Provides various avenues for the researcher seeking to penetrate popular thought. The topics of this book cover old myths and world views, concepts of witchcraft and the Devil stretching back to the Middle Ages, and the values and collective emotions of Fi

Covering spiritual responses and survival strategies of medieval man when faced with natural disasters, this book asks what the medieval man's means were to deal with natural disasters, phenomena he could not scientifically understand. How did he try to prevent them? What were his feelings and actions during the situation? How did he manage to carry on with his life afterwards? Based on original sources, the book crosses boundaries between different fields of learning and traditionally accepted time periods of history. Although it is essentially a book on medieval man, it stretches far beyond...

Lying on the border between eastern and western Christendom, Orthodox Karelia preserved its unique religious culture into the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was described and recorded by Finnish and Karelian folklore collectors. This colorful array of rituals and beliefs involving nature spirits, saints, the dead, and pilgrimage to monasteries represented a unique fusion of official Church ritual and doctrine and pre-Christian ethnic folk belief. The book explores topics such as beliefs in supernatural forces, folk models of illness, holy icons, the role of the ritual specialist and healer,...