Rampton, Martha (Author)
Cornell University Press
Publication date: 2021
Language: English
Physical Details: 465
Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essense of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Pastoureau, Michel;
(2012)
Les cornes, les poils, les oreilles et la queue. Se déguiser en animal dans l'Occident médiéval
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001420805/)
Book
Cryer, Frederick H.;
Thomsen, Marie-Louise;
(2001)
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Vol. 1: Biblical and Pagan Societies
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000101593/)
Article
Lavrov, Aleksandr S.;
(2007)
Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700--1740: Popular Orthodoxy
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001030531/)
Book
Ankarloo, Bengt;
Clark, Stuart;
(2002)
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000201866/)
Book
Klaassen, Frank F.;
(2013)
The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001321244/)
Book
Bailey, Michael David;
(2007)
Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001232135/)
Book
Cameron, Euan;
(2010)
Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250--1750
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001231073/)
Book
Janowitz, Naomi;
(2002)
Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000201864/)
Book
Hanegraaff, Wouter J.;
(2012)
Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001201630/)
Book
Csepregi, Ildikó;
Burnett, Charles;
(2012)
Ritual Healing: Magic, Ritual and Medical Therapy from Antiquity until the Early Modern Period
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001251699/)
Article
Bailey, Michael David;
(2002)
The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000660559/)
Article
George Latura;
(2018)
Milky Way Vicissitudes: Macrobius to Galileo
(/p/isis/citation/CBB398306024/)
Book
Coudert, Allison P.;
(2011)
Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001201259/)
Book
Paul B. Moyer;
(2020)
Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World
(/p/isis/citation/CBB859290445/)
Book
Decker, Rainer;
(2008)
Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001231264/)
Book
Janowitz, Naomi;
(2001)
Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000101628/)
Article
Mandosio, Jean-Marc;
(2013)
Les vies légendaires d'Apollonius de Tyane, mage et philosophe
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001420829/)
Book
Alessia Belli;
Astrid Estuardo Flaction;
(2019)
Les striges en Italie du Nord. Édition critique et commentaire des traités de démonologie et sorcellerie de Girolamo Visconti (Milan, c. 1460) et de Bernard Rategno (Côme, c. 1510)
(/p/isis/citation/CBB843528981/)
Book
Ostorero, Martine;
Modestin, Georg;
Utz Tremp, Kathrin;
(2010)
Chasses aux sorcières et démonologie: entre discours et pratiques (XIVe-XVIIe siècles)
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001200354/)
Article
Kent, E. J.;
(2005)
Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 1593--1680
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000670541/)
Be the first to comment!