Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland

ISBN-13: 9780199587902 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 320 str.

Michael Ostling

Opis

Outside the imagination, witches don't exist. But in Poland and in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions,Ostling also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babiesuncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self-imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft Ostling explores the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in thetransubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Recenzje

makes for fascinating reading ... His framing of the wider question of what constitutes Christianity as an approach to reading witchcraft trials turns our attention to the margin between culture and self. His multidisciplinary approach (using comparative ethnology, folklore, and anthropology of religion) seeks to prove the very piety of the Polish Catholic peasant women accused of consorting with the devil through the motifs of diabolic copulation, host desecration, and invocation.

O autorze

Michael Ostling grew up in northern California. He fell in love with Poland while teaching English in that country during a break from university. He did his graduate work at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, and currently teaches witchcraft, Christianity, mythology and related subjects at Central Michigan University.