Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia, this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of course, witchcraft. These traditional religious belief and practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded within notarial and trial records are accounts that reveal the integration of folkloric and theological elements in early modern spirituality. Drawing from extensive archival research, the contributors argue for the integration of such beliefs into our understanding of late medieval and early modern Europe.
- Introduction; Expanding the Analysis of Traditional Belief - Kathryn A. Edwards
- Dangerous Spirits; Shapeshifting, Apparitions, and Fantasy in Lorraine Witchcraft Trials - Robin Briggs
- Living With the Dead; Ghosts in Early Modern Bavaria - David Lederer
- Reformed or Recycled?; Possession and Exorcism in the Sacramental Life of Early Modern France - Sarah Ferber
- Revisiting El Encubierto; Navigating between Visions of Heaven and Hell on Earth - Sara T. Nalle
- Woms and the Jews; Jews, Magic, and Community in 17th-Century Worms - Dean Phillip Bell
- Asmodea; A Nun-Witch in Eighteenth18th-Century Tuscany - Anne Jacobson Schutte
- When Witches Became False; Séducteurs an Crédules Confront the Paris Police at the Beginning of the 18th-Century - Ulrike Krampl
- God Killed Saul; Heinrich Bullinger and Jacob Ruef on the Power of the Devil - Bruce Gordon
- Such an Impure, Cruel and Savage Beast; Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works - Nicole Jacques-Léfevre
- Charcot, Freud and the Demons - H. C. Erik Midelfort