The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain

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Author :
Publisher : Neale UCL Studies in British History
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (555 download)

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Book Synopsis The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain by : Sophie Page

Download or read book The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain written by Sophie Page and published by Neale UCL Studies in British History. This book was released on 2010 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unorthodox imagination in late medieval Britain explores how medieval people responded to images, stories, beliefs and practices which were at odds with the normative world view, from the heretical and subversive to the marvellous and exotic. The Neale lecture by Jean-Claude Schmitt examines why some unorthodox images were viewed as provocative and threatening and explores how successfully ecclesiastical authorities contained their impact. The power of unorthodoxy to provoke wonder, skepticism or disapproval provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The essays in this volume show that unorthodoxy was embedded in mainstream medieval culture, from stories of fairies and witches which promoted orthodox moral values to the social conformity of practitioners of ritual magic. This book provides a guide to understanding medieval unorthodoxy and the roles played by experience and imagination in medieval encounters with the unorthodox. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the exotic, provocative and deviant in medieval culture.

The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812248848
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages by : Mary Dzon

Download or read book The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages written by Mary Dzon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.

Going to Church in Medieval England

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Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300262612
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Going to Church in Medieval England by : Nicholas Orme

Download or read book Going to Church in Medieval England written by Nicholas Orme and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging, richly illustrated account of parish churches and churchgoers in England, from the Anglo-Saxons to the mid-sixteenth century Parish churches were at the heart of English religious and social life in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. In this comprehensive study, Nicholas Orme shows how they came into existence, who staffed them, and how their buildings were used. He explains who went to church, who did not attend, how people behaved there, and how they—not merely the clergy—affected how worship was staged. The book provides an accessible account of what happened in the daily and weekly services, and how churches marked the seasons of Christmas, Lent, Easter, and summer. It describes how they celebrated the great events of life: birth, coming of age, and marriage, and gave comfort in sickness and death. A final chapter covers the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and shows how, alongside its changes, much that went on in parish churches remained as before.

Magic and Religion in Medieval England

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Author :
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780230745
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Magic and Religion in Medieval England by : Catherine Rider

Download or read book Magic and Religion in Medieval England written by Catherine Rider and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Middle Ages, many occult rituals and beliefs existed and were practiced alongside those officially sanctioned by the church. While educated clergy condemned some of these as magic, many of these practices involved religious language, rituals, or objects. For instance, charms recited to cure illnesses invoked God and the saints, and love spells used consecrated substances such as the Eucharist. Magic and Religion in Medieval England explores the entanglement of magical practices and the clergy during the Middle Ages, uncovering how churchmen decided which of these practices to deem acceptable and examining the ways they persuaded others to adopt their views. Covering the period from 1215 to the Reformation, Catherine Rider traces the change in the church’s attitude to vernacular forms of magic. She shows how this period brought the clergy more closely into contact with unofficial religious practices than ever before, and how this proximity prompted them to draw up precise guidelines on distinguishing magic from legitimate religion. Revealing the necessity of improving clerical education and the pastoral care of the laity, Magic and Religion in Medieval England provides a fascinating picture of religious life during this period.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191015008
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity by : John H. Arnold

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity written by John H. Arnold and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500AD. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why 'Christianity' took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherwordly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded. This Handbook is a landmark academic collection that presents cutting-edge interpretive perspectives on medieval religion for a wide academic audience, drawing together thirty key scholars in the field from the United States, the UK, and Europe. Notably, the Handbook is arranged thematically, and focusses on an analytical, rather than narrative, approach, seeking to demonstrate the variety, change, and complexity of religion throughout this long period, and the numerous different ways in which modern scholarship can approach it. While providing a very wide-ranging view of the subject, it also offers an important agenda for further study in the field.

Love Spells and Lost Treasure

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009286730
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Love Spells and Lost Treasure by : Tabitha Stanmore

Download or read book Love Spells and Lost Treasure written by Tabitha Stanmore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317430344
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (174 download)

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Book Synopsis Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages by : Keagan Brewer

Download or read book Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages written by Keagan Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

A Companion to Lollardy

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004309853
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to Lollardy by : Mishtooni Bose

Download or read book A Companion to Lollardy written by Mishtooni Bose and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Companion to Lollardy, Patrick Hornbeck sums up what we know about lollardy, describes, its fortunes in the hands of its most recent chroniclers, explores the many individuals, practices, texts, and beliefs that have been called lollard.

Middle English Marvels

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271081767
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Middle English Marvels by : Tara Williams

Download or read book Middle English Marvels written by Tara Williams and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English Marvels, Tara Williams explores the didactic and affective potential of secular representations of magic and shows how fourteenth-century English writers tested the limits of that potential. Drawing on works by Augustine, Gervase of Tilbury, Chaucer, and the anonymous poets of Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, Williams examines how such marvels might convey moral messages within and beyond the narrative. She analyzes examples from both highly canonical and more esoteric texts and examines marvels that involve magic and transformation, invoke visual spectacle, and invite moral reflection on how one should relate to others. Within this shared framework, Williams finds distinct concerns—chivalry, identity, agency, and language—that intersect with the marvelous in significant ways. Integrating literary and historical approaches to the study of magic, this volume convincingly shows how certain fourteenth-century texts eschewed the predominant trends and developed a new theory of the marvelous. Williams’s engaging, erudite study will be of special interest to scholars of the occult, the medieval and early modern eras, and literature.

Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131705718X
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture by : Robin Macdonald

Download or read book Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture written by Robin Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

Elf Queens and Holy Friars

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812293169
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Elf Queens and Holy Friars by : Richard Firth Green

Download or read book Elf Queens and Holy Friars written by Richard Firth Green and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland. Taking as his starting point the assumption that the major cultural gulf in the Middle Ages was less between the wealthy and the poor than between the learned and the lay, Green explores the church's systematic demonization of fairies and infernalization of fairyland. He argues that when medieval preachers inveighed against the demons that they portrayed as threatening their flocks, they were in reality often waging war against fairy beliefs. The recognition that medieval demonology, and indeed pastoral theology, were packed with coded references to popular lore opens up a whole new avenue for the investigation of medieval vernacular culture. Elf Queens and Holy Friars offers a detailed account of the church's attempts to suppress or redirect belief in such things as fairy lovers, changelings, and alternative versions of the afterlife. That the church took these fairy beliefs so seriously suggests that they were ideologically loaded, and this fact makes a huge difference in the way we read medieval romance, the literary genre that treats them most explicitly. The war on fairy beliefs increased in intensity toward the end of the Middle Ages, becoming finally a significant factor in the witch-hunting of the Renaissance.

Feeling Like Saints

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801470986
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Feeling Like Saints by : Fiona Somerset

Download or read book Feeling Like Saints written by Fiona Somerset and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lollard" is the name given to followers of John Wyclif, the English dissident theologian who was dismissed from Oxford University in 1381 for his arguments regarding the eucharist. A forceful and influential critic of the ecclesiastical status quo in the late fourteenth century, Wyclif's thought was condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415. While lollardy has attracted much attention in recent years, much of what we think we know about this English religious movement is based on records of heresy trials and anti-lollard chroniclers. In Feeling Like Saints, Fiona Somerset demonstrates that this approach has limitations. A better basis is the five hundred or so manuscript books from the period (1375–1530) containing materials translated, composed, or adapted by lollard writers themselves.These writings provide rich evidence for how lollard writers collaborated with one another and with their readers to produce a distinctive religious identity based around structures of feeling. Lollards wanted to feel like saints. From Wyclif they drew an extraordinarily rigorous ethic of mutual responsibility that disregarded both social status and personal risk. They recalled their commitment to this ethic by reading narratives of physical suffering and vindication, metaphorically martyring themselves by inviting scorn for their zeal, and enclosing themselves in the virtues rather than the religious cloister. Yet in many ways they were not that different from their contemporaries, especially those with similar impulses to exceptional holiness.

The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019959032X
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages by : Mary Carruthers

Download or read book The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages written by Mary Carruthers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses lexical analyses of key terms employed by medieval people to valuate their own aesthetic feelings to show how flux and change, and the creative tension of antithetical physical qualities from which all things were thought to be made (cold, hot, dry, wet), govern the pleasures medieval artists sought to produce.

Reading Heresy

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110556820
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Heresy by : Gregory Erickson

Download or read book Reading Heresy written by Gregory Erickson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heresy studies is a new interdisciplinary, supra-religious, and humanist field of study that focuses on borderlands of dogma, probes the intersections between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and explores the realms of dissent in religion, art, and literature. Free from confessional agendas and tolerant of both religious and non-religious perspectives, heresy studies fulfill an important gap in scholarly inquiry and artistic production. Divided into four parts, the volume explores intersections between heresy and modern literature, it discusses intricacies of medieval heresies, it analyzes issues of heresy in contemporary theology, and it demonstrates how heresy operates as an artistic stimulant. Rather than treating matters of heresy, blasphemy, unbelief, dissent, and non-conformism as subjects to be shunned or naively championed, the essays in this collection chart a middle course, energized by the dynamics of heterodoxy, dissent, and provocation, yet shining a critical light on both the challenges and the revelations of disruptive kinds of thinking and acting.

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107035643
Total Pages : 499 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Geoffrey Chaucer in Context by : Ian Johnson

Download or read book Geoffrey Chaucer in Context written by Ian Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

The Routledge History of Medieval Magic

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Author :
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.

The Sacred and the Sinister

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271084375
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sacred and the Sinister by : David J. Collins, S. J.

Download or read book The Sacred and the Sinister written by David J. Collins, S. J. and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.