Fearful Spirits Reasoned Follies

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Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies

Author : Michael D. Bailey
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801467306
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies by : Michael D. Bailey

Download or read book Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies written by Michael D. Bailey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition—tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe’s universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.

Archaeology of the Unconscious

Author : Alessandra Aloisi
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000113558
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Archaeology of the Unconscious by : Alessandra Aloisi

Download or read book Archaeology of the Unconscious written by Alessandra Aloisi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-10 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’, historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of Unbewussten, retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. Archaeology of the Unconscious aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century, characterised by the sedimentation, circulation, intersection, and synergy of different cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions, proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an archaeological study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct, but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir (1969), this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation, across different authors and texts, of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes, including dreams, memory, recollection, desire, imagination, fantasy, madness, creativity, inspiration, magnetism, and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’, this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious, beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.

Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe

Author : Julian Goodare
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000080803
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe by : Julian Goodare

Download or read book Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe written by Julian Goodare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonology – the intellectual study of demons and their powers – contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. But how exactly did intellectual ideas relate to prosecutions? Recent scholarship has shown that some of the demonologists’ concerns remained at an abstract intellectual level, while some of the judges’ concerns reflected popular culture. This book brings demonology and witch-hunting back together, while placing both topics in their specific regional cultures. The book’s chapters, each written by a leading scholar, cover most regions of Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain through to Germany, France and Switzerland, and Italy and Spain. By focusing on various intellectual levels of demonology, from sophisticated demonological thought to the development of specific demonological ideas and ideas within the witch trial environment, the book offers a thorough examination of the relationship between demonology and witch-hunting. Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of demonology, witch-hunting and early modern Europe.

Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe

Author : Nathan J. Ristuccia
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192539647
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe by : Nathan J. Ristuccia

Download or read book Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe written by Nathan J. Ristuccia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity-the phenomena traditionally termed "Christianization". It refocuses scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual, Rogationtide supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of "Christianization without religion." Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. In the Middle Ages, religion did not exist in the sense of a fixed system of belief bounded off from other spheres of life. Rather, Christianization was primarily ritual performance. Being a Christian meant joining a local church community. After the fall of Rome, mandatory rituals such as Rogationtide arose to separate a Christian commonwealth from the pagans, heretics, and Jews outside it. A Latin West between the polis and the parish had its own institution-the Rogation procession-for organizing local communities. For medieval people, sectarian borders were often flexible and rituals served to demarcate these borders. Rogationtide is an ideal case study of this demarcation, because it was an emotionally powerful feast, which combined pageantry with doctrinal instruction, community formation, social ranking, devotional exercises, and bodily mortification. As a result, rival groups quarrelled over the holiday's meaning and procedure, sometimes violently, in order to reshape the local order and ban people and practices as non-Christian.

Current Trends in the Historiography of Inquisitions

Author : Autori Vari
Publisher : Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (546 download)

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Book Synopsis Current Trends in the Historiography of Inquisitions by : Autori Vari

Download or read book Current Trends in the Historiography of Inquisitions written by Autori Vari and published by Viella Libreria Editrice. This book was released on 2024-03-28T10:04:00+01:00 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume launches the book series of “Inquire – International Centre for Research on Inquisitions” of the University of Bologna, a research network that engages with the history of religious justice from the 13th to the 20th century. This first publication offers twenty chapters that take stock of the current historiography on medieval and early modern Inquisitions (the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions) and their modern continuations. Through the analysis of specific questions related to religious repression in Europe and the Iberian colonial territories extending from the Middle Ages to today, the contributions here examine the history of the perception of tribunals and the most recent historiographical trends. New research perspectives thus emerge on a subject that continues to intrigue those interested in the practices of justice and censorship, the history of religious dissent and the genesis of intolerance in the Western world and beyond.

Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany

Author : Deeana Copeland Klepper
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501766163
Total Pages : 158 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany by : Deeana Copeland Klepper

Download or read book Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany written by Deeana Copeland Klepper and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, Deeana Copeland Klepper shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity. The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries—property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility—as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, Klepper affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.

Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author : Louise Nyholm Kallestrup
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319323857
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (193 download)

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Book Synopsis Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by : Louise Nyholm Kallestrup

Download or read book Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-04 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book breaks with three common scholarly barriers of periodization, discipline and geography in its exploration of the related themes of heresy, magic and witchcraft. It sets aside constructed chronological boundaries, and in doing so aims to achieve a clearer picture of what ‘went before’, as well as what ‘came after’. Thus the volume demonstrates continuity as well as change in the concepts and understandings of magic, heresy and witchcraft. In addition, the geographical pattern of similarities and diversities suggests a comparative approach, transcending confessional as well as national borders. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the orthodoxy of the Christian Church was continuously contested. The challenge of heterodoxy, especially as expressed in various kinds of heresy, magic and witchcraft, was constantly present during the period 1200-1650. Neither contesters nor followers of orthodoxy were homogeneous groups or fractions. They themselves and their ideas changed from one century to the next, from region to region, even from city to city, but within a common framework of interpretation. This collection of essays focuses on this complex.

The Routledge History of Medieval Magic

Author : Sophie Page
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317042751
Total Pages : 550 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge History of Medieval Magic by : Sophie Page

Download or read book The Routledge History of Medieval Magic written by Sophie Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book’s interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.

Magic: The Basics

Author : Michael D. Bailey
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317610660
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Magic: The Basics by : Michael D. Bailey

Download or read book Magic: The Basics written by Michael D. Bailey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to magic in world history and contemporary societies. Presenting magic as a global phenomenon which has manifested in all human cultures, this book takes a thematic approach which explores the historical, social, and cultural aspects of magic. Key features include: attempts to define magic either in universal or more particular terms, and to contrast it with other broad and potentially fluid categories such as religion and science; an examination of different forms of magical practice and the purposes for which magic has been used; debates about magic’s effectiveness, its reality, and its morality; an exploration of magic’s association with certain social factors, such as gender, ethnicity and education, among others. Offering a global perspective of magic from antiquity through to the modern era and including a glossary of key terms, suggestions for further reading and case studies throughout, Magic: The Basics is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn more about the academic study of magic.

Visions of Deliverance

Author : Mayte Green-Mercado
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501741470
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Visions of Deliverance by : Mayte Green-Mercado

Download or read book Visions of Deliverance written by Mayte Green-Mercado and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean. Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped define and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era.

A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond

Author : James Mixson
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004297529
Total Pages : 445 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond by : James Mixson

Download or read book A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond written by James Mixson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Observant reform of the religious orders remains one of the most important yet understudied religious movements of the later Middle Ages. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the field, and suggests new avenues for future scholarship.

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism

Author : Jacqueline Z. Wilson
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137561351
Total Pages : 1045 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism by : Jacqueline Z. Wilson

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism written by Jacqueline Z. Wilson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 1045 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive Handbook addresses a range of contemporary issues related to Prison Tourism across the world. It is divided into seven sections: Ethics, Human Rights and Penal Spectatorship; Carceral Retasking, Curation and Commodification of Punishment; Meanings of Prison Life and Representations of Punishment in Tourism Sites; Death and Torture in Prison Museums; Colonialism, Relics of Empire and Prison Museums; Tourism and Operational Prisons; and Visitor Consumption and Experiences of Prison Tourism. The Handbook explores global debates within the field of Prison Tourism inquiry; spanning a diverse range of topics from political imprisonment and persecution in Taiwan to interpretive programming in Alcatraz, and the representation of incarcerated Indigenous peoples to prison graffiti. This Handbook is the first to present a thorough examination of Prison Tourism that is truly global in scope. With contributions from both well-renowned scholars and up-and-coming researchers in the field, from a wide variety of disciplines, the Handbook comprises an international collection at the cutting edge of Prison Tourism studies. Students and teachers from disciplines ranging from Criminology to Cultural Studies will find the text invaluable as the definitive work in the field of Prison Tourism.

Reformations

Author : Carlos M. N. Eire
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300111924
Total Pages : 914 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Reformations by : Carlos M. N. Eire

Download or read book Reformations written by Carlos M. N. Eire and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 914 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TWENTY-THREE. The Age of Devils -- TWENTY-FOUR. The Age of Reasonable Doubt -- TWENTY-FIVE. The Age of Outcomes -- TWENTY-SIX. The Spirit of the Age -- EPILOGUE. Assessing the Reformations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Illustration Credits -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z

The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims

Author : Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812247159
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims by : Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

Download or read book The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims written by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Ermine de Reim's life in fourteenth-century France, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings.--Publisher's description.

The Routledge History of Witchcraft

Author : Johannes Dillinger
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000765741
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge History of Witchcraft by : Johannes Dillinger

Download or read book The Routledge History of Witchcraft written by Johannes Dillinger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Witchcraft is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the belief in witches from antiquity to the present day, providing both an introduction to the subject of witchcraft and an overview of the on-going debates. This extensive collection covers the entire breadth of the history of witchcraft, from the witches of Ancient Greece and medieval demonology through to the victims of the witch hunts, and onwards to children’s books, horror films, and modern pagans. Drawing on the knowledge and expertise of an international team of authors, the book examines differing concepts of witchcraft that still exist in society and explains their historical, literary, religious, and anthropological origin and development, including the reflections and adaptions of this belief in art and popular culture. The volume is divided into four chronological parts, beginning with Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Part One, Early Modern witch hunts in Part Two, modern concepts of witchcraft in Part Three, and ending with an examination of witchcraft and the arts in Part Four. Each chapter offers a glimpse of a different version of the witch, introducing the reader to the diversity of witches that have existed in different contexts throughout history. Exploring a wealth of texts and case studies and offering a broad geographical scope for examining this fascinating subject, The Routledge History of Witchcraft is essential reading for students and academics interested in the history of witchcraft.

Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe

Author : Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198850468
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe by : Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Download or read book Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe written by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader

Author : Helen L. Parish
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1441100326
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader by : Helen L. Parish

Download or read book Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader written by Helen L. Parish and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe brings together a rich selection of essays which represent the most important historical research on religion, magic and superstition in early modern Europe. Each essay makes a significant contribution to the history of magic and religion in its own right, while together they demonstrate how debates over the topic have evolved over time, providing invaluable intellectual, historical, and socio-political context for readers approaching the subject for the first time. The essays are organised around five key themes and areas of controversy. Part One tackles superstition; Part Two, the tension between miracles and magic; Part Three, ghosts and apparitions; Part Four, witchcraft and witch trials; and Part Five, the gradual disintegration of the 'magical universe' in the face of scientific, religious and practical opposition. Each part is prefaced by an introduction that provides an outline of the historiography and engages with recent scholarship and debate, setting the context for the essays that follow and providing a foundation for further study. This collection is an invaluable toolkit for students of early modern Europe, providing both a focused overview and a springboard for broader thinking about the underlying continuities and discontinuities that make the study of magic and superstition a perennially fascinating topic.