The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Documents in History, 5)

Witchcraft and the occult sciences are areas which have benefited enormously from the spread of more sophisticated cultural studies in recent years. The old debate as to whether or not witches were really believed to exist has collapsed in the face of the overwhelming bodies of evidence suggesting a genuine and widespread acceptance of the occult in a notionally Christian Europe. This excellent and wide-ranging documentary anthology shows the genuinely pan-European nature of the phenomenon, its spread through all classes and its importance in people’s thinking about the natural world. It covers magic, witchcraft, astrology, alchemy and other related occult themes and presents them, not as disparate elements of folkloric belief and intellectual aberrations, but as parts of a coherent, intellectually rigorous and scientifically challenging world-view, consistently argued in accordance with its given basic principles. This collection is drawn from a very wide range of authors from the early modern period and includes many newly translated documents which appear in English here for the first time.