This book explores the manifold ways of knowingand knowing about preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that an awareness and understanding of the nature and capabilities of spiritswhether benevolent or malevolentwas fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750. This is, therefore, a book about how epistemological and experiential knowledge of spirits persisted and evolved in concert with the wider intellectual changes of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
Theory and Practice in Early Modern Epistemologies of the Preternatural;
Michelle Brock and David Winter.- Part I: Knowing in Theory.- Knowing the
Spirit(s) in the Dutch Radical Reformation: From Physical Perception to
Rational Doubt, 1536-1690; Gary Waite.- Hell and Fairy: The Differentiation
of Fairies and Demons within British Ritual Magic of the Early Modern Period;
Daniel Harms.- Preternatural Peasants and the Discourse of Demons:
Xenoglossy, Superstition, and Melancholy in Early Modern Spain; Andrew
Keitt.- Testing for Demonic Obsession: Goclenius, Scribonius, and the Lemgo
Witchcraft Trial of 1583; Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter.- The Damned Trinity:
Judas, the Devil, and the Hell-Beast in Russian Iconography; Dmitriy
Antonov.- Part II: Knowing in Practice.- Curious Companions: Spirit Conjuring
and Alchemy in the Sixteenth Century; Frank Klaassen.- Edward Terry and the
Demons of India; Richard Raiswell.- Jesuit Missionaries and the
Accommodationist Demons of New France; Mairi Cowan.- Angels, Devils, and
Discernment in Early Modern Scotland; Martha McGill.- Discerning Spirits in
the Early Enlightenment: The Case of the French Prophets; Michael B.
Riordan.- Afterword: The Science of Knowing Spirits: Rationality and the
Invisible World; Nancy Mandeville Caciola.- Index.
Michelle D. Brock is Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University, USA. Richard Raiswell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. David R. Winter is Associate Professor of History at Brandon University, Canada.
