Friday, October 18, 4pm, Pomerene Hall [Rm. 160], 1760 Neil Ave.

The OSU Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies [CMRS] will host Dr. Michael Ostling for an installment of the CMRS lecture series. Dr. Ostling will present “Evicting the Landlords: Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism Reconsidered.”

For about a century now, scholars have been debating Max Weber’s claim that the Reformations brought about a “disenchantment of the world,” rendering Nature inert, lifeless, and amenable to capitalist extraction. That discussion has too often relied on a distinction Weber himself would never have countenanced, between a romanticized enchanted premodernity and a soulless instrumentalizing present. Drawing on Weber, on Jane Schneider’s Marxian “Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism,” and on recent anthropological, folkloric, and historical attention to land-spirits, house-spirits, and other “small gods,” Ostling will work to reconsider the shift from a spirit-haunted world to a world empty of spirits in terms of exorcism and eviction: when and why does a community seek to free itself of its preternatural landlords, and when and why might they regret those landlords’ absence?

Michael Ostling is the author of Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (revised edition 2024), and co-editor of the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. He teaches at the Honors College at Arizona State University and has been thinking for the past decade or so about the place of fairies and goblins in a disenchanted world.

This event is free and open to the public and is co-hosted by the OSU Center for Folklore Studies and the OSU Humanities Institute.

The OSU Humanities Institute and its related centers host a wide range of events, from intense discussions of works in progress to cutting-edge presentations from world-known scholars, artists, activists, and everything in between.

We value in-person engagement at our events as we strive to amplify the energy in the room. To submit an accommodation request, please send your request to MacKenzie DiMarco: dimarco.33@osu.edu.

Hosted by OSU Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.