Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly,
however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their
horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices
might also come to mind praying to St. Christopher or lighting
candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such
practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe
superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of
essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws.
But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned
Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of
superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle
Ages.
Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition
from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages.
He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an
outpouring of writings devoted to superstition tracts and treatises
with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia
superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other
academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were
increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and
practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from
astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As
Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in
their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of
superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of
legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay
the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion,
science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing
the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions
about the operation of natural properties and forces using the
vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the
powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the
"superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity."
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