Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays focusing on the relationship between concepts of the holy and the unholy in western European medieval culture. Demonstrates how religion, magic, and science were all modes of engagement with a natural world that was understood to be divinely created and infused with mysterious power.
Trade Review“This collection of essays brings together two areas that are still often looked at separately: the history of magic and the history of saints, mystics, and more everyday parishioners. As well as celebrating the work of Richard Kieckhefer, Collins’s volume showcases the original work being done by leading scholars in the field. It should stimulate new work on the relationship between holiness and unholiness in the Middle Ages.”
—Catherine Rider,author of Magic and Religion in Medieval England
“This fascinating collection explores, as its dedicatee has done throughout his career, the fundamental ambivalence between ‘the holy and the unholy.’ Perfectly capturing Richard Kieckhefer’s eclectic interests, the book includes essays on topics ranging from saints and their hagiographers, to church buildings (and their embodiments of identities and meanings), to heresy, demons, and magic. Kieckhefer once quipped that his scholarship has a right hand and a left hand. Both sides are delightfully represented here.”
—Laura Ackerman Smoller,author of The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
“Apart from the introduction, this volume contains ten contributions by Anglophone authors—discipuli, collegae, amici—which, as usual, prove to be of quite diverse subject matter and quality.”
—Peter Dinzelbacher Sehepunkte
“The collection of essays presented here represents a valuable contribution to recent and ongoing efforts to complicate assumptions about religion, science and magic as operating within distinct environments with distinct ideological underpinnings. This fascinating range of essays is suggestive of the multiplicity of environments and contexts in which the sacred and the sinister became sometimes disturbingly entangled.”
—Jennifer Farrell Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Flirting Between Heaven and Hell
David J. Collins, S.J.
Part 1: Traditional Holiness
1. Extreme Sanctity at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century: The Metamorphosis of Body and Community in the Vitae of Christina Mirabilis and Francis of Assisi
Claire Fanger
2. The Sources and Significance of Stefania’s New Statement on Margherita Colonna’s Perfection of the Virtues
Sean L. Field
Part 2: Conflicts over the Holy
3. Materializing Conflict: How Parish Communities Remember
Their Medieval Pasts
Kristi Woodward Bain
4. Rape and Rapture: Violence, Ambiguity, and Raptus in Medieval Thought
Elizabeth Casteen
5. Syneisaktism : Sacred Partnership and Sinister Scandal
Maeve B. Callan
Part 3: Identifying and Grappling with the Unholy
6. Was Magic a Religious Movement?
Michael D. Bailey
7. The Jurisdiction of Medieval Inquisitors over Jews and Muslims: Nicholas Eymeric’s Contra infideles demones invocantes
Katelyn Mesler
8. Magicking Madness: Secret Workings and Public Narratives of Disordered Minds in Late Medieval Germany
Anne M. Koenig
Part 4: Magic and the Cosmos
9. A Late Medieval Demonic Invasion of the Heavens
Sophie Page
10. Scholastics, Stars, and Magi: Albert the Great on Matthew 2
David J. Collins, S.J.
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
