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Believe Not Every Spirit
From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism—popular with women—emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions? Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism...
Becoming a New Self
In Becoming a New Self, Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the case that these practices promoted the idea of achieving a new self through the knowing of oneself. Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.
Patroness of Paris
The book examines the cult of Sainte Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. Using hagiographic and liturgical documents, as well as municipal, ecclesiastical, and notarial records, it analyzes the religious, political, and social contexts of public devotion in the early modern city.
The Knights of Modernism
According to the customary literary-historical and theoretical notion, the fact that the first modern novel represents a parody or travesty of the chivalric ideal merits no particular attention. Failing to become attuned to the real role of the chivalric ideal at the beginning of the era of the modern novel, commentators missed the chance to adequately review the role of chivalry at the end of that period. The modern novel did not only begin, but also ended with a travesty of the chivalric ideal. The deep need of a significant number of modernist writers to measure their own time according to the ideals of the high and late Middle Ages cannot, therefore, be explained by a set of literary-historical, spiritual-historical or social circumstances. The predilection of a range of twentieth century novelists for a distant feudal past suggests that there exists a fundamental poetic connection between the modern (or at least the modernist) novel and the ideals of chivalry.
Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine
When queer Jewish people migrated from Central Europe to the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century, they contributed to the creation of a new queer culture and community in Palestine. This volume offers the first collection of studies on queer Jewish lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine. While the first section of the book presents queer geographies, including Germany, Austria, Poland and Palestine, the second section introduces queer biographies between Europe and Palestine including the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), the writer Hugo Marcus (1880–1966), and the artist Annie Neumann (1906-1955).
Enchanted Europe
Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called 'superstitious' by educated elites. For centuries religious believers used 'superstition' as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith 'wrongly'. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to m...
Into the Dark Night and Back: The Mystical Writings of Jean-Joseph Surin
The French mystic Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–65) was the chief exorcist during the infamous demonic possession in Loudun in 1634–37. During the exorcism, a demon entered Surin’s own soul, and the exorcist became demoniac. He spent the following eighteen years of his life mute and paralyzed. All the while his troubled mind conversed with God, and he composed hymns and poems that tried to comprehend his agony. Surin left detailed descriptions of the dramatic events that shaped his life and fascinated his fellow Jesuits. But Surin was also an author of spiritual texts, a spiritual director of souls, a poet, and a prolific correspondent. This volume is the first to offer English readers a comprehensive selection of Surin’s mystical writings.
Jews and Protestants
The book sheds light on various chapters in the long history of Protestant-Jewish relations, from the Reformation to the present. Going beyond questions of antisemitism and religious animosity, it aims to disentangle some of the intricate perceptions, interpretations, and emotions that have characterized contacts between Protestantism and Judaism, and between Jews and Protestants. While some papers in the book address Luther’s antisemitism and the NS-Zeit, most papers broaden the scope of the investigation: Protestant-Jewish theological encounters shaped not only antisemitism but also the Jewish Reform movement and Protestant philosemitic post-Holocaust theology; interactions between Jews ...
The Bedevilment of Elizabeth Lorentz
Elizabeth Lorentz was a young maid servant in early modern Germany who believed herself to be tormented by the devil, and who was eventually brought to trial in 1667. The trial grappled with the question of whether Lorentz was a willing accomplice of the devil or suffering from melancholy as a result of her previous sins. To provide readers with historical context, Morton includes an introduction to the early modern issues of demonic pact, possession, and spiritual melancholy, and as a supplement, a contemporary record of demonic possession of another young woman. The Bedevilment of Elizabeth Lorentz provides excellent insight into the complexities of Protestant attitudes to melancholy and the Devil, and into the circumstances of young women in early modern Europe.
Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe
Covering Western Europe (c. 1240-1450) and drawing upon a rich body of sources, this volume analyses how lay people understood the phenomenon of demonic presence and possession and used it to identify and unravel problems in their lives.
