The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches. It was written in 1487 by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Institoris, following his failure to prosecute a number of women for witchcraft, it is in many ways a highly personal document, full of frustration at official complacency in the face of a spiritual threat, as well as being a practical guide for law-officers who have to deal with a cunning, dangerous enemy. Combining theological discussion, illustrative anecdotes, and useful advice for those involved in suppressing witchcraft, its influence on witchcraft studies has been extensive. The only previous translation into English, that by Montague Summers produced in 1928, is full of inaccuracies. It is written in a style almost unreadable nowadays, and is unfortunately coloured by his personal agenda. This new edited translation, with an introductory essay setting witchcraft, Institoris, and the Malleus into clear, readable English, corrects Summers' mistakes and offers a lean, unvarnished version of what Institoris actually wrote. It will undoubtedly become the standard translation of this important and controversial late-medieval text. -- .

This is the first English translation of one of the most important, interesting and comprehensive discussions of the occult sciences ever published. Investigations into Magic" deals not only with magic in all its forms, from the manipulation of angelic and demonic powers to straightforward conjuring and illusion, but also with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, divination, prophecy, and possession by evil spirits. In addition, Del Rio gives judges and confessors practical advice on the most effective ways of dealing with people who are accused of practising magic, and enlivens his whole discussion with anecdotes drawn from a remarkable range of sources, including his own experience. Nothing so panoramic had ever appeared before, and for the next one hundred and fifty years "Investigations into Magic" was the indispensable reference work on the subject. Modern historians and students of the sixteenth century, as well as readers across many interdisciplinary fields, will likewise find it an invaluable and fascinating guide to certain modes of early modern thought.

Witchcraft and the occult sciences are areas which have benefited from the spread of more sophisticated cultural studies in recent years. The old debate as to whether or not witches were really believed to exist has collapsed in the face of the bodies of evidence suggesting a widespread acceptance of the occult in a notionally Christian Europe. This wide-ranging documentary anthology shows the pan European nature of the phenomenon, its spread through all classes and its importance in people's thinking about the natural world. It covers magic, witchcraft, astrology, alchemy and other related occult themes and presents them, not as disparate elements of folkloric belief and intellectual aberrations, but as parts of a coherent world view, argued in accordance with its given basic principles. This collection is drawn from a wide range of authors from the early modern period and includes many newly translated documents.

In this title, the history of alchemy traced from its earliest roots through to its influence in modern-day science. Beginning in China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists. Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative substances known as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demonstrations of the art were performed in royal courts and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums today. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists - principally Carl Jung - perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature.

Scotland, in common with the rest of Europe, was troubled from time to time by outbreaks of witchcraft which the authorities sought to contain and then to suppress, and the outbreak of 1658-1662 is generally agreed to represent the high water mark of Scottish persecution. These were peculiar years for Scotland. This work deals with this subject.

The history of a unique reign of terror. A thoroughly readable book on the lives and careers of possibly the most sadistic group of people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the great age of witch-hunting in Europe and North America. From the doyen of witch-hunters, the Jesuit del Rio, to the British Matthew Hopkins, not to mention Pierre de Lancre, a judge who was responsible for burning 600 women, Maxwell-Stuart charts the progress of these fierce and dangerous zealots, while providing an insight into the world they perceived as evil and which they sought to destroy.

Controversy has rarely been far away. Had the original party of monks accompanying St Augustine in the Summer of 596 had their way, they would have turned back in France and never set foot in England. But once established, the Archbishops soon began what was to be a fatal partnership with the Crown. Dunstan and King Edgar, Lanfranc and William the Conqueror set the pattern, and things soon went wrong. William Warham lost the battle to keep the English Church out of Henry VIII's greedy, destructive fingers, Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake, and William Laud beheaded. The office was far from a sinecure. But after the excitements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth lapsed into navel-gazing, while the twentieth took to travel. Cosmo Lang hated trains and expected the world to come to him, but Geoffrey Fisher, whose personal brand of sarcasm did not go down well with the press, traveled extensively. "The Archbishops of Canturbury" is not so much a history of the Church of England as a personal survey of the men who have led it for fourteen hundred years - the decisive, the weak, the admirable, and the odd.

Evil has been personified in every religion and culture, and Christianity in particular developed a highly graphic view of him from its earliest period. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful, sometimes threatening, sometimes seductively helpful, sometimes comical, Satan has played a variety of roles in human existence. Feared and frightening adversary of humankind during the Middle Ages, supposed master and friend of witches during the 16th century, and seducer of the devout during the 17nth, he was gradually explained away as the 19th century started to lose its faith at home and export him in all his traditional aspects to the Empire. Satan made a startling and vicious comeback during the 20th century as a focus of renewed admiration and even worship. This book follows the Devil through his various and sometimes surprising incarnations from the ancient world to the present, and shows that his significance is by no means over, even in the West.