Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (2013)
Bailey, Michael David (Author)
Cornell University Press
Physical Details: xv + 296 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
Language: English
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind---praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition---tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.
...MoreReview Page, Sophie (2015) Review of "Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 429-430).
Review Parish, Helen (2014) Review of "Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe". Renaissance Quarterly (p. 654).
Similar Citations
Book
Klaassen, Frank F.;
(2013)
The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
(/isis/citation/CBB001321244/)
Article
Carter, Christopher;
(2012)
Meteors, Prodigies, and Signs: The Interpretation of the Unusual in Sixteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB001200755/)
Book
Stuckrad, Kocku von;
(2010)
Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities
(/isis/citation/CBB001201627/)
Article
Grant, Edward;
(2011)
How Theology, Imagination, and the Spirit of Inquiry Shaped Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages
(/isis/citation/CBB001023541/)
Book
Grant, Edward;
(2001)
God and Reason in the Middle Ages
(/isis/citation/CBB000301747/)
Book
Cunningham, Jack;
(2012)
Robert Grosseteste: His Thought and Its Impact
(/isis/citation/CBB001260630/)
Book
Csepregi, Ildikó;
Burnett, Charles;
(2012)
Ritual Healing: Magic, Ritual and Medical Therapy from Antiquity until the Early Modern Period
(/isis/citation/CBB001251699/)
Article
Brown, David;
(2006)
Astral Divination in the Context of Mesopotamian Divination, Medicine, Religion, Magic, Society, and Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB001021328/)
Book
Sannino, Antonella;
(2011)
Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale
(/isis/citation/CBB001200499/)
Book
Von Stuckrad, Kocku;
(2010)
Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities
(/isis/citation/CBB001200922/)
Article
Boner, Patrick J.;
(2012)
Beached Whales and Priests of God: Kepler and the Cometary Spirit of 1607
(/isis/citation/CBB001252632/)
Book
Hughes, Jonathan;
(2012)
The Rise of Alchemy in Fourteenth-Century England: Plantagenet Kings and the Search for the Philosopher's Stone
(/isis/citation/CBB001214743/)
Book
Tom Lynch;
(2022)
Making Miracles in Medieval England
(/isis/citation/CBB243022654/)
Book
Martha Rampton;
(2021)
Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000
(/isis/citation/CBB212132197/)
Article
Halfond, Gregory;
(2012)
Tenebrae Refulgeant: Celestial Signa in Gregory of Tours
(/isis/citation/CBB001200588/)
Book
Böhlandt, Marco;
(2009)
Verborgene Zahn -- Verborgener Gott: Mathematik und Naturwissen im Denken des Nicolaus Cusanus (1401--1464)
(/isis/citation/CBB001023242/)
Book
Greyerz, Kaspar von;
Pavlovic, Milica;
(2010)
Religion und Naturwissenschaften im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert
(/isis/citation/CBB001033567/)
Book
Nicholas Campion;
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum;
(2016)
Astrology in Time and Place: Cross-Cultural Questions in the History of Astrology
(/isis/citation/CBB721551148/)
Book
David Brown;
Jonathan Ben-Dov;
(2018)
The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science
(/isis/citation/CBB920028822/)
Book
(2021)
Pietro d'Abano il Conciliatore: Crocevia di culture
(/isis/citation/CBB844811117/)
Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
History of Science
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Be the first to comment!