Enchanted Europe

The history of superstitious beliefs, as Euan Cameron states provocatively but accurately in the introduction to this masterful survey of the history of superstition, cannot be written. Superstitious beliefs and practices are a disorganised bundle of traditions, some local and some global; some have their origins in folklore and others in Christian practices, some are particular and idiosyncratic acts while others are elements of a developed and rational alternative cosmology. Cameron’s book, therefore, traces not the history of superstitions per se but the history of attitudes toward superstitious beliefs and practices from 1250 to 1750. The time-frame is significant, as it bridges the usual gap between the late middle ages and the early modern period, and between traditional (and allegedly superstitious) Catholicism and the (allegedly anti-superstitious) Protestant Reformations. One of Cameron's main arguments is that anti-superstitious theology has been part and parcel of church history throughout the ages, and that, while the Reformation obviously introduced major changes to the definition of what constitutes superstition, reformers did not invent ab nihilo an anti-superstitious body of knowledge. On the contrary, the decades of the Reformation interrupted temporarily a continuing process of drawing the boundaries between authorised and suspect religious practices and beliefs

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atheism · Criminology · Damnation · Folklore · Middle Ages · Protestantism · Sociology · Superstition · Suspect · Theology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Religious Studies