Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Empirical Wonder
Eighteenth-century England did not only see the rise of the novel, but also the rise of genres of what we now call the fantastic, such as imaginary voyages and apparition narratives. Combining theoretical reflection and cultural analysis, the author of this book investigates the origins, and demonstrates the formal and historical identity of a great variety of texts, which have never been considered as part of the same family. The fantastic, he argues, is an intrinsically modern mode, which uses the devices of realistic representation to describe supernatural phenomena. Its origins can be found in the seventeenth century, when the rise of modern empiricism threatened the ontological and epis...
The Restoration Mind
Through the inclusion of essays by leading Restoration scholars from around the world, this book attempts to fulfill a much-needed function for serious students of the period and uses a culture-based approach to offer a general theory regarding the Restoration mentality. The editor, W. Gerald Marshall, addresses the serious lack of an interdisciplinary, culture-based study of this important era.
Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage
Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America
The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of ...
English Witchcraft, 1560-1736, vol 4
This chronological collection charts the change in attitudes to witchcraft during the period 1560-1736, which culminates in the educated debate on the reality of witchcraft and the gradual decline in belief in witches and associated phenomena.
They Flew
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 ...
Spellbound
Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America is a collection of twelve articles that explore crucial events in the history of witch-hunting and its demonization of women in American and American women's own use of witchcraft as a source of identity and strength, as well as the complicated relationship between the two. Beginning with the accused 'witches' of colonial America, Spellbound extends its focus through the nineteenth century to explore women's involvement with alternative spiritualities, and culminates with examinations of the contemporary feminist neopagan and Goddess movements.
The Salem Witchcraft Trials
Historian Peter Charles Hoffer reexamines a notorious episode in American history and presents many of its legal details in true perspective for the first time. Hoffer also shows how rights we take for granted today did not exist in colonial times, and he demonstrates how these cases relate to current instances of children accusing adults of abuse.
The Witches of Selwood Forest
The ancient forest of Selwood straddles the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire and terminates in the south where these counties meet Dorset. Until now, a comprehensive study of its exceptionally rich history of demonological beliefs and witchcraft persecution in the early modern period has not been attempted. This book explores the connections between important theological texts written in the region, notably Richard Bernard’s Guide to the Grand-Jury Men (1627) and Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), influential local families such as the Hunts and the Hills, and the extraordinary witchcraft episodes associated with Shepton Mallet, Brewham, Stoke Trister, and elsewhere. In particular, it focuses on a little-known case in the village of Beckington in 1689, and shows how this was not a late, isolated episode, but an integral part of the wider Selwood Forest witchcraft story.
The Refiner's Fire
This 1995 book presents an alternative and comprehensive understanding of the roots of Mormon religion.
