Werewolves Witches And Wandering Spirits

Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia, this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of course, witchcraft. These traditional religious beliefs and practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded within notarial and trial records are accounts that reveal the integration of folkloric and theological elements in early modern spirituality. Drawing from extensive archival research, the contributors argue for the integration of such beliefs into our understanding of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Are werewolves real? When the moon is full, do ordinary people under a supernatural curse transform into snarling creatures charging out of the fog, only to revert to human form? Throughout history, people have claimed to have seen weird beings that are p

Werewolf Histories is the first academic book in English to address European werewolf history and folklore from antiquity to the twentieth century. It covers the most important werewolf territories, ranging from Scandinavia to Germany, France and Italy, and from Croatia to Estonia.

In the early 1990s people around the small town of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, claimed to see strange, hairy, wolf-headed creatures that sometimes walked upright and seemed not afraid of man. The canid sensation was soon dubbed Beast of Bray Road, after the location of the first reported sightings. Author Linda Godfrey began investigating this story and soon found herself in the middle of a national sensation. Nobody has ever been able to prove whether the beast is a flesh-and-blood werewolf or will-o'-the-wisp, demon dog, or noble animal. But the author gives the reader plenty to chew on. Make up your own mind, if you do so at all, only after the marrow has been extracted and well digested.

Scholars of religion have begun to explore horror and the monstrous, not only within the confines of the biblical text or the traditions of religion, but also as they proliferate into popular culture. This exploration emerges from what has long been present in horror: an engagement with the same questions that animate religious thought - questions about the nature of the divine, humanity's place in the universe, the distribution of justice, and what it means to live a good life, among many others. Such exploration often involves a theological conversation. Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination pursues questions regarding non-physical realities, spaces where both divinity and horror dwell. Through an exploration of theology and horror, the contributors explore how questions of spirituality, divinity, and religious structures are raised, complicated, and even sometimes answered (at least partially) by works of horror.

The European Witch-Hunt seeks to explain why thousands of people, mostly lower-class women, were deliberately tortured and killed in the name of religion and morality during three centuries of intermittent witch-hunting throughout Europe and North America. Combining perspectives from history, sociology, psychology and other disciplines, this book provides a comprehensive account of witch-hunting in early modern Europe. Julian Goodare sets out an original interpretation of witch-hunting as an episode of ideologically-driven persecution by the ‘godly state’ in the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Full weight is also given to the context of village social relationships, and there is a detailed analysis of gender issues. Witch-hunting was a legal operation, and the courts’ rationale for interrogation under torture is explained. Panicking local elites, rather than central governments, were at the forefront of witch-hunting. Further chapters explore folk beliefs about legendary witches, and intellectuals’ beliefs about a secret conspiracy of witches in league with the Devil. Witch-hunting eventually declined when the ideological pressure to combat the Devil’s allies slackened. A final chapter sets witch-hunting in the context of other episodes of modern persecution. This book is the ideal resource for students exploring the history of witch-hunting. Its level of detail and use of social theory also make it important for scholars and researchers.

The witch, the vampire and the werewolf endure in modern horror. These "old monsters" have their origins in Aristotle as studied in the universities of medieval Europe, where Christian scholars reconciled works of natural philosophy and medicine with theological precepts. They codified divine perfection as warm, light, male and associated with the ethereal world beyond the moon, while evil imperfection was cold, dark, female and bound to the corrupt world below the moon. All who did not conform to divine goodness--including un-holy women and Jews--were considered evil and ascribed a melancholic, blood hungry and demonic physiology. This construct was the basis for anti-woman and anti-Jewish discourse that has persisted through modern Western culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in horror films, where the witch, the vampire and the werewolf represent our fear of the inverted other.

In 1691, a Livonian peasant known as Old Thiess boldly announced before a district court that he was a werewolf. Yet far from being a diabolical monster, he insisted, he was one of the “hounds of God,” fierce guardians who battled sorcerers, witches, and even Satan to protect the fields, flocks, and humanity—a baffling claim that attracted the notice of the judges then and still commands attention from historians today. In this book, eminent scholars Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln offer a uniquely comparative look at the trial and startling testimony of Old Thiess. They present the first English translation of the trial transcript, in which the man’s own voice can be heard, before turning to subsequent analyses of the event, which range from efforts to connect Old Thiess to shamanistic practices to the argument that he was reacting against cruel stereotypes of the “Livonian werewolf” a Germanic elite used to justify their rule over the Baltic peasantry. As Ginzburg and Lincoln debate their own and others’ perspectives, they also reflect on broader issues of historical theory, method, and politics. Part source text of the trial, part discussion of historians’ thoughts on the case, and part dialogue over the merits and perils of their different methodological approaches, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf opens up fresh insight into a remarkable historical occurrence and, through it, the very discipline of history itself.