The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft

The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft PDF Author: Hans Broedel
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.

The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft

The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft PDF Author: Hans Broedel
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.

The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft

The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft PDF Author: Hans Peter Broedel
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719064418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What was witchcraft? Were witches real? How should witches be identified? How should they be judged? Towards the end of the middle ages these were new questions, without answers hallowed by time and authority. Between 1430 and 1500, a number of learned "witch-theorists" attempted to provide the answers, and of these perhaps the most famous are the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches. This, the first book-length study of the Malleus in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this text and to the conceptual world of its authors. Ultimately, this book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, with a view of witches very different from that of competing authors, its arguments were powerfully compelling and so remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten.

The Hammer of Witches

The Hammer of Witches PDF Author: Christopher S. Mackay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110739371X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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Book Description
The Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486–7, is the standard medieval text on witchcraft and it remained in print throughout the early modern period. Its descriptions of the evil acts of witches and the ways to exterminate them continue to contribute to our knowledge of early modern law, religion and society. Mackay's highly acclaimed translation, based on his extensive research and detailed analysis of the Latin text, is the only complete English version available, and the most reliable. Now available in a single volume, this key text is at last accessible to students and scholars of medieval history and literature. With detailed explanatory notes and a guide to further reading, this volume offers a unique insight into the fifteenth-century mind and its sense of sin, punishment and retribution.

The Witchcraft Reader

The Witchcraft Reader PDF Author: Darren Oldridge
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415214933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
The excellent reader offers a selection of the best historical writing on witchcraft, exploring how belief in witchcraft began, and the social and context in which this belief flourished.

Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews

Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews PDF Author: Sigrid Brauner
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558492974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum (1487). In subsequent works by Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife. By demonstrating how the binary concepts of "good" housewife and "bad wife" (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and subservience expected of the new urban housewife.

Male witches in early modern Europe

Male witches in early modern Europe PDF Author: Lara Apps
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152613750X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is the first ever full book on the subject of male witches addressing incidents of witch-hunting in both Britain and Europe. Uses feminist categories of gender analysis to critique the feminist agenda that mars many studies. Advances a more bal. Critiques historians’ assumptions about witch-hunting, challenging the marginalisation of male witches by feminist and other historians. Shows that large numbers of men were accused of witchcraft in their own right, in some regions, more men were accused than women. It uses feminist categories of gender analysis to challenge recent arguments and current orthodoxies providing a more balanced and complex view of witch-hunting and ideas about witches in their gendered forms than has hitherto been available.

Demon Lovers

Demon Lovers PDF Author: Walter Stephens
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226772622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
On September 20, 1587, Walpurga Hausmännin of Dillingen in southern Germany was burned at the stake as a witch. Although she had confessed to committing a long list of maleficia (deeds of harmful magic), including killing forty—one infants and two mothers in labor, her evil career allegedly began with just one heinous act—sex with a demon. Fornication with demons was a major theme of her trial record, which detailed an almost continuous orgy of sexual excess with her diabolical paramour Federlin "in many divers places, . . . even in the street by night." As Walter Stephens demonstrates in Demon Lovers, it was not Hausmännin or other so-called witches who were obsessive about sex with demons—instead, a number of devout Christians, including trained theologians, displayed an uncanny preoccupation with the topic during the centuries of the "witch craze." Why? To find out, Stephens conducts a detailed investigation of the first and most influential treatises on witchcraft (written between 1430 and 1530), including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). Far from being credulous fools or mindless misogynists, early writers on witchcraft emerge in Stephens's account as rational but reluctant skeptics, trying desperately to resolve contradictions in Christian thought on God, spirits, and sacraments that had bedeviled theologians for centuries. Proof of the physical existence of demons—for instance, through evidence of their intercourse with mortal witches—would provide strong evidence for the reality of the supernatural, the truth of the Bible, and the existence of God. Early modern witchcraft theory reflected a crisis of belief—a crisis that continues to be expressed today in popular debates over angels, Satanic ritual child abuse, and alien abduction.

The Witch as Muse

The Witch as Muse PDF Author: Linda C. Hults
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812221459
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Occult topics have long fascinated artists, and the subject of witches—their imagined bodies and fantastic rituals—was a popular one for painters and printmakers in early modern Europe. Focusing on several artists in depth, Linda C. Hults probes the historical and theoretical contexts of their work to examine the ways witches were depicted and the motivations for those depictions. While studying the work of such artists as Dürer, Baldung, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Goya, Hults discerns patterns suggesting that the imagery of witchcraft served both as an expression of artistic license and as a tool of self-promotion for the artists. These imagined images of witches were designed to catch the attention of powerful and important patrons as witchcraft was being debated in political and intellectual centers. Dürer's early engravings of witnesses made in the wake of the Malleus maleficarum of 1487 were crucial in linking the seductive or aged female form with the dangers of witchcraft. The polarized idea of gender pervaded many aspects of early modern culture, including art theory. As the deluded female witch embodied the abuse of imagination and fantasy, so the male artist presented himself as putting those faculties to productive and reasoned use.

The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West

The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West PDF Author: David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 897

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Book Description
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.

Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction

Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Malcolm Gaskill
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191613681
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Witchcraft is a subject that fascinates us all, and everyone knows what a witch is - or do they? From childhood most of us develop a sense of the mysterious, malign person, usually an old woman. Historically, too, we recognize witch-hunting as a feature of pre-modern societies. But why do witches still feature so heavily in our cultures and consciousness? From Halloween to superstitions, and literary references such as Faust and even Harry Potter, witches still feature heavily in our society. In this Very Short Introduction Malcolm Gaskill challenges all of this, and argues that what we think we know is, in fact, wrong. Taking a historical perspective from the ancient world to contemporary paganism, Gaskill reveals how witchcraft has meant different things to different people and that in every age it has raised questions about the distinction between fantasy and reality, faith and proof. Telling stories, delving into court records, and challenging myths, Gaskill examines the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and explores the reinvention of witchcraft - as history, religion, fiction, and metaphor. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.