Practising Piety: Spiritual Intermediality and Devotion in Early Modern Europe

Situated at the intersection of theology, history, literature, and the arts, this edited volume introduces the concept of spiritual intermediality and highlights its central role in early modern piety across various Christian denominations. The case studies present a diverse array of perspectives that explore different forms and functions of intermediality in devotional practices of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, thereby enhancing our understanding of the medial conditions and intermedial aspects of devotion during one of the most fruitful periods of devotional arts and practices in Europe.
By arguing that early modern devotion often relied on intermedial forms of expression to unfold its full semantic and performative potential, the volume sheds new light on the rich web of media that shaped early modern Christian culture.

Contributors include: Wietse de Boer, Marlene Dirschauer, Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, Tara Hamling, Jenny Körber, Judith Lipperheide, Cosima Macco, Alec Ryrie, Franziska Schreiber, James Simpson, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Stephanie Wodianka, and Katharina Worms.

Marlene Dirschauer earned a doctoral degree in Comparative literature from Freie Universität Berlin. Her main areas of research are British modernist literature and early modern devotional poetry. She is the author of Modernist Waterscapes: Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf (2023).
Rogier Gerrits is a literary scholar at the University of Hamburg where he obtained a doctoral degree in Romance Studies. He has published articles on early modern French literature and is co-editor of Reproducing Miracles. On Media and the Miraculous in Early Modern Europe (2025).
Marc Föcking is Professor of Romance Studies at the University of Hamburg. He has written books and many articles on Italian spiritual poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and on French novels and medical knowledge in the nineteenth century. He is co-editor of A Companion to Anticlassicisms in the Cinquecento (2023).
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. He has extensively published on the history of the Reformation and of Protestantism more widely. He is the author of Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) and Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019).