A focus on objects, affects and effects in early modern culture – such as in our research project – will almost certainly have to include bodily practices and bodily experiences. The body is especially crucial when it comes to exploring the dimensions of religious and cultural identities through and in the use of objects and materials. The international conference Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent: Naked, Veiled – Vilified, Worshiped (conference program) which took place in Berlin from November 30th to December 2nd 2016 focused on bodily practices and religious dissent in early modern Europe. Organised by Xenia von Tippelskirch (Berlin) and Elisabeth Fischer (Hamburg), the aim of the
Studying early modern artisans, who specialised in the trade, usage and processing of feathers, I dedicated my last summer to search for the traces that these craftsmen left in the archives. Travelling from archive to archive and museum to museum throughout Central Europe for months, I studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, images and artefacts. All of them document the impressive variety of activities, which such artisans conducted. Archival research is a very specific experience that affect historians’ imagination, and I wish to write a – very – brief blog entry on how such an experience may look like and what it may result in. Since studies like Fiction in the Archives (N. Z. D
