The publication of early witchcraft texts created witches by generating controversy about them. Witch-dramas, pamphlets, testimonies about witch-encounters, sermons, and accounts of trials published the anxieties, related the long standing suspicions, and sensationalised the physical manifestations that made women into witches. Sometimes accompanied by woodcuts, many texts insisted on the reality, materiality, and immediacy of witches and their familiars. In these writings, the early modern witch was represented as both a perpetrator of violence and the victim of it. The early modern witch is thus a fascinating enigma: a legal entity and a neighbourhood resource or nuisance, she purportedly engaged in natural and supernatural forms of wisdom with the potential to heal or harm others, or even herself. The words she spoke could become malefic by intent, if not by content. According to the sensationalist constructions of witchcraft, her body was contaminated by the magics she used: she fed familiars with blood, grew spare parts, could not weep, and would not sink. In accounts focused on bewitchment and possessions, the witch vomited pins or personified pollution and a culturally legitimate cunning-person such as a physician or minister or exorcist acted as curative. Despite the skepticism about witches that followed Reginald Scot’s assertions and the decline of legal examinations trials, the early modern witch is an enduring force in the cultural imagination. Witchcraft continues to be the focus of academic articles, scholarly volumes, digital resources, archaeological.

This issue of Preternature, in association with the “Capturing Witches” conference, invites contributions from any discipline that highlight the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the early English witch. Contributions should be roughly 8,000 – 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus, adhere to the journal style guide, and be formatted in the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing endnotes). Contributions must be submitted through the Preternature CMS.

Queries about journal scope and submissions can be made to the Editor, Dr. Kirsten C. Uszkalo. Queries concerning books to be reviewed can be made to the Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Richard Raiswell. Queries concerning this special volume, The Early Modern Witch (1450-1700), can be sent to special volume editors, Professor Alison Findlay and Dr. Liz Oakley-Brown. Final submissions are due November 30, 2012.

Full journal style guides are available at http://preternature.org. Information on the early English witch can be found at the WEME project at http://witching.org. Details on the “Capturing Witches” conference can be found at http://www.transculturalwriting.com/?page_id=1535

Preternature is a subscription based bi-annual publication, published through the Pennsylvania State University Press, and available in print or electronically through JSTOR, Project Muse, and as a Kindle e-book.

Articles:

• Reuters
• Locus magazine

The third conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung will take place at Zurich University, from 13th to 16th September 2012.

The fantastic raises a significant number of questions about cultural and social developments and challenges existing boundaries. With regard to transitions and the crossing of boundaries, the focus of this conference will lie on objects, norms, knowledge, ascribed meanings and potential spectrums of interpretation associated with the fantastic. The aim is to explore representations of worlds and subjects, reality and fiction, in order to contribute to a further assessment of the cultural relevance of the fantastic – in its contemporary, historical, social and medial dimensions.

Speakers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Turkey and the USA will present and discuss their papers in more than thirty sections, either in English (E) or German (G).

Keynotes will be presented by Renate Lachmann (G), Hans Richard Brittnacher (G), John Clute (E), Dieter Petzold (E), Alexander Knorr (G) and Marleen S. Barr (E). The wellknown authors Jan Koneffke (G) and Lev Grossman (E) and the illustrator John Howe (E) will also be present to speak about their work and be available for discussion.

The conference will take place in the main building of Zurich University, in the town centre, with good connection to public transport. It starts on Thursday, at 01:30 p.m., and ends on Sunday, at 01:00 p.m.

Up to date information is available on our conference homepage: http://www.ipk.uzh.ch/tagungen/gff2012.html, where you also find the programme, some information about accommodation, the registration fee, and the registration form, to be handed in by 31.07.2012. Hotel bookings should be made as early as possible.

We are looking forward to welcome you at Zurich University.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award is the most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain. The annual award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a shortlist of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.

The six shortlisted books are:

• Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three (Gollancz)
• Drew Magary, The End Specialist (Harper Voyager)
• China Miéville, Embassytown (Macmillan)
• Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
• Charles Stross, Rule 34 (Orbit)
• Sheri S.Tepper, The Waters Rising (Gollancz)

• ANDREW FERGUSON is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Virginia. His dissertation examines the aesthetics of “glitching” in modernist and postmodernist fiction, videogames, and sf. He received the award for best student paper delivered at the 2009 SFRA conference and the 2012 top prize from the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia for his work collecting the print materials of R.A. Lafferty. His work has appeared in SFS, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and other venues. He will spend ten days in the Eaton researching the “Shaver Mysteries” promoted in Amazing Stories during the mid-to-late 1940s.

• MATTHEW HOLTMEIER is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. His research, on “biopolitical production and cinematic subjectivity,” uses fan culture studies to examine the dynamics of affect and belief in popular film and television audiences. His essays have appeared in Short Film Studies, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. He will spend a week in the Eaton studying the emergence of fan communities surrounding The X-Files, including working in the Mari Ruíz-Torres Collection of books, scripts, posters, photographs, and fan club materials relating to the program.

• MALISA KURTZ is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University. Her dissertation examines the intersections of (post)colonialism, technoculture, and race in twentieth-century sf. She has presented her work at the Popular Culture Association of Canada conference and the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and has won a number of competitive research fellowships. During a month in the Eaton, she plans to explore “the cultural construction of a pan-Asian identity” in early pulp sf.

The survey is located at http://app.fluidsurveys.com/surveys/iafa/icfa-2012/.

Thanks everyone!

The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages is seeking proposals of 500 words for essays devoted to Arthurian-themed film, television, and/or electronic games. We are particularly interested in approaches that explore issues of transformation and/or diversity in these works.

Please submit proposals and CV to popular.culture.and.the.middle.ages@gmail.com by 6/1/12 and note “Are You From Camelot Proposal” in the subject line.

Completed essays should be between 5000 to 8000 words and submitted to the editors by 12/1/12 or earlier.

http://are-you-from-camelot.blogspot.com/