Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe

Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe
Author: Kathryn A. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317138341

While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe

Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe
Author: Kathryn A. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317138333

While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe
Author: E. Bever
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 643
Release: 2008-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230582117

Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

The Magical Universe

The Magical Universe
Author: Stephen Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN:

The universality of the magical beliefs which have existed throughout Europe in the Middle Ages has been hidden by a focus on the sensational aspects of magic, and on witch trials in particular. The Magical Universe shows how magical beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of work and of family life through- out Europe in the Middle Ages, and profoundly influenced the approach of men and women to health and healing, birth, marriage, and death. Magic offered the hope of protection in a dangerous and uncertain world. Shared by the powerful as well as the poor, magical beliefs have lasted remarkably late in many rural areas and have still not completely vanished to this day.

Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe

Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe
Author: Mark A. Waddell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108425283

An accessible new exploration of the vibrant world of early modern Europe through a focus on magic, science, and religion.

Witchcraft continued

Witchcraft continued
Author: Willem De Blecourt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2018-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526137976

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The study of witchcraft accusations in Europe during the period after the end of the witch trials is still in its infancy. Witches were scratched in England, swum in Germany, beaten in the Netherlands and shot in France. The continued widespread belief in witchcraft and magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France has received considerable academic attention. The book discusses the extent and nature of witchcraft accusations in the period and provides a general survey of the published work on the subject for an English audience. It explores the presence of magical elements in everyday life during the modern period in Spain. The book provides a general overview of vernacular magical beliefs and practices in Italy from the time of unification to the present, with particular attention to how these traditions have been studied. By functioning as mechanisms of social ethos and control, narratives of magical harm were assured a place at the very heart of rural Finnish social dynamics into the twentieth century. The book draws upon over 300 narratives recorded in rural Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provide information concerning the social relations, tensions and strategies that framed sorcery and the counter-magic employed against it. It is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania.

Magic in the Modern World

Magic in the Modern World
Author: Edward Bever
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0271079878

This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism. Taking a two-track approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of the construction of the modern self and its relation to the modern preoccupation with magic. Essays examine how modern “rational” consciousness is generated and maintained and how proponents of both magical and scientific traditions rationalize evidence to fit accepted orthodoxy. This book also describes how people unsatisfied with the norms of modern subjectivity embrace various forms of magic—and the methods these modern practitioners use to legitimate magic in the modern world. A compelling assessment of magic from the early modern period to today, Magic in the Modern World shows how, despite the dominant culture’s emphatic denial of their validity, older forms of magic persist and develop while new forms of magic continue to emerge. In addition to the editors, contributors include Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng.

Making Magic in Elizabethan England

Making Magic in Elizabethan England
Author: Frank Klaassen
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2019-12-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0271085177

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800
Author: Kasper von Greyerz
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195327659

In the pre-industrial societies of early modern Europe, religion was a vessel of fundamental importance in making sense of personal and collective social, cultural and spiritual exercises. This text presents Kaspar von Greyerz's important overview and interpretation of the religions and cultures of Early Modern Europe.