In early modern England, the practice of ritual or ceremonial magic - the attempted communication with angels and demons - both reinforced and subverted existing concepts of gender.
Elagabalus was one of the most notorious of Rome's 'bad emperors': a sexually-depraved and eccentric hedonist who in his short and riotous reign made unprecedented changes to Roman state religion and defied all taboos.
'The fables of witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man, that few or none can indure with patience the hand and correction of God.
On a foggy November day in 1589, when one of the five daughters of Robert and Elizabeth Throckmorton suddenly fell sick, no one in the small English village of Warboys could have predicted the terrifying events that would follow.
Whether they focus on Thor's powerful hammer, the mysterious valkyries, the palatial home of the gods - Asgard - or ravenous wolves and fierce elemental giants, the Norse myths are packed with vivid incident.
Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting.
Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from SoulCycle to Mark Twain American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two, is the second in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama.
Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them.
Explores the embodiment of religion in the Cahokia land and how places create, make meaningful, and transform practices and beliefs Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St.
The result of a perfect storm of factors that culminated in a great moral catastrophe, the Salem witch trials of 1692 took a breathtaking toll on the young English colony of Massachusetts.
In the first book to consider the study of world religion and world literature in concert, Zhange Ni proposes a new reading strategy that she calls "e;pagan criticism,"e; which she applies not only to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary texts that engage the global resurgence of religion but also to the very concepts of religion and the secular.
The result of a perfect storm of factors that culminated in a great moral catastrophe, the Salem witch trials of 1692 took a breathtaking toll on the young English colony of Massachusetts.
In 1631, at the epicenter of the worst excesses of the European witch-hunts, Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit priest, published the Cautio Criminalis, a book speaking out against the trials that were sending thousands of innocent people to gruesome deaths.
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons.
A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo.
Rapley analyses witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finds many of the same elements repeated in more recent miscarriages of justice - from the Dreyfus case for treason in late nineteenth-century France, to the persecution of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama for the gang rape of two white girls in the 1930s, to the Guildford and Maguire terrorist prosecutions in Britain in the 1970s.
Rapley analyses witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finds many of the same elements repeated in more recent miscarriages of justice - from the Dreyfus case for treason in late nineteenth-century France, to the persecution of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama for the gang rape of two white girls in the 1930s, to the Guildford and Maguire terrorist prosecutions in Britain in the 1970s.
Kathleen Wall traces the myth through fifteen works of English, American, and Canadian literature, providing a fresh, feminist reading of these narratives.
This unique book is the only fully interdisciplinary and comprehensive study of the Australian desert and its pivotal role in the cultural history of Australia.
The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980's, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage.
Following Jesus to Burning Man: Recovering the Church's Vocation places the author, a Pentecostal/evangelical minister, in a thoroughly pagan context in the Nevada desert where he discovered the presence of God in a way that transformed his understanding of ministry in the twenty-first century context.
African religion is ancestor worship; that is, funeral preparations, burial of the dead with ceremony and pomp, belief in eternal existence of souls of the dead as ancestors, periodic remembrance of ancestors, and belief that they influence the affairs of their living descendants.
