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"From the 15th through the beginning of the 18th century, many intellectuals expounded and defended views of the world and of human behavior to which witches were central. This volume presents a magnificent attempt to understand this demonological thinking and the intellectual activity of which it was a part."--Choice
"A short review cannot do justice to the richness or the subtlety of this volume. One of the most striking things about it is Clark's willingness to treat the subject with proper seriousness....The book...ought to be in the hands of as many readers as possible."--Sixteenth Century Journal
"Nothing in [Clark's] earlier writings would have led one to expect that he was meditating a work so powerful in conception and so massive in scale as he has now produced. His Thinking with Demons, which runs to over eight hundred large, closely printed, and heavily annotated pages, suddenly places him at the forefront of cultural history...For anyone interested in what we can
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This is a work of fundamental importance for our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe. Stuart Clark offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft beliefs of European intellectuals based on their publications in the field of demonology, and shows how these beliefs fitted rationally with many other views current in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Professor Clark is the first to explore the appeal of demonology to early modern intellectuals by looking at the books they published on the subject during this period. After examining the linguistic foundations of their writings, the author shows how the writers' ideas about witchcraft (and about magic) complemented their other intellectual commitments--in particular, their conceptions of nature, history, religion, and politics. The result is much more than a history of demonology. It is a survey of wider intellectual and ideological purposes, and underlines just how far the nature of rationality is dependent on its historical context.
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To make any kind of sense of the witchcraft beliefs of the past we need to begin with language. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
To make any kind of sense of the witchcraft beliefs of the past we need to begin with language. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I purchased this title primarily because it was written by the professor who's course I was taking at university. It absolutely made the fascinating history of witchcraft more accessible. However, being written by a post-modernist historian, some of the book's concepts can be difficult to grasp if the reader doesn't have a prior background in the subject; definately not bedtime reading. Altogether though, an interesting and worthwhile read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4 reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
A Must Read for Anyone Interested in the Early Modern Period
29 Dec 2000
Format:Paperback
Stuart Clark explains the thinking that produced the panic about witches in the seventeenth century and why the panic occurred when it did. He argues that witches should be understood as an expression of demonology, that is, thinking about demons. Traditional thinking divided the world between God and the devil, an opposition that explained everything in science, history, religion, and politics. These four categories organize the book. In each of them, Clark discusses how oppositional thinking accounted for how things worked, how things happened, how things really were, and how political relationships functioned. The book is exhaustively researched, citing authorities in all the major early modern European languages and cultures, and at the same time responding to recent scholarship about witches and language. The latter is important because of the binary thinking that Clark identifies at the heart of demonology. Few historians are as familiar both with traditional sources and with postmodern thinking about historical thinking. This is a fascinating and rewarding book. I read it straight through.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
A Comprehensive Examination of Witchcraft
26 Nov 2001
Format:Paperback
When discussing the impact of women in European society, witchcraft inevitably enters the forefront of study. Many authors have discussed the crimes and punishments of witches, but Stuart Clark's Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe breaks away from the traditional format. Rather than focus on witchcraft itself, Clark writes about the idea of witchcraft; he concludes that the concept of witchcraft was an integral component in the general intellectual life of early modern Europe, woven into the scholarly debates about the key issues of the era. According to Clark, the emphasis was on demonology, which was a "composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity and the nature of political authority" (viii). To encompass this broad nature of demonology, Clark divides the book into five separate yet overlapping sections - Language, Science, History, Religion and Politics - each of which expresses a relatively simple argument. In `Language,' Clark discusses the antithetical nature of rhetoric and discussion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this permitted the discussion of witchcraft as the natural malevolent balance to proper behavior. The section titled `Science' argues that demonology was part of the advancement on science, rather than an obstacle or adversary to it. Magic, both good and evil, was assumed to be part of the natural world, and subject to the scientific investigations of the time. `History' details how the people were easily convinced of the activities of the devil and his minions through the increasing emphasis on the apocalyptic vision that the world was in the Last Days. `Religion,' which focused mainly on the writings of the clergy, essentially demonstrated that the religious powers of Europe believed that witchcraft was a sin against the Lord, and involved illicit dealings with the devil. Finally, `Politics' presents that view that the power of the king was based upon his inability to engage in witchcraft. Essentially, since a monarch was conferred power through divine right - meaning the ruler was empowered by the Lord - he was inviolable and therefore immune to the effects of witchcraft.
Thinking with Demons continues the examination of women and their relationship to criminal behavior that was introduced in Ulinka Rublack's The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. The most fascinating aspects of this book dealt with the importance of duality in early modern Europe, particularly in regards to the masquerade. Such dualism, and the perception that it was natural and important to society, is a fascinating concept to consider. Such a system of duality, in which everything is "distributed between a column of positive (or superior) terms and categories and a column of their negative (or inferior) opposites" (38) would seem to be an important tool in explaining the gender-based hierarchies that evolved in society.
Thinking with Demons continues the examination of women and their relationship to criminal behavior that was introduced in Ulinka Rublack's The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. The most fascinating aspects of this book dealt with the importance of duality in early modern Europe, particularly in regards to the masquerade. Such dualism, and the perception that it was natural and important to society, is a fascinating concept to consider. Such a system of duality, in which everything is "distributed between a column of positive (or superior) terms and categories and a column of their negative (or inferior) opposites" (38) would seem to be an important tool in explaining the gender-based hierarchies that evolved in society.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A Comprehensive Work
26 Nov 2001
Format:Paperback
When discussing the impact of women in European society, witchcraft inevitably enters the forefront of study. Many authors have discussed the crimes and punishments of witches, but Stuart Clark's Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe breaks away from the traditional format. Rather than focus on witchcraft itself, Clark writes about the idea of witchcraft; he concludes that the concept of witchcraft was an integral component in the general intellectual life of early modern Europe, woven into the scholarly debates about the key issues of the era. According to Clark, the emphasis was on demonology, which was a "composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity and the nature of political authority" (viii). To encompass this broad nature of demonology, Clark divides the book into five separate yet overlapping sections - Language, Science, History, Religion and Politics - each of which expresses a relatively simple argument. In `Language,' Clark discusses the antithetical nature of rhetoric and discussion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this permitted the discussion of witchcraft as the natural malevolent balance to proper behavior. The section titled `Science' argues that demonology was part of the advancement on science, rather than an obstacle or adversary to it. Magic, both good and evil, was assumed to be part of the natural world, and subject to the scientific investigations of the time. `History' details how the people were easily convinced of the activities of the devil and his minions through the increasing emphasis on the apocalyptic vision that the world was in the Last Days. `Religion,' which focused mainly on the writings of the clergy, essentially demonstrated that the religious powers of Europe believed that witchcraft was a sin against the Lord, and involved illicit dealings with the devil. Finally, `Politics' presents that view that the power of the king was based upon his inability to engage in witchcraft. Essentially, since a monarch was conferred power through divine right - meaning the ruler was empowered by the Lord - he was inviolable and therefore immune to the effects of witchcraft.
Thinking with Demons continues with the examination of women and their relationship to criminal behavior, as was introduced in The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany by Ulinka Rublack. The most fascinating aspects of this book dealt with the importance of duality in early modern Europe, particularly in regards to the masquerade. Such dualism, and the perception that it was natural and important to society, is a fascinating concept to consider. Such a system of duality, in which everything is "distributed between a column of positive (or superior) terms and categories and a column of their negative (or inferior) opposites" (38) would seem to be an important tool in explaining the gender-based hierarchies that evolved in society.
Thinking with Demons continues with the examination of women and their relationship to criminal behavior, as was introduced in The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany by Ulinka Rublack. The most fascinating aspects of this book dealt with the importance of duality in early modern Europe, particularly in regards to the masquerade. Such dualism, and the perception that it was natural and important to society, is a fascinating concept to consider. Such a system of duality, in which everything is "distributed between a column of positive (or superior) terms and categories and a column of their negative (or inferior) opposites" (38) would seem to be an important tool in explaining the gender-based hierarchies that evolved in society.
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