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The Rise and Persistence of a Myth: Witch Transvection
- from Essays
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- By Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, Oakland University
- Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck, Marygrove College in Detroit, Barbara I. Gusick, Troy University-Dothan, Alabama
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- Book:
- Fifteenth-Century Studies
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 01 February 2008, pp 106-113
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Summary
Whether humans can perform the feat of flying is a question deeply rooted in humankind's consciousness. Certainly our study of ancient civilizations suggests the affirmative if mythology provides a clue. The Assyro- Babylonians believed in Ningirsu and the goddess Lilitu (flying gods), while the Aztecs mentioned the flying Quetzalcoatl. In this study we shall limit ourselves to western Europe and concentrate upon evidence from the latemedieval and early modern periods, roughly spanning 1350–1750, specifically during the time of the so-called witch-craze (1450–1750). In particular, we intend to examine the hypothesis that recorded “transvections” of witches by air could have been the result of a sorceress's delusional state produced by an ointment (rubbed on her skin) containing alkaloids from solanaceous plants, such as belladonna or datura, both belonging to the nightshade family. Incidentally, modern anthropologists continue to research witchcraft among primitive populations.
Almost all ancient gods were believed to fly, mainly because they were thought to reside in heaven or an elevated place on earth. Some iconographic representations gave these deities wings, or in the case of Mercury winged sandals; other sources depicted the divine beings as riding some creature (for example Odin on his eight-legged winged horse Sleipnir), or portrayed them metamorphosing themselves into birds, as Zeus transformed into an eagle when abducting Ganymede. Not only deities, but also magicians, were said to achieve flight, as, for instance, shown in Apuleus's Golden Ass (Book 3, ch. 21), where Pamphile, after rubbing herself with an ointment, changes into an owl and flies away.
Doctor Johann Weyer (1515–88) and Witchcraft
- Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck, Marygrove College, Michigan, Barbara I. Gusick, Troy State University Montgomery, Alabama
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- Book:
- Fifteenth-Century Studies Vol. 31
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2006, pp 70-79
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Summary
Witchcraft, the exercise of supernatural powers, such as magic, sorcery, and satanism, is based on a belief in separate powers of good and evil, a conviction found in ancient pagan cults and in religions, including Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism. In the western civilizations the range, imagery, and iconography of demonology, sorcery, and witchcraft were shaped essentially by the Middle Ages. First mentioned in the Canon Episcopi (c. 900), witches were believed to fly at nighttime — an assumption condemned by the Canon. Sorceresses perverted by the Devil became part of the universe of Thomas Aquinas, who believed that evil resulted from the intervention of demons in human affairs (logic demanded that there be agents for the administration of evil). Edelgard E. DuBruck further explains that:
[b]eginning in the fifteenth century, theoretical writings of various types described, classified, and accused sorcery and witchcraft. Besides John Nider's Formicarius (c.1475), there was Peter Marmoris's Flagellum maleficorum (Lyon, 1490), Geiler von Kaysersberg's Die Ameis (Strasbourg, 1517), John Trithemius's Antipali maleficiorum libri quatuor (1605), Martin A. Del Rio's Disquisitionum magicarum (1608), and Ulrich Molitor's De lamiis (Strasbourg, 1489), to name but a few.
The monotheistic Christian Church persecuted witches from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century: under the Spanish Inquisition, up to 100 alleged witches were burned in a day; in 1692, twenty persons were executed as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. In this essay, I will present the first person who refuted both witchcraft and witch-persecution: Dr. Johann Weyer.
The witch hunt was sanctioned by jurists and doctors of medicine alike, and by the end of the fifteenth century, the entire western world was convinced that witches (female demons) and their dangers to humankind should be extirpated. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches, 1486) by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Krämer and J. Sprenger, and its many later editions, remained the chief guides consulted for the persecution of witches during the next two centuries. The inquisition's application of justice (then a synonym for torture) also arose in sixteenth-c. iconography; execution consisted of burning witches on the continent, of hanging them in England.
Huot, Sylvia. Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 224 (Gerulaitis).
- Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck, Marygrove College, Michigan, Barbara I. Gusick, Troy State University Montgomery, Alabama
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- Book:
- Fifteenth-Century Studies Vol. 31
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2006, pp 209-210
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Summary
Professor Huot is a distinguished scholar of French medieval literature who teaches at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. In her latest book, Madness in Medieval French Literature, she examines literary representations of insanity during the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, from the perspective of individual and collective identity. Her approach is mainly influenced by three well-known scholars: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Julia Kristeva (1941–). She also consults some feminist critics.
The fol (fou, madman) transcends rational thought and is characterized by inaccessible otherness. Madness becomes a means for the construction of his identity, as well as for exclusion from the social group, and determines his/her homosocial status. The real person still exists, but his/her socially constructed identity is masked or damaged by the mental condition. Caused by humoral dyscrasia, magic potions, or enchantments (according to the texts consulted), madness blurs the distinctions between civilization and savagery. Huot assumes that the concepts of sanity and madness are formed and reinforced “through repetitive performances of exclusion, identification, and imitation” (p. 6).
In her first chapter the author examines madness as having bipolar consequences, i.e., abjection or sublimity: the fol is associated with sin, deviance, and illness, but also (in other cases) with sanctity, heroism, and genius. For example, the famous “Juggler of Notre Dame,” in one of the Miracles de Nostre Dame (twelfth century), is an individual whom the dominant culture cannot assimilate or explain rationally. Huot then looks at Daguenet in Arthur's court, at the mad Lancelot, and Tristan at Tintagel among other characters, and she tries to establish the role these protagonists play in the construction of communal identity, for example, in the legendary king's environment or the court at Tintagel.
The third chapter explores the role of violence in demarcating the line of distinction between sanity and madness and also compares the insane, subjected to exclusion and violence, to other living beings treated similarly: holy martyrs, peasants, and animals. Further chapters deal with the relation between madness and love/sexuality: literary and historical sources explain that the homosocial knightly class must remain heterosexual, and that any behavior of transgression may engender a rather pathological affliction.
3 - Some Renaissance Views about Madness and Genius: Reading Ficino and Paracelsus
- from Essays
- Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck, Marygrove College in Detroit, Barbara I. Gusick, Troy University-Dothan, Alabama
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- Book:
- Fifteenth-Century Studies
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 29 April 2005, pp 58-67
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During the late 1400s, an important shift in the spiritual and factual orientations of humankind began to take place, as Christian teleology became challenged by a worldly anthropology. Whereas before, God and religious concerns held sway in the world, now secular matters came to preoccupy the lives and fears of humankind and became the center of attention. As Georges Duby observes, “there can be no doubt that a subjective experience of the presence of evil did exist; but, as has often been observed, the most frightening demons are those within.” Duby's comment captures the temper of an individualistic era, one empowering humankind by validating its authority to achieve progress — while providing subject matter for moralists.
Culturally, this was a time of brilliant accomplishments in scholarship, literature, science, and the arts, and the beginning of a revolution in commerce. The Renaissance first appeared in Italy, where relative political stability, economic expansion, wide contact with other cultures, and a flourishing urban civilization provided the background for a new view of the world. The humanist emphasis on the individual was typified in the ideal of the Renaissance man, the man of universal genius, best exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci. Soon, the northern states, above all France, benefited from and adopted the ideas, practices, and world view of the Italian Renaissance. Geographic exploration — as well as the first investigations into mental processes and the human behavioral microcosm — were now underway.