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Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies - The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Paperback)
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Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies - The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Paperback)
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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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