against epidemic disease. Theologically, however, flight savoured of an attempt to defy divine providence, or a dereliction of Christian charity, while staying could seem an act of presumption or recklessness. This essay studies six theologians whose writings on the issue circulated in sixteenth-century England. Long dismissed as inconclusive and derivative, these ‘flight theologies’ …
Escribir y prohibir
The Polar Regions
Imagining early modern histories
Name-Changes and Everyday Self-Fashioning in the Toledo Inquisition, 1575–1610
This article surveys more than a thousand relaciones de causa (summaries of cases) from the Toledo tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition to examine the uses of names in early modern Iberia. Three crucial features of early modern names come to the fore: the potential to communicate information about the bearer, contingency upon interpersonal use, and the ease of changing one’s name. The confluence of these factors made names a potent means for creat…
The Life of Ignatius of Loyola
Thinking with Crocodiles
This paper seeks to explore how culturally and religiously significant animals could shape discourses in which they were deployed, taking the crocodile as its case study. Beginning with the textual and visual traditions linking the crocodile with Africa and the Middle East, I read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel narratives categorizing American reptiles as "crocodiles" rather than "alligators," as attempts to mitigate the disruptive str…
Panopticon, Inc
This essay revisits Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, perhaps the foundational figure of the study of the prison, to recover a dimension of the project wholly omitted in Michel Foucault’s canonical reading in Discipline and Punish. Nowhere does Foucault mention Bentham’s insistence that the prison be run by a private contractor. With Bentham's penal theory characteristically derived from his account of human psychology, the contract and private profit…
Imagining early modern histories
The Life of Ignatius of Loyola
Thinking with Crocodiles
This paper seeks to explore how culturally and religiously significant animals could shape discourses in which they were deployed, taking the crocodile as its case study. Beginning with the textual and visual traditions linking the crocodile with Africa and the Middle East, I read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel narratives categorizing American reptiles as "crocodiles" rather than "alligators," as attempts to mitigate the disruptive str…
Imagining early modern histories
Name-Changes and Everyday Self-Fashioning in the Toledo Inquisition, 1575–1610
This article surveys more than a thousand relaciones de causa (summaries of cases) from the Toledo tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition to examine the uses of names in early modern Iberia. Three crucial features of early modern names come to the fore: the potential to communicate information about the bearer, contingency upon interpersonal use, and the ease of changing one’s name. The confluence of these factors made names a potent means for creat…
Escribir y prohibir
The Polar Regions
Roy Porter Student Prize Essay How (Not) to Survive a Plague
Early modern medicine favoured flight as the best prophylactic against epidemic disease. Theologically, however, flight savoured of an attempt to defy divine providence, or a dereliction of Christian charity, while staying could seem an act of presumption or recklessness. This essay studies six theologians whose writings on the issue circulated in sixteenth-century England. Long dismissed as inconclusive and derivative, these ‘flight theologies’ …
Hagiography by the Book
This article probes the interplay of religious belief and early modern textual culture in Francisco Zumel's 1588 vita of Peter Nolasco. Like many hagiographers before and after, Zumel drew on earlier saint's lives to supply missing details; to choose his diverse set of sources, however, turned to bibliomancy, opening Laurentius Surius's hagiography collection De probatis sanctorum historiis at random. The intersection of divination and compilatio…
Unaccountable Subjects
The first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London's Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting the narrative around the prisoners, their agenc…
Panopticon, Inc
This essay revisits Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, perhaps the foundational figure of the study of the prison, to recover a dimension of the project wholly omitted in Michel Foucault’s canonical reading in Discipline and Punish. Nowhere does Foucault mention Bentham’s insistence that the prison be run by a private contractor. With Bentham's penal theory characteristically derived from his account of human psychology, the contract and private profit…
An Infinity of Relics
John Calvin's “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe's fraudulent relics. Yet, theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while for Catholics prayer's intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in Calvin's humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus's satirical or devotional works, but to his rhetorical…
Sums Theological
From 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603-1604, 1625-1626, 1636, and 1665-1666). A bro…
The Theology of Heinrich Bullinger
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Why Early Modern Mass Incarceration Matters
In 1627, at the height of the Bamberg witch-hunt (1595–1631), the prince-bishopric erected the Malefizhaus (“witchcraft-house”), the first cellular prison purpose-built for solitary confinement. This article recovers the history of the Malefizhaus to establish the importance of imprisonment and carceral institutions to the early modern witch-craze. The prison at once concretized the ideology of the hunt and furnished a fearsome weapon of persecut…
Rediscovery and First Publication
The Soul of Brutes
History (9 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works)