Witchcraft holds a continued fascination for readers around the world, and the Scottish witch hunts have recently received renewed media attention, especially with the BBC 2 show Lucy Worsley Investigates, bringing attention to Edinburgh's witches. Expert Mary Craig explores the unusual story of Agnes Finnie, a middle class shopkeeper who lived in the tenements of Edinburgh. After arrest, most witches were tried within a matter of days but not Agnes. Her unusual case took months with weeks of deliberation of the jury. Mary explains why and gives her expert insight into the political and religious tensions that led to her burning. The book will interest a variety of readers, academics and non-academics alike - those interested in witchcraft, British and Scottish history, religious studies and women's studies. Mary Craig works as a historian with museums, archives and schools and hosts regular, well-attended events on the subject of witchcraft in the Scottish Borders. We expect strong media coverage. The Witches of Scotland campaign has recently gained traction and the attention of first minister Nicola Sturgeon, calling for a pardon and apology to those accused during the witch hunts.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.

Disputed Messiahs: Jewish and Christian Messianism in the Ashkenazic World during the Reformation is the first comprehensive study that situates Jewish messianism in its broader cultural, social, and religious contexts within the surrounding Christian society. By doing so, Rebekka Vo?f shows how the expressions of Jewish and Christian end-time expectation informed one another. Although the two groups disputed the different messiahs they awaited, they shared principal hopes and fears relating to the end of days. Drawing on a great variety of both Jewish and Christian sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Latin, the book examines how Jewish and Christian messianic ideology and politics were deeply linked. It explores how Jews and Christians each reacted to the other's messianic claims, apocalyptic beliefs, and eschatological interpretations, and how they adapted their own views of the last days accordingly. This comparative study of the messianic expectations of Jews and Christians in the Ashkenazic world during the Reformation and their entanglements contributes a new facet to our understanding of cultural transfer between Jews and Christians in the early modern period. Disputed Messiahs includes four main parts. The first part characterizes the specific context of Jewish messianism in Germany and defines the Christian perception of Jewish messianic hope. The next two parts deal with case studies of Jewish messianic expectation in Germany, Italy and Poland. While the second part focuses on the messianic phenomenon of the prophet Asher Lemlein, part 3 is divided into five chapters, each devoted to a case of interconnected Jewish-Christian apocalyptic belief and activity. Each case study is a representative example used to demonstrate the interplay of Jewish and Christian eschatological expectations. The final part presents Vo?f's general conclusions, carving out the remarkable paradox of a relationship between Jewish and Christian messianism that is controversial, albeit fertile. Scholars and students of history, culture, and religion are the intended audience for this book.

The title for this work comes from the Puritan minister Increase Mather, who used the colorful metaphor to express his concern about the state of English Protestantism. Like many New Englanders, Mather's fears about the creeping influence of French Catholicism stemmed from English conflicts with France that spilled over into the colonial frontiers from French Canada. The most consistently fragile of these frontiers was the Province of Maine, notorious for attracting settlers who had "one foot out the door" of New England Puritanism. It was there that English Protestants and French Catholics came into frequent contact. The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier shows how, between the volatile years of 1688 to 1727, the persistence of Catholic people and culture in New England's border regions posed consistent challenges to the bodies and souls of frontier Protestants. Taking a cue from contemporary observers of religious culture, as well as modern scholars of early American religion, social history, material culture, and ethnohistory, Laura M. Chmielewski explores this encounter between opposing Christianities on an early American frontier. She examines the forms of lived religion and religious culture-enacted through gestures, religious spaces, objects, and discreet religious expressions-to elucidate the range of experience of its diverse inhabitants: accused witches, warrior Jesuits, unorthodox ministers, indigenous religious thinkers, voluntary and involuntary converts. Chmielewski offers a nuanced perspective of the structured categories of early American Christian religious life, suggesting that the terms "Protestant" and "Catholic" varied according to location and circumstances and that the assumptions accompanying their use had long-term consequences for generations of New Englanders.