Medicine Magic And Art In Early Modern Norway

This book addresses magical ideas and practices in early modern Norway. It examines a large corpus of Norwegian manuscripts from 1650-1850 commonly called Black Books which contained a mixture of recipes on medicine, magic, and art. Ane Ohrvik assesses the Black Books from the vantage point of those who wrote the manuscripts and thus offers an original study of how early modern magical practitioners presented their ideas and saw their practices. The book show how the writers viewed magic and medicine both as practical and sacred art and as knowledge worth protecting through encoding the text. The study of the Black Books illuminates how ordinary people in Norway conceptualized magic as valuable and useful knowledge worth of collecting and saving despite the ongoing witchcraft prosecutions targeting the very same ideas and practices as the books promoted. Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway is essential for those looking to advance their studies in magical beliefs and practices in early modern Europe as well as those interested in witchcraft studies, book history, and the history of knowledge.

This collection of papers explores the sacred and magical aspects of ethno-medicine. The subject area is marked out by the points of connection between religious anthropology, ethno-medicine and medical anthropology, focusing on topics such as magical and religious concepts of health and disease, causes of disease, religious and magical averting and healing rites, healing gods, saints and, last but not least, the role that these play in the society, religion, mentality and everyday life of a community, as well as their various representations in folklore, literature or art. This volume includes, without restrictions of a methodological, temporal or geographical nature, works from the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, cultural history, comparative historical and textual philology, as well as research findings using the latest methods of analysis in textual folklore or based on archival research or fieldwork in or outside of Europe. This book will appeal to researchers and students of religion, folklore, and medical anthropology, as well as general readers interested in the humanities and cultural history.

Tying on case studies from late antiquity to the 21st century, this is the first volume that systematically explores the inter-relationship between fictional narratives about magic and the real-world ritual art of practicing magicians.

This book sheds new light on the key role played by the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen in the collection of folklore an d the creation of national culture in Northern Europe.

This books explores varying conceptions of the Nightmare hag, mara, in Scandinavian folk belief. What began as observations of some startling narratives preserved in folklore archives where sex, violence and curses are recurring themes gradually led to questions as to how rural people envisaged good and evil, illness and health, and cause and effect. At closer reading, narratives about the mara character involve existential themes, as well as comments on gender and social hierarchy. This monograph analyses how this female creature was conceived of in oral literature and everyday ritual practice in pre-industrial Scandinavia, and what role she played in a larger pattern of belief in witchcraft and magic.

Bridging the gap between cognition and culture, this handbook explores both social scientific and humanities approaches to understanding the physical processes of religious life, tradition, practice, and belief. It reflects the cultural turn within the study of religion and puts theory to the fore, moving beyond traditional theological, philosophical, and ethnographic understandings of the aesthetics of religion. Editors Anne Koch and Katharina Wilkens bring together research in cultural studies, cognitive studies, material religion, religion and the arts, and epistemology. Questions of identity, gender, ethnicity, and postcolonialism are discussed throughout. Key topics include materiality, embodiment, performance, popular/vernacular art and space to move beyond a sensory understanding of aesthetics. Emerging areas of research are covered, including secular aesthetics and the aesthetic of spirits. This is an important contribution to theory and method in the study of religion, and is grounded in research that has been taking place in Europe over the past 20 years. Case studies are drawn from around the world with contributions from scholars based in Europe, the USA, and Australia. The book is illustrated with over 40 color images and features a foreword from Birgit Meyer.

Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

Today, we worry about Mad Cow Disease, AIDS, Alzheimers, and other prolonged-onset ailments. But back in the “good old days”, folks worried about infected cuts and slashes, internal diseases, parasites, and a whole variety of ailments which are perfectly treatable or preventable by means of modern medicine. Folks rarely lived long enough to suffer from a long, slow disease; heck, just staying alive to see one’s fortieth birthday was considered a feat. Even as late as the 19th century, medicine was pretty medieval to our way of looking at it. There were no wonder drugs, no X-ray or CAT scans, no hospitals as we know them today, and spotty training of medical professionals. The dentist was feared, and quack nostrums were sold by the case by traveling snake-oil salesmen. Many of those nostrums contained relatively innocuous ingredients, but some were downright dangerous, especially those incorporating psychoactive alkaloids, heavy metals or raw isotopes. Mercury or radium were primary ingredients in some quack medicinal “cures” even into the early 20th century. And in rural areas, the old “magic medicine” was still practiced by generations of folks who passed on these traditions and lore to their students and/or children. Much of the material presented in this volume has already been documented and published in the Norwegian language by scholars and folklorists, such as Ingjald Reichborn-Kjennerud, Nils Lid, Hjalmar Falk, Olav Bø, O.A. Høeg, Per Holck, Odd Nordland, Chr. Bang, and A. Steen, among others. There has been a growing interest in folklore, folk medicine, and the “old ways” in recent years, and this volume is an attempt to present a part of this lore to the English-speaking audience.