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The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the best-known treatises dealing with the problem of what to do with witches. 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, the treatise's influence on witchcraft studies has been extensive. The only previous translation into English, that by Montague Summers in 1928, is full of inaccuracies. It is written in a style almost unreadable nowadays, and is unfortunately coloured by Institoris's personal agenda. This new edited translation, with an introductory essay setting witchcraft, Institoris and the Malleus into clear English, corrects Summers' mistakes and offers an unvarnished version of what Institoris actually wrote. It will undoubtedly become the standard translation of this controversial late medieval text.
comments in the visitors’ log book. Nature, apparently untouched and undisturbed by the holidaymaker’s presence, is all around. St Winifred’s Well encapsulates many of the paradoxical elements that cluster together in environmentalist thinking and intro 8/9/06 2 2:47 pm Page 2 Greenery ecocriticism alike and epitomises my own interests in bringing current green literary criticism to bear on late medieval texts. The cottage occupies a geographical, environmental and commercial position made up of many of the contradictions inherent in our human relations with the
Some Middle English narratives juxtapose representations of hunting and histories of aristocratic loss. The Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight redirect anxieties about the contingency and precariousness of lordly advantage in a world that sometimes seems to be ruled by Fortune. Though produced in different formal traditions and different circumstances, the two poems display comparable features of a broader sense of ‘seigneurial poetics’ in late medieval texts.
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.
Marian model of maternity can teach us. While not a book that is overtly about race or racism, this study has examined Marian maternity through matricentric feminism, a theoretical lens shaped largely by the intellectual work of Black mothers. My aim has been to render its concepts of mothering—of maternal practice—more legible in these late-medieval texts. We should know where the culturally dominant
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.
categories of the sacred and the secular. The pivotal element is time: literary categories coordinate narrative time, the temporal structure of the world, and heavenly timelessness. Examples in which secular and religious time are thus negotiated can be found in love lyric, romance (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), dream vision (Pearl) – and, perhaps most poignantly, in texts that specifically engage with sanctity. We, as readers and scholars, are invited to mobilise the meaning of late medieval texts about sanctity as performances of the literary. As contributors, we
various early and late medieval texts and, developing this analysis, interrogate the distinctions and contradictions between historicist analysis and the logic of periodisation. My reading also takes account of the translation history of The Ruin. While a great deal of work has been done in the past few years on the creative histories of Old English literature, The Ruin has largely escaped critics’ attention and the work that has been done has focused on poetic and literary translation and appropriation.33 By examining the two dominant strands of this history side by
Christian poetry, and late medieval texts from Scandinavia are primarily connected through the impact of a fixed ‘Germanic’ culture on north-western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. 47 This line of thought is not limited to German-speaking archaeology. Furthermore, it has not been replaced following the criticism of the term ‘Germanic’ and the concept of an early medieval Germanic identity which has developed since the 1980s. 48 It