Author: Jules Michelet
Publisher: Citadel Press
ISBN: 9780806516868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Michelet's classic study of medieval hexes and spell-casting.

Author: Frederick Valletta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This study examines the relationship between élite and popular beliefs in witchcraft, magic and superstition in England, analyzing such beliefs against the background of political, religious and social upheaval characteristic of the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration periods. Belief in witchcraft received new impulses because of the general ferment of religious ideas and the tendency of participants in the Civil Wars to resort to imagery drawn from beliefs about the devil and witches; or to use portents to argue for the wrongs of their opponents. Throughout the work, the author stresses that deeply held superstitions were fundamental to belief in witches, the devil, ghosts, apparitions and supernatural healing. Despite the fact that popular superstitions were often condemned, it was recognized that their propaganda value was too useful to ignore. A host of pamphlets and treatises were published during this period which unashamedly incorporated such beliefs. Valletta here explores the manner in which political and religious authorities somewhat cynically used demonic imagery and language to discredit their opponents and to manipulate popular opinion.

Author: Frances Timbers
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526731827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The author of Magic and Masculinity explores the history and development of magic and witchcraft in Western society. Broomsticks, cauldrons, familiars, and spells—magic and witchcraft conjure a vivid picture in our modern-day imagination. While much of our understanding is rooted in superstition and myth, the history of magic and witchcraft offers a window into the past. It illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past and elucidates the fascinating pop culture of the premodern world. Blowing away folkloric cobwebs, this enlightening new history dispels many misconceptions surrounding witchcraft and magic that we still hold today. From Ancient Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, historian Frances Timbers details the impact of Christianity and popular culture in the construction of the figure of the “witch.” The development of demonology and ceremonial magic is combined with the West’s troubled past with magic and witchcraft to chart the birth of modern Wiccan and Neopagan movements in England and North America. Witchcraft is a metaphor for oppression in an age in which persecution is an everyday occurrence somewhere in the world. Fanaticism, intolerance, prejudice, authoritarianism, and religious and political ideologies are never attractive. Beware the witch hunter!

Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019974369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 981

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Book Description
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Author: Michael David Bailey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742533875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The only comprehensive, single-volume survey of magic available, this compelling book traces the history of magic and superstition in Europe from antiquity to the present. Focusing mainly on the medieval and early modern era, Michael Bailey also explores the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and the spread of magical systems_particularly modern witchcraft or Wicca_from Europe to the United States. He explains how magic was understood, constructed, and frequently condemned and how magical beliefs and practices have changed over time yet also remain vital even today.

Author: Willem De Blécourt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719066580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
An important collection of essays that use a variety of different approaches and sources to uncover the continued relevance of witchcraft and magic in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.

Author: Howard Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Witchcraft
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This volume contains a history of the practice of witchcraft, including the origin, prevalence and varieties of superstitions that flourished in the 16th-and17th-centuries.

Author: Jules Michelet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806500591
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Michael D. Bailey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

Author: Owen Davies
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191509248
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
What is a grimoire? The word has a familiar ring to many people, particularly as a consequence of such popular television dramas as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. But few people are sure exactly what it means. Put simply, grimoires are books of spells that were first recorded in the Ancient Middle East and which have developed and spread across much of the Western Hemisphere and beyond over the ensuing millennia. At their most benign, they contain charms and remedies for natural and supernatural ailments and advice on contacting spirits to help find treasures and protect from evil. But at their most sinister they provide instructions on how to manipulate people for corrupt purposes and, worst of all, to call up and make a pact with the Devil. Both types have proven remarkably resilient and adaptable and retain much of their relevance and fascination to this day. But the grimoire represents much more than just magic. To understand the history of grimoires is to understand the spread of Christianity, the development of early science, the cultural influence of the print revolution, the growth of literacy, the impact of colonialism, and the expansion of western cultures across the oceans. As this book richly demonstrates, the history of grimoires illuminates many of the most important developments in European history over the last two thousand years.