Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century

Couverture
Penn State Press, 1998 - 384 pages
Preserved in the Bavarian State Library in Munich is a manuscript that few scholars have noticed and that no one in modern times has treated with the seriousness it deserves. Forbidden Rites consists of an edition of this medieval Latin text with a full commentary, including detailed analysis of the text and its contents, discussion of the historical context, translation of representative sections of the text, and comparison with other necromantic texts of the late Middle Ages.
Like many medieval texts for the use of magicians, it is a miscellany rather than a systematic treatise. It is exceptional, however, in the scope and variety of its contents - prayers and conjurations, rituals of sympathetic magic, procedures involving astral magic, a catalogue of spirits, lengthy ceremonies for consecrating a book of magic, and other materials.
 

Table des matières

Introduction MAGICAL BOOKS AND MAGICAL RITES
1
The Munich Handbook of Necromancy Clm 849
22
Banquets Horses and Castles ILLUSIONIST EXPERIMENTS
42
Love Favour and Madness PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS
69
Learning Hidden and Future Things DIVINATORY EXPERIMENTS
96
Formulas for Commanding Spirits CONJURATIONS AND EXORCISMS
126
Demons and Daimons THE SPIRITS CONJURED
154
THE MAGIC OF CIRCLES AND SPHERES
170
CONCLUSION
186
EDITION OF THE NECROMANCERS HANDBOOK IN Clm 849 FOLS 3r108v
190
PLATES
349
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
377
INDEX
377
Droits d'auteur

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À propos de l'auteur (1998)

Richard Kieckhefer is Professor of Religion and History at Northwestern University and an acknowledged expert on medieval magic and witchcraft. His publications include European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300&–1500 (1976), Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (1979), Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (1984), and Magic in the Middle Ages (1990).

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