How am I just now hearing about this?! (squeals)
For y’all who don’t know me from back in the day, I’m a medievalist by training and wrote my doctoral dissertation on portrayals of the soul-body relationship in medieval English religious literature. This involved dipping into all kinds of things – poetry, herbals, sermons, penitentials, medical manuals – lots of old manuscripts in multiple dead languages. And it required gobs of original translation because much of it had never seen the light of day in modern English.
So I’m here to assert that medieval Christianity was often way freakin’ weirder than you probably think; many of the ideas we’ve absorbed about what it was like are incredibly off-base for many times and places of the era; and sometimes our operative categories for understanding and talking about this stuff don’t work *at all* and lead to mischaracterization and mistranslation. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Getting access to these old manuscripts can be quite difficult, and reading them is frequently brutal.
So *I cannot wait to read this.* This is me as a little kid, and I’m about to walk into the candy store.
“Red Cover” – Lulu Link – Amazon Link
“Brown Cover” – Lulu Link – Amazon Link
After a year of labor, the new book’s finally finished! If you’ve ever wondered what scholars talk about when speaking of the “magical components” in medieval exorcisms, then wonder no more!
The new book contains several selections from Medieval exorcism manuscripts, with the complete rituals being given (in Manuals that contained multiple rituals, I gave a sampling).
For those unfamiliar with the Manuals, the primary source-texts of Catholic exorcism, the exorcisms of elves, dryads, and other spirits from folk beliefs, this book can be your introduction.
For those of you already familiar with the Manuals, this may be the first time substantial sections have been put into English, especially the Teilrituale or CLM 10085 – possibly one of the original “Solomonic-Catholic exorcism manuals” – and a full translation for Conjuration of Mirage from the…
View original post 340 more words