Lane ignored Perrault in favor of repeatedly publishing and repurposing his rival seventeenth-century French conteuses, most notably Mme D’Aulnoy. While addressing many of the same domestic and political issues as Minerva Terror Fiction and Minerva Historicals, these contes de fée unsentimentally performed their promise, “Whatever you wish you shall have,” while warning readers to be careful what they wished for. The second section considers novel Minerva fictions that preempted nineteenth-century realism by infusing magical fairy-tale materials into novels conducted in the real world.

This chapter collects evidence from drama, poetry, cult inscriptions, and papyri that identifies peithō with the action of enchantment (thelgein). Descriptions of the goddess Peithō in cult and early Greek poetry, beginning with Hesiod, associate her with the magical qualities of related divinities, such as Aphrodite and Hermes. The chapter outlines three mechanisms of Peithō’s bewitching action that are represented across a variety of source material: the beguilement of the eyes in Ibycus, Pindar, and Aeschylus; the driving force of erotic agōgai in Pindar and the Greek Magical Papyri; and the ambiguous poison of pharmaka (drugs) in Gorgias’ Encomium and Sophocles’ Trachiniae. Through association with the operations of thelgein, peithō is situated as a surreptitious and enchanting force that comes from outside but can also enter the psyche of a person with or without their willing it.

Scott’s sympathy for the figure of the witch is put to the test in Guy Mannering with the introduction of Meg Merrilies, the Roma prophetess and witch. Merrilies’s status as a local sibyl and matriarchal leader within the Romany community is deliberately contrasted with Guy Mannering’s academic magic as an educated English astrologer, and, later, his social standing as a colonel and beloved father/patriarch. In addition, Merrilies’s powers as a storyteller or story-shaper are also in tension with Scott’s authorial control. It is not surprising, therefore, that the climactic resolution in Guy Mannering hinges on the death of Merrilies. Yet Scott’s effort to suppress and contain the disruptive presence of Merrilies by disposing of her is not entirely successful. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of the afterlife of Meg Merrilies in theatrical productions, Keats’s famous poem, and her influence on the aged Sarah Siddons.

The Conclusion reviews Plath’s engagement with the supernatural within the political, cultural, and literary context of post-war America and Britain. It summarises the nuances of concepts like witch, witchcraft, black and white magic, and their relation to gender and power. The Conclusion also emphasises the importance of examining Plath’s manuscripts and additional archival materials, which her demonstrate continuous interest in magical themes around gender power dynamics. Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural concludes that the re-examination of Plath’s works with an approach of the supernatural is timely and significant not only for Plath scholarship but for literary studies. It positions the comprehensive analysis of this book in the historical reckoning with witch trials and reflects on the lasting relationship between the language of magic and poetry.

The Introduction situates Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural within the current scholarship of Plath studies along with the recent new publications of Plath’s works. It introduces the purpose of the book and reviews the previous, often misguided approaches to Plath’s relationship to the supernatural and the occult. The Introduction emphasises the new approach of bringing together literary studies with the framework of the early modern witch trials and historical studies on witchcraft to interrogate the full extent Plath engaged with the political, cultural, and literary heritages of the European and American witch-hunts. Across seven chapters, this book reviews the way in which gender, magic, and power intersect in her poetry and prose contextualised within the post-war era.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

This chapter examines the historical development of the Spanish Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico), investigating its processes, targets, and ambitions. It surveys the first inquisition prosecutions there, which were carried out not by inquisitors per se, but by mendicant friars as well as the episcopal court. After King Philip II authorized an inquisition tribunal for New Spain in 1569, inquisitors quickly began to operate in Mexico City. At the same time, Spanish inquisitors in New Spain had no investigative or coercive powers over New Spain’s Indigenous populations, whose religious beliefs and practices were monitored by the episcopal legal jurisdiction. New Spain’s inquisitors prosecuted far fewer serious heretics than their counterparts in Spain itself, though the tribunal was interested in Portuguese conversos, especially when it was encountering financial difficulties.

The inquisition tribunal in Lima, Peru, has received comparatively less scholarly attention because its sources are scattered and remain relatively incomplete. This chapter examines the inquisitorial jurisdiction in terms both of geography and of the Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who attracted the inquisitors’ attention. It covers the lives and careers of prominent inquisitors, and addresses the variety of alleged offenders. It identifies different phases of tribunal activity, provides examples of the offenses that Lima’s inquisitors targeted in each phase, and delves into trials of faith for the heresy of crypto-judaism, the so-called “Great Complicity” of 1635–39. Inquisitors in Lima were interested in the same range of offenses as their counterparts in Spain. The tribunal worried about the presence of hidden Jews, Muslims, and Protestants in the Peruvian Viceroyalty and the effects they might have. They also were preoccupied with minor offenders such as visionaries, sorcerers, and bigamists.

Chapter 6 considers how the legal system dealt with theft, damage to property, personal insult, and violence, and how citizens obtained redress. The law of obligations is important since, for example, theft, the most common action that modern law defines under criminal law, was under Roman law a delict, prosecuted through action taken by the injured party on the basis of an obligation on the wrongdoer to make restitution. Therefore, the Romans distinguished between a delict and a crimen, which was punished by public penalty after formal trial. In the legal definition of unlawful killing, injury, outrage, and loss, concepts of negligence, deceit, and causation emerged in assessing responsibility. We then consider the definition of theft and robbery, the remedies available for plaintiffs, and the main criminal offences tried in the public jury courts. Those who did not conform with the religious establishment and social conventions, for example, magicians, Jews, and Christians, faced pursuit and prosecution.

The notion that curse tablets were used to cause harm whereas amulets were used to provide protection is a misleading oversimplification. Curse tablets have often been removed from the category of religion and consigned to the illusive one of magic. However, the existence of those tablets designated as prayers for justice illustrates that the desires which drove curse tablet creation were varied. To ascertain to what extent the use of curse tablets and amulets fitted in with polis religion, different aspects of them are examined, such as the ritualistic nature of their creation, their use of formulaic inscriptions and evidence for their use, or lack of use, of reciprocity. Examples of amulets and curse tablets are presented from the fourth century BCE through to the second century CE and from a large geographical scope. Examples from across the Greek world illustrate a paradoxical unity and sense of religious community amongst those who engaged in these practices. The incredibly personal nature of the inscriptions on curse tablets and the wearing of amulets provides an insight into Greek religious practice at an individual level.

Ancient views of magic were extremely diverse. In order to examine the issue of personal religion this chapter sets out to bracket the over-familiar negative discourse, which sought to represent magic as the opposite of (true) religion, and shift the discussion to include the perspectives of actual practitioners. Of the many different types of historical practitioner, three are selected for longer discussion: ‘wise folk’, specifically ‘rootcutters’ (rhizotomists); the Hellenistic ‘Magian’ tradition ascribed to pseudonymous authors such as Persian Zoroaster; and the so-called magical papyri from Roman Egypt. Rhizotomists used ritualisation as their primary means of empowerment, with a clear sense of the divine origin of the potency of herbs. Drawing on this tradition, the Magian writers linked it to the materials made available through translation of the knowledge stored in Babylonian and Egyptian temples to create a sense of the inexhaustible powers of divine Nature. Ritual expertise and theological knowledge are most evidently in play in the hundreds of procedures included in the surviving Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, exemplified here by the case of PGM IV 1496–1595.

This chapter is about the flourishing of a variety of distinctively postmodern ‘alternative realisms’ in the early Twenty-First Century, which are predicated on the ontological questions Brian McHale famously identified as a recurrent element of postmodernism. It shows how a range of novels – especially examples by David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Maggie Gee and Kazuo Ishiguro – are charged with a postmodern sense that literature evokes a ‘plurality of worlds’, as dream-logic and mundane reality collide in comic and destabilizing ways, and the boundary between the mundane and the magical is rendered porous. These novels, the chapter contends, might productively be considered apocalyptic, a form of narrative in which veiled, hidden or buried stories are revealed. As a result, twenty-first-century alternative realism redoubles the impetus of late twentieth-century postmodernism to convey a distrust of authoritarianism by preserving a sense of the sublime.

The Introduction presents the central ideas of the book. The major theme is acculturation. Dominant forms of ethnohistory discuss Native peoples of the Americas and the ways they responded to Spanish political domination. This book reverses the approach by analyzing how non-Native women adapted to their predominantly Native Mesoamerican cultural environment. Witchcraft and sorcery and their suppression by inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts represent the particular entry point for understanding these processes of acculturation. Non-Native women in this book were Spanish, Canarian, North African, Basque, and Senegambian. They adopted Mesoamerican rituals, such as corn hurling (tlapohualiztli), Nahua healing and midwifery, and peyote consumption, and spoke Nahuatl in everyday lives. Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish, such as metate, tianguis, and patle, symbolize the processes of acculturation. This book studies the earliest forms of non-Native women adapting Mesoamerican sorcery, magic, and healing, limited to the period 1521–71.

This chapter analyzes magic and attitudes toward magic in early modern Spain. The time period for review is primarily the sixteenth century. The chapter summarizes basic Spanish terminology such as hechicería, bruja, and sortilegio. There are two elements to this discussion. First, the chapter examines the cases of famous witch crazes in the Basque region of Spain in 1525 and 1609–11 in Zugarramurdi. There is a lot of popular imagery concerning witch crazes, seen for example in Goya’s painting of the Aquelarre, or the witches’ sabbath. In reality, Catholic courts and the Inquisition were skeptical of the existence of witches. The chapter analyzes some specific anti-sorcery writings such as treatises by Martín de Arlés and Martín de Castañega. It also looks at inquisitor manuals such as those by Alfonso de Castro, Nicolau Eimeric, and Diego de Simancas. Furthermore, this chapter examines the role of royal law in Siete Partidas in establishing jurisdiction over witchcraft. The chapter also includes some observations about uniquely Spanish types of magic and folk healing, such as the belief in the evil eye, herbal remedies, and Saint John’s Night.

This chapter provides examples of how attention plays an important role in our everyday lives. Real-world examples are used to explain the motivations behind cutting-edge attention research being done in neuroscience labs. These include distracted driving, airport security screening, and radar and sonar monitoring. Vigilance and the ability to sustain attention are introduced as critical mental processes for success at certain jobs. The influence of attention on reading and memory, and the choice of whether to study in silence or with music are discussed. Lapses of attention are described, including how these can have a range of consequences, from the brief embarrassment of not knowing what someone just said to us to the potentially fatal effect of not attending to our driving. Theories of joint attention and social-gaze orienting are introduced to explain how our attention is linked to those around us. The purposeful misdirection of a person’s attention, at multiple levels, by skilled magicians is linked to core processes of attention and perception. This chapter also introduces the idea of training attention, including the effects of playing video games, and explains how proper training protocols require detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of attention.