An award-winning historian’s examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significance   Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals.   Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newton’s scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundaries between the natural and supernatural that marked the transition to modernity.   Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de �greda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges readers to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural’s relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores—such as why and how “impossibility� is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science—have resonance and lessons for our time.

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death, and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. In sixteenth-century Spain, the social and economic debts of the living were extended to the dead, and society's central paradigms sought to invert perceptions, making death seem better than life itself. This is the first full-length study of this phenomenon. It differs from previous histories of death in two significant ways: in its methodology, which seeks to interweave social history and intellectual/cultural history; and in its geographical and cultural setting (previous studies have focused on France, Italy, and England). As a history of mentalites focused on a subject of universal significance, From Madrid to Purgatory transcends its 'Spanishness' and its time period while being wholly attentive to them.

This is the first full-length study of Spanish attitudes toward death and the afterlife in the peak years of the Counter-Reformation. It contains an analysis of the death rituals requested in sixteenth-century Madrid testaments, as well as a detailed account of the ways in which the "good" deaths of King Philip II and St. Teresa of Avila were interpreted by contemporaries. Though focused on death, it also aims to analyze the ethos of Spanish Catholic piety and belief in an age of profound transformations. This is a history of mentalities that combines quantitative and qualitative methods and analyzes the symbiotic relation between beliefs and cultural structures. It is a study of the relation between popular piety and elite theology, between paradigms and deeds, myth and ritual, art and craft. Though concentrating exclusively on Spain, this study places the early modern Spanish mentality in the wider context of the European Reformation and Counter-Reformation and of Western attitudes toward death.

A lively, expansive history of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the momentous changes they set in motion This fast-paced survey of Western civilization's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg's printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years' War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.

In the second decade of the sixteenth century medieval piety suddenly began to be attacked in some places as "idolatry," or false religion. This study calls attention to the importance of the idolatry issue during the Reformation.

Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of this seminal book, this new edition includes an illuminating foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittges The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations-both Protestant and Catholic-of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society. With a new foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers, this modern classic is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of students and scholars.