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While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or
'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain
inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over
pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those
themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen
as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more
difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying
this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more
theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors
here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often
accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In
their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted
treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits
by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance
of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars
frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and
less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic
was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the
witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary
members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this
volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the
ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need
to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make
more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.
Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia,
this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular
religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of
course, witchcraft. These traditional religious belief and
practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic
studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and
Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other
supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded within
notarial and trial records are accounts that reveal the integration
of folkloric and theological elements in early modern spirituality.
Drawing from extensive archival research, the contributors argue
for the integration of such beliefs into our understanding of late
medieval and early modern Europe.
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