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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > Witchcraft
This book will guide you if you wish to read more about hedge
witchcraft as a pathway, or are already following such a path and
wish to progress. It only has a little about hedge riding as this
book has too small a scope to include it. Please read the
accompanying book in the Pagan Portal series, Hedge Riding.
Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern
England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as
the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without
human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the
manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was
criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public
theatre was emerging - to great controversy - as the perfect medium
to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of
representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money
and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current
era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as
mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance
of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money
and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous
Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on
such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News.
Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations
between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute
in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and
The Winter's Tale.
The fifteenth century is more than any other the century of the
persecution of witches. So wrote Johan Huizinga more than eighty
years ago in his classic Autumn of the Middle Ages. Although
Huizinga was correct in his observation, modern readers have tended
to focus on the more spectacular witch-hunts of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, it was during the late Middle
Ages that the full stereotype of demonic witchcraft developed in
Europe, and this is the subject of Battling Demons.
At the heart of the story is Johannes Nider (d. 1438), a
Dominican theologian and reformer who alternately persecuted
heretics and negotiated with them--a man who was by far the most
important church authority to write on witchcraft in the early
fifteenth century. Nider was a major source for the infamous
Malleus maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1486), the manual of
choice for witch-hunters in late medieval Europe. Today Nider's
reputation rests squarely on his witchcraft writings, but in his
own day he was better known as a leader of the reform movement
within the Dominican order and as a writer of important tracts on
numerous other aspects of late medieval religiosity, including
heresy and lay piety. Battling Demons places Nider in this wider
context, showing that for late medieval thinkers, witchcraft was
one facet of a much larger crisis plaguing Christian society.
As the only English-language study to focus exclusively on the
rise of witchcraft in the early fifteenth century, Battling Demons
will be important to students and scholars of the history of magic
and witchcraft and medieval religious history.
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