Witchcraft, Madness, Society and Religion in Early Modern Germany

These are, effectively, the collected essays of Erik Midelfort, one of the most prominent American historians of early modern Germany and one who has published continuously since the early 1970s and shows no sign of slowing down. Fifteen items appear in this volume, ranging in length from four pages to forty-four and spanning the whole period of Midelfort’s life as an author. As the title and subtitle indicate, they deal with the imaginative world of Germans between the early sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, representing a social and cultural history of attitudes to religion, magic, the spirit world, and lunacy. The introduction to them provided by the author is brief and mostly autobiographical (though no less interesting for that). If the book establishes any overarching theoretical principle, it is simply that the ideas and beliefs of the past can only properly be understood in the context of the broad social setting within which they operated. To put it another way, the book argues that only historians can really understand history. If this currently seems unremarkable to many current practitioners of the discipline, this is at least partly because of the work of scholars such as Midelfort in making it so

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Literature · MAGIC (telescope · Period (music · Sign (mathematics · Sociology · Subtitle · Classics · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies