Believe Not Every Spirit

Believe Not Every Spirit is a sprawling, energetic, deeply researched book, one that glides happily to and fro among salacious tidbits and big historiographical assertions, one that addresses twenty-first century feminist concerns while simultaneously embedding itself in Catholic Reformation theological debates. The chronological scope is substantial, starting early in the fifteenth century and ending late in the seventeenth. The geographic range is equally expansive, focusing on Italy, France, and Spain but extending into the Low Countries and Germany. Throughout Early Modern Continental Western Europe, wherever distrusted or unwelcome spirits appeared and left a documentary record, there is Moshe Sluhovsky to take their measure. If wealth of detail counted as scientific verification, then we would indeed have no doubts about just how ubiquitously spirits intervened in people's daily lives, especially people who were female and enclosed in convents. But whether the hundreds of individual possessions and dozens of collective supernatural experiences for which the author provides endnotes, or the thousands of spiritual encounters alluded to even if not specifically documented, amount to a lot or a little is hard to say. In simple arithmetic terminology, we know the numerator of incidents, perhaps with a margin of error around tenfold, but we have no idea of a proper denominator: all people, mostly women, primarily nuns, people where the Inquisition was powerful.

Aesthetics · Art · Discernment · Historiography · Literature · Mysticism · Possession (linguistics) · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Classics · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies