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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2007

        The Malleus Maleficarum

        by P. Maxwell-Stuart

        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. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2024

        The Malleus Maleficarum

        by Peter Maxwell-Stuart

        A shocking glimpse into the mind of a medieval witch hunter. In 1487, the zealous Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer wrote a treatise that would have a remarkable influence on European history. Blaming women for his own lust, and frustrated by official complacency before what he saw as a monstrous spiritual menace, Kramer penned a practical guide to aid law officers in the identification and prosecution of witches. Fusing theology, lurid anecdotes and advice for those engaged in combating sorcery, The Malleus Maleficarum transports the reader into the dark heart of medieval belief - where fear of the supernatural provokes a gripping struggle for understanding and control. Kramer's book led to the burning of numerous innocents and had a lasting impact on the popular image of witchcraft. It remains a sinister symbol of fanaticism and cruelty to this day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2023

        A defence of witchcraft belief

        A sixteenth-century response to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

        by Eric Pudney

        This is the first published edition of a fascinating manuscript on witchcraft in the collection of the British Library, written by an unknown sixteenth-century scholar. Responding to a pre-publication draft of Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the treatise represents the most detailed defence of witchcraft belief to be written in the early modern period in England. It highlights in detail the scriptural and theological justifications for a belief in witches, covering ground that may well have been considered too sensitive for print publications and presenting learned arguments not found in any other contemporary English work. Consequently, it offers a unique insight into elite witchcraft belief dating from the very beginning of the English witchcraft debate. This edition, which includes a comprehensive analytical introduction, presents the treatise with modernised spelling and relevant excerpts from Scot's book.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2020

        The supernatural in early modern Scotland

        by Julian Goodare, Martha McGill, Janet Hadley Williams, Lizanne Henderson, Liv Helene Willumsen, Michelle D. Brock, Alasdair Raff, Jane Ridder-Patrick, Michael B. Riordan, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Felicity Loughlin, Hamish Mathison

        This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2020

        The supernatural in early modern Scotland

        by Julian Goodare, Martha McGill, Janet Hadley Williams, Lizanne Henderson, Liv Helene Willumsen, Michelle D. Brock, Alasdair Raff, Jane Ridder-Patrick, Michael B. Riordan, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Felicity Loughlin, Hamish Mathison

        This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2020

        The supernatural in early modern Scotland

        by Julian Goodare, Martha McGill, Janet Hadley Williams, Lizanne Henderson, Liv Helene Willumsen, Michelle D. Brock, Alasdair Raff, Jane Ridder-Patrick, Michael B. Riordan, Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Felicity Loughlin, Hamish Mathison

        This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2017

        A familiar compound ghost

        Allusion and the Uncanny

        by Sarah Annes Brown

        A Familiar Compound Ghost explores the relationship between allusion and the uncanny in literature. An unexpected echo or quotation in a new text can be compared to the sudden appearance of a ghost or mysterious double, the reanimation of a corpse, or the discovery of an ancient ruin hidden in a modern city. In this scholarly and suggestive study, Brown identifies moments where this affinity between allusion and the uncanny is used by writers to generate a particular textual charge, where uncanny elements are used to flag patterns of allusion and to point to the haunting presence of an earlier work. A Familiar Compound Ghost traces the subtle patterns of connection between texts centuries, even millennia apart, from Greek tragedy and Latin epic, through the plays of Shakespeare and the Victorian novel, to contemporary film, fiction and poetry. Each chapter takes a different uncanny motif as its focus: doubles, ruins, reanimation, ghosts and journeys to the underworld.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2021

        A defence of witchcraft belief

        A sixteenth-century response to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

        by Eric Pudney

        This is the first published edition of a fascinating manuscript on witchcraft in the collection of the British Library, written by an unknown sixteenth-century scholar. Responding to a pre-publication draft of Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the treatise represents the most detailed defence of witchcraft belief to be written in the early modern period in England. It highlights in detail the scriptural and theological justifications for a belief in witches, covering ground that may well have been considered too sensitive for print publications and presenting learned arguments not found in any other contemporary English work. Consequently, it offers a unique insight into elite witchcraft belief dating from the very beginning of the English witchcraft debate. This edition, which includes a comprehensive analytical introduction, presents the treatise with modernised spelling and relevant excerpts from Scot's book.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2021

        A defence of witchcraft belief

        A sixteenth-century response to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

        by Eric Pudney

        This is the first published edition of a fascinating manuscript on witchcraft in the collection of the British Library, written by an unknown sixteenth-century scholar. Responding to a pre-publication draft of Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the treatise represents the most detailed defence of witchcraft belief to be written in the early modern period in England. It highlights in detail the scriptural and theological justifications for a belief in witches, covering ground that may well have been considered too sensitive for print publications and presenting learned arguments not found in any other contemporary English work. Consequently, it offers a unique insight into elite witchcraft belief dating from the very beginning of the English witchcraft debate. This edition, which includes a comprehensive analytical introduction, presents the treatise with modernised spelling and relevant excerpts from Scot's book.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2021

        A defence of witchcraft belief

        A sixteenth-century response to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft

        by Eric Pudney

        This is the first published edition of a fascinating manuscript on witchcraft in the collection of the British Library, written by an unknown sixteenth-century scholar. Responding to a pre-publication draft of Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the treatise represents the most detailed defence of witchcraft belief to be written in the early modern period in England. It highlights in detail the scriptural and theological justifications for a belief in witches, covering ground that may well have been considered too sensitive for print publications and presenting learned arguments not found in any other contemporary English work. Consequently, it offers a unique insight into elite witchcraft belief dating from the very beginning of the English witchcraft debate. This edition, which includes a comprehensive analytical introduction, presents the treatise with modernised spelling and relevant excerpts from Scot's book.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2020

        The Malleus Maleficarum

        by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2023

        The supernatural in early modern Scotland

        by Julian Goodare, Martha McGill

        This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences

        Die Magie der verbotenen Märchen / The Magic of the Forbidden Fairy Tales

        by Sergius Golowin

        What do folk tales teach us today? Fairy godmothers, bitches, gnomes, dwarfs and many others are thoroughly described in this book. In his ethnic study Sergius Golowin explores the figures of the folk tales as symbols of our unconsciousness. Golowin decodes the symbolic language of fairy tales and enlightens the secret science of Celtic priests and the magic knowledge of Nordic warlocks. Golowin shows that mandrake, toadstool and monkshood were well known in past times. Those who knew their secrets had superhuman power and wisdom. The possibility to see new realities is shown as one of the oldest, but always banned knowledge.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences

        Magie und Macht in Italien / Magic and Power in Italy

        Über Frauenzauber, Kirche und Politik / Witches, Church and Politics

        by Thomas Hauschild

        An exciting book about Italy, the hidden power structures of the Catholic Church and the question of what is - after all post-modern discussion - essentially human In the early 1980ies Thomas Hauschild started his anthropological fieldwork in Southern Italy. He discovered a kind of modern European shamanism, which has been in dialogue with the almighty Catholic Church for a long time. These traditions of magic, trance, and vision are kept as a form of religious daily life and are still very vivid. Thomas Hauschild describes and explains rites of birth, life and death, how women and men make their living by healing, and how this regenerates local and national politics. Since the church was likely to loose control, it always tried to obliterate popular rituals and, by doing so, revitalized their powers even more. This is a book against a ‘the politics of’ stance in anthropological reasoning that asks for the very processes through which political power is created and installed. Most remarkable: the language – “the sound” – of the book: although it deals with all the urgent questions of humanity it is never academic.

      • Magic, spells & alchemy

        The Grimoire of Saint Cyprian

        Clavis Inferni : Sive Magia Alba Et Nigra Approbata Metratona

        by Stephen Skinner

        There have been many grimoires attributed to St Cyprian of Antioch due to his reputation as a consummate magician before his conversion to Christianity, but perhaps none so intriguing as the present manuscript. This unique manuscript (unlike the more rustic examples attributed to St Cyprian called the Black Books of Wittenburg, as found in Scandinavia, or the texts disseminated under his name in Spain and Portugal) is directly in line with the Solomonic tradition, and therefore relevant to our present series of Sourceworks of Ceremonial Magic. It is unique in that instead of being weighed down with many prayers and conjurations it addresses the summoning and use of both the four Archangels, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel as well as their opposite numbers, the four Demon Kings, Paymon, Maimon, Egyn and Oriens. The later are shown in their animal and human forms along with their sigils, a resource unique amongst grimoires. The text is in a mixture of three magical scripts, Greek, Hebrew, cipher, Latin, (and reversed Latin) with many contractions and short forms, but expanded and made plain by the editors. The title literally means 'The Key of Hell with white and black magic as proven by Metatron'.

      • Occult studies

        Michael Psellus On the Operation of Daemons

        by Marcus Collisson

        Michael Constantine Psellus (1018-1178 C.E) was one of the most notable writers and philosophers of the Byzantine era. The Byzantine domain was effectively the eastern Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire centred on Byzantium (Constantinople, modern Istanbul) which split off from the Latin West in 364 C.E. Its intellectual legacies helped lay the foundations for the Italian Renaissance. It was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that released a tide of Greek reading scholars into Western Europe, particularly Venice. With them came much of the magical and Hermetic knowledge which the Greeks in their turn had inherited from the Egyptians. The Key of Solomon was one such text. It is therefore essential to the understanding of such magical texts that one understands exactly how the Byzantines understood the nature of daemons. Psellus forms the bridge between the ancient world, Byzantine Greek, and the grimoire conception of the nature of daemons. Hailing from Constantinople, Psellus' career was an illustrious and practical one, serving as a political advisor to a succession of emperors, playing a decisive role in the transition of power between various monarchs. He became the leading professor at the newly founded University of Constantinople, bearing the honorary title, 'Consul of the Philosophers'. He was the driving force behind the university curriculum reform designed to emphasise the Greek classics, especially Homeric literature. Psellus is credited with the shift from Aristotelian thought to the Platonist tradition, and was adept in politics, astronomy, medicine, music, theology, jurisprudence, physics, grammar and history.

      • Occult studies

        Sepher Raziel Also Known As Liber Salomonis, a 1564 English Grimoire from Sloane Ms 3826

        by Stephen Skinner

        Sepher Raziel (also called Liber Salomonis) is not the same as the Hebrew Sepher Raziel ha-Melakh. It is a full grimoire in the Solomonic tradition from a 1564 century English manuscript, derived from Latin sources. As such it is one of the earliest grimoires produced in this series. It begins with directions for making the parchment, pen and ink of Art, required to write the names. It contains seven separate Treatises: 1 - Liber Clavis which is concerned with astrology and its correct use in magic, something long forgotten by modern astrologers, with the precise interactions between planets, Signs and Houses; 2 - The Ala outlines in four sections the magical virtues of stones, herbs and beasts, and words; 3 - The Tractatus Thymiamatus explains why incense is essential to magical operations, and the effect of various incenses on the spirits, with a list of the key perfumes and suffumigations. An Appendix gives the modern and botanical names; 4 - The Treatise of Times gives details of the correct hours of the day and night for each operation, with associated angels and the proper names of the Sun, Moon and planets to be used in each season. This is something left out of almost all other grimoires; 5 - The Treatise on Purity explains the exact preparations, and the reasons for ritual purity; 6 - Samaim is a treatise on the seven Heavens, with the names of their angels; 7 - The Book of Virtues and Miracles is a treatise on the Semiforas, the names of God, and how they are to be used in invocation to produce miraculous results.

      • Egyptian archaeology / Egyptology
        December 2014

        Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic

        by Stephen Skinner (Dr.)

        This is the first book in any language to analyse the Graeco-Egyptian Magical papyri in terms of the actual techniques used by Graeco-Egyptian magicians, utilising their own (Greek) terminology for the types of magic they used. Stephen Skinner holds a Ph.D in Classics, and has grouped together rites, according to their Greek headwords, making it much easier to understand the intentions, implements and procedures of the original magicians, from their point of view, rather than that of later commentators. 42 Illustrations and 61 detailed Tables. 978-0-956828569

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