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The Devil's Art - Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany (Hardcover)
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The Devil's Art - Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in Early Modern German History
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In early modern Germany, soothsayers known as wise women and men
roamed the countryside. Fixtures of village life, they identified
thieves and witches, read palms, and cast horoscopes. German
villagers regularly consulted these fortune-tellers and practiced
divination in their everyday lives. Jason Phillip Coy brings their
enchanted world to life by examining theological discourse
alongside archival records of prosecution for popular divination in
Thuringia, a diverse region in central Germany divided into a
patchwork of princely territories, imperial cities, small towns,
and rural villages. Popular divination faced centuries of elite
condemnation, as the Lutheran clergy attempted to suppress these
practices in the wake of the Reformation and learned elites sought
to eradicate them during the Enlightenment. As Coy finds, both of
these reform efforts failed, and divination remained a prominent
feature of rural life in Thuringia until well into the nineteenth
century. The century after 1550 saw intense confessional conflict
accompanied by widespread censure and disciplinary measures, with
prominent Lutheran theologians and demonologists preaching that
divination was a demonic threat to the Christian community and that
soothsayers deserved the death penalty. Rulers, however, refused to
treat divination as a capital crime, and the populace continued to
embrace it alongside official Christianity in troubled times. The
Devil's Art highlights the limits of Reformation-era disciplinary
efforts and demonstrates the extent to which reformers' efforts to
inculcate new cultural norms relied upon the support of secular
authorities and the acquiescence of parishioners. Negotiation,
accommodation, and local resistance blunted official reform efforts
and ensured that occult activities persisted and even flourished in
Germany into the modern era, surviving Reformation-era preaching
and Enlightenment-era ridicule alike.
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