Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany

A Ship of Fools

H.C. Erik Midelfort

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040234051
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

H.C. Erik Midelfort has carved out a reputation for innovative work on early modern German history, with a particular focus on the social history of ideas and religion. This collection pulls together some of his best work on the related subjects of witchcraft, the history of madness and psychology, demonology, exorcism, and the social history of religious change in early modern Europe. Several of the pieces reprinted here constitute reviews of recent scholarly literature on their topics, while others offer sharp departures from conventional wisdom. A critique of Michel Foucault's view of the history of madness proved both stimulating but irritating to Foucault's most faithful readers, so it is reprinted here along with a short retrospective comment by the author. Another focus of this collection is the social history of the Holy Roman Empire, where towns, peasants, and noble families developed different perceptions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and of the options the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century offered. Finally, this collection also brings together articles which show how Freudian psychoanalysis and academic sociology have filtered and interpreted the history of early modern Germany.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: History and the sense of surprise
• I Witchcraft, magic, and the occult
• II Witchcraft
• III Were there really witches?
• IV Catholic and Lutheran reactions to demon possession in the late seventeenth century: two case histories
• V Witch craze? Beyond the legends of panic
• VI Toward a social history of ideas in the German Reformation
• VII Social history and Biblical exegesis: community, family and witchcraft in sixteenth-century Germany
• VIII The Reformation and the early social sciences (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud): toward a cultural epidemiology
• IX The worst book in the world
• X Curious Georgies: the German nobility and their crisis of legitimacy in the late sixteenth century
• XI The Reformation and the German nobility
• XII Madness and civilization in early modern Europe: a reappraisal of Michel Foucault
• XIII Reading and believing. On the reappraisal of Michel Foucault
• XIV Madness and the millennium at Münster, 1534–1535
• XV Charcot, Freud, and the demons
• Index