The Witch Of The Middle Ages

Author : Jeffrey Burton Russell
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501720317
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Witchcraft in the Middle Ages written by Jeffrey Burton Russell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the known theories and incidents of witchcraft in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century are brilliantly set forth in this engaging and comprehensive history. Building on a foundation of newly discovered primary sources and recent secondary interpretations, Jeffrey Burton Russell first establishes the facts and then explains the phenomenon of witchcraft in terms of its social and religious environment, particularly in relation to medieval heresies. Russell treats European witchcraft as a product of Christianity, grounded in heresy more than in the magic and sorcery that have existed in other societies. Skillfully blending narration with analysis, he shows how social and religious changes nourished the spread of witchcraft until large portions of medieval Europe were in its grip, "from the most illiterate peasant to the most skilled philosopher or scientist." A significant chapter in the history of ideas and their repression is illuminated by this book. Our enduring fascination with the occult gives the author's affirmation that witchcraft arises at times and in areas afflicted with social tensions a special quality of immediacy.

Author : Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812203712
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages written by Stephen A. Mitchell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.

Author : P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1441109803
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Witch Beliefs and Witch Trials in the Middle Ages written by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New translations of primary documents of a crucial period in the development of attitudes to witchcraft.

Author : L. J. Michelet
Publisher : Holley Press
ISBN 13 : 1443713953
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Witch of the Middle Ages written by L. J. Michelet and published by Holley Press. This book was released on 2008-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Witch Of The Middle Ages. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Author : Richard Kieckhefer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108861121
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Magic in the Middle Ages written by Richard Kieckhefer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was magic practiced in medieval times? How did it relate to the diverse beliefs and practices that characterized this fascinating period? This much revised and expanded new edition of Magic in the Middle Ages surveys the growth and development of magic in medieval Europe. It takes into account the extensive new developments in the history of medieval magic in recent years, featuring new material on angel magic, the archaeology of magic, and the magical efficacy of words and imagination. Richard Kieckhefer shows how magic represents a crossroads in medieval life and culture, examining its relationship and relevance to religion, science, philosophy, art, literature, and politics. In surveying the different types of magic that were used, the kinds of people who practiced magic, and the reasoning behind their beliefs, Kieckhefer shows how magic served as a point of contact between the popular and elite classes, how the reality of magical beliefs is reflected in the fiction of medieval literature, and how the persecution of magic and witchcraft led to changes in the law.

Author : Jules Michelet
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781537457024
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Eve - the Witch of the Middle-Ages written by Jules Michelet and published by . This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eve - Witch she is by nature. It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch ; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest and beguile them. The Sibyl foretold a fortune, the Witch accomplishes one. Here is the great, the true difference between them. The latter calls forth a destiny, conjures it, works it out. Unlike the Cassandra of old, who awaited mournfully the future she foresaw so well, Eve - the woman herself - creates the future. Even more than Circe, than Medea, does she bear in her hand the rod of natural miracle, with Nature herself a sister and helpmate. Already she wears the features of a modern Prometheus. With her industry begins, especially that queen-like industry which heals and restores mankind. As the Sibyl seemed to gaze upon the morning, so she, contrariwise, looks towards the west ; but it is just that gloomy west, which long before dawn as happens among the tops of the Alps gives forth a flush anticipant of day. The only physician of the people for a thousand years was the Witch. The emperors, kings, popes, and richer barons had indeed their doctors of Salerno, their Moors and Jews ; but the bulk of people in every state, the world as it might well be called, consulted none but the Saga, or wise-woman. When she could not cure them, she was insulted, was called a Witch.

Author : Heidi Breuer
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135868220
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Crafting the Witch written by Heidi Breuer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. This project explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation, seeking an answer to the question, 'why did the witch become wicked?' Heidi Breuer traverses both the medieval and early modern periods and considers the way in which the representation of literary witches interacted with the culture at large, ultimately arguing that a series of economic crises in the fourteenth century created a labour shortage met by women. As women moved into the previously male-dominated economy, literary backlash came in the form of the witch, and social backlash followed soon after in the form of Renaissance witch-hunting. The witch figure serves a similar function in modern American culture because late-industrial capitalism challenges gender conventions in similar ways as the economic crises of the medieval period.

Author : Jonathan Barry
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319637843
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present written by Jonathan Barry and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection based on the contributions to witchcraft studies of Willem de Blécourt, to whom it is dedicated, and who provides the opening chapter, setting out a methodological and conceptual agenda for the study of cultures of witchcraft (broadly defined) in Europe since the Middle Ages. It includes contributions from historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and folklorists who have collaborated closely with De Blécourt. Essays pick up some or all of the themes and approaches he pioneered, and apply them to cases which range in time and space across all the main regions of Europe since the thirteenth century until the present day. While some draw heavily on texts, others on archival sources, and others on field research, they all share a commitment to reconstructing the meaning and lived experience of witchcraft (and its related phenomena) to Europeans at all levels, respecting the many varieties and ambiguities in such meanings and experiences and resisting attempts to reduce them to master narratives or simple causal models. The chapter 'News from the Invisible World: The Publishing History of Tales of the Supernatural c.1660-1832' is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Author : Jules Michelet
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book La Sorcière written by Jules Michelet and published by . This book was released on 1863 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Edward Peters
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812211016
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Magician, the Witch, and the Law written by Edward Peters and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Helps to place our understanding of medieval witchcraft into a broader context. . . . Sheds light on the various genres of literature in which magic was discussed."—Speculum