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Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
Keith Thomas · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Devils of Loudun
Aldous Huxley · 374 pages
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still
The Black Arts : A Concise History of Witchcraft, Demonology, Astrology, and Other Mystical Practices Throughout the Ages
Richard Cavendish · 373 pages
The Black Arts is a fascinating and wonderfully readable exploration of the practice, theory, and underlying rationale of magic and occultism in all its branches, including witchcraft, spells, numerology, astrology, alchemy, kabbalah, tarot, charms, and summoning and control of spirits.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries
Carlo Ginzburg · 216 pages
Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
Marvin Harris · 276 pages
This book challenges those who argue that we can change the world by changing the way people think. The author shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions. It is by isolating and identifying these conditions that we will be able to understand and cope with some of our own apparently senseless life styles. In a devastat
Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
Kristin Kobes Du Mez · 352 pages
The Malleus Maleficarum
Heinrich Kramer, Jakob Sprenger · 278 pages
When God Was a Woman
Merlin Stone · 265 pages
Here, archaeologically documented is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Known by many names, she reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East. How did the change in women's roles come about? By documenting the wholesale rewriting of myth and religious dogmans, Stone details an ancient conspiracy that laid the foundation for one of culture's greatest shams--the legend of Adam and fallen Eve.
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton · 501 pages
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
Leila Ahmed · 304 pages
Explores the historical roots of the debate about women in Islamic societies by tracing the developments in Islamic discourses on women and gender up to the present. The book describes the gender systems in place in the Middle East both before and after the rise of Islam.
The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
Karen Armstrong · 442 pages
"In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong shows us how and why fundamentalist groups came into existence and what they yearn to accomplish.". "We see the West in the sixteenth century beginning to create an entirely new kind of civilization, which brought in its wake change in every aspect of life - often painful and violent, even if liberating. Armstrong argues that one of the things that changed
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap
A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837
Paul E. Johnson · 232 pages
The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries
Rodney Stark · 246 pages
The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark
How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women
Zoe Venditozzi · 320 pages
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler · 261 pages
"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan · 336 pages
Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee gathering followers to establish the "Kingdom of God." He was tortured and executed as a state criminal. Within decades, his followers would call him God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer · 399 pages
Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they receive
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Cornelius Agrippa · 938 pages
The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America
Don Lattin · 256 pages
Lattin examines the lives and times of four men--Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Andrew Weil, and Huston Smith--whose paths crossed in the 1960s at Harvard, and who consequently launched the mind, body, spirit movement.
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
Charles Freeman · 470 pages
How the early Christian Church bent the intellectual climate of the Mediterranean world from one of active and questioning inquiry to an encouragement of the subordination of the mind to authority and acceptance of incomprehensibility as the will of God.
God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson · 320 pages
A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon; of the Gunpowder Plot; the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen; Arcadian landscapes; murderous, toxic slums; and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than it had ever been, and the entire culture was
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam
Bernard Lewis · 176 pages
Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty
John M. Barry · 472 pages