Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies

Bailey, Michael D.

doi:10.7591/cornell/9780801451447.001.0001

Cited by 74 publications

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“…He assembled these sermons into an influential treatise On the Commandments of the Decalogue (De preceptis decalogi) in 1423. 33 Among religious clergy who promoted reform both within their own orders and beyond them, and who also addressed sorcery and superstition, we find around the middle of the fifteenth century two influential Carthusians. 34 Moving to the mendicant orders, we find a number of highly placed observant leaders also deeply engaged with issues of superstition and sorcery.…”

Section: A Prosopography Of Reformers Addressing Superstition and Sormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 Like all medieval advocates of astrology, however, he also had to recognize some corrupt and illegitimate usages of the astral arts, including many varieties of illicit divination, which he defined as superstitions. 15 Another important leader at the Council of Constance and a very powerful voice for church reform was d'Ailly's former pupil Jean Gerson. 16 He was also a major critic of sorcery, divination, and magical practices.…”

Section: A Prosopography Of Reformers Addressing Superstition and Sormentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reformers on Sorcery and Superstition

Bailey¹

2015

A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond

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The Observant Movement was a widespread effort to reform religious life across Europe. It took root around 1400, and for a century and more thereafter it inspired or shaped much that became central to European religion and culture. The Observants produced many of the leading religious figures of the later Middle Ages-Catherine of Siena, Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola in Italy, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros in Spain, and in Germany Martin Luther himself. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the Observant Movement. Its essays also seek collectively to expand the horizons of our study of Observant reform, and to open new avenues for future scholarship.

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Section: A Prosopography Of Reformers Addressing Superstition and Sormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Prosopography Of Reformers Addressing Superstition and Sormentioning

confidence: 99%

Reformers on Sorcery and Superstition

Bailey¹

2015

A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond

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“…Much of this shift in attitude can be attributed to the growing seriousness with which authorities regarded superstitious practices among elites like themselves, such as astrology and necromancy, which becomes evident in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and develops dramatically in the fourteenth century. 70 In the fifteenth century, they began to (partially) reorient their condemnations of supposedly superstitious rites, now highly diabolized because of the need to address the explicitly demonic invocations of necromancers, back toward more common practices and more ordinary people. The shift is patent in the career of Jean Gerson.…”

Section: Shifting Focus Of Concernsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Superstition and sorcery

Bailey¹

2019

The Routledge History of Medieval Magic

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In 1398, the faculty of theology of the University of Paris condemned 28 articles pertaining to 'magic arts', 'sorceries', and 'similar superstitions'. The theologians left no doubt about the threat they felt such 'nefarious, pestiferous, and monstrous abomination' presented to Christian society. They also stressed, however, that 'it is not our intention in any way to disparage licit and true traditions, science, or arts, but we will try to uproot and extirpate, insofar as we are able, the insane and sacrilegious errors of the foolish and the deadly rites that harm, contaminate, and infect orthodox faith and Christian religion'.1 This was a necessary qualification because, as threatening and harmful as superstitious rites were understood to be, they frequently bordered on practices that were legitimate, respectable, and in some cases even revered. The boundaries between licit and illicit acts could be very difficult to discern, even for highly educated experts. Medieval authorities did not need to debate whether superstition ought to be condemned, because for them the term superstitio always denoted a condemnable error. The troubling issue was instead what sort of practices were to be understood as superstitious. This chapter will address this question, examining how the medieval church defined superstition, surveying the kinds of practices, both common and elite, that could fall within this broad category, and outlining how levels of concern heightened over time.

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“…These might include worshipping at certain trees, rocks, or streams, venerating the sun or moon, or explicitly honoring pagan deities. 27 By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, as even the imagined remnants of paganism faded from long-Christianized regions of Western Europe, criticism of superstition began to focus more on the misuse of entirely Christian rites. The 'falsity' of these rites now depended on some incorrect understanding of the operation of true faith on the part of their practitioners, or on some basic failure in a practitioner's own piety.…”

Section: Similarly In Hismentioning

confidence: 99%

Superstition and Dissimulation: Discerning False Religion in the Fifteenth Century

Bailey¹

2015

Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe

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Most religions claim special access to the truth and often depict those who do not accept their revelation or doctrine as living in error.1 As Christianity emerged in the late ancient world and certainly as it developed an increasingly centralized clerical hierarchy in medieval Europe, it became particularly exercised by issues of dissimulation and deceit.2 What interests the historian is how this concern shifted over time. From antiquity onwards, fear of false religion and religious falsity (which are not necessarily the same thing) had lurked in charges of paganism, heresy, apostasy, Judaizing, sorcery, and superstition. Many of these trends culminated in the early modern period, when the ruptures of the Protestant Reformation caused Christians of different creeds to hurl charges of false religion at one another with an intensity rarely felt before, and when individuals living under the domination of another religious confession frequently had to resort to pretense and dissimulation for survival. Disciplines

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Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies

Cited by 74 publications

References 0 publications

Reformers on Sorcery and Superstition

Reformers on Sorcery and Superstition

Superstition and sorcery

Superstition and Dissimulation: Discerning False Religion in the Fifteenth Century

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