The frontier of the Early Modern Burgundies? In this book, Edwards applies in reverse the American frontier concept in order to understand the local changes in family and community in a Burgundy torn in two after the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, residents of the eastern duchy and the western county of Burgundy were in a place and time of transition and transformation, a veritable frontier. While France and the Holy Roman Empire vied for political control of the region, residents struggled to define their social, cultural,...

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...