Bailey, Michael

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Email Address
mdbailey@iastate.edu
Birth Date
Title
Distinguished Professor
Academic or Administrative Unit
Organizational Unit
Department of History
The Department of History seeks to provide students with a knowledge of historical themes and events, an understanding of past cultures and social organizations, and also knowledge of how the past pertains to the present.

History
The Department of History was formed in 1969 from the division of the Department of History, Government, and Philosophy.

Organizational Unit
World Languages and Cultures
The Department of World Languages and Cultures seeks to provide an understanding of other cultures through their languages, providing both linguistic proficiency and cultural literacy. Majors in French, German, and Spanish are offered, and other coursework is offered in Arabic, Chinese, Classical Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and Russian
About
I am a historian of the European Middle Ages, having received my PhD from Northwestern University in 1998. My research focuses on late medieval religious history, particularly the history of magic, witchcraft, and superstition, as well as heresy and religious reform. I also study the history of magic globally from antiquity to the present day. I have written, edited, or co-edited eight books, including most recently Magic: The Basics (2018) and Origins of the Witches' Sabbath (2021), and I have published more than twenty-five articles in academic journals and edited volumes. I also serve as an associate editor of the interdisciplinary journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, which I helped to found in 2006. In 2023 I was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and in 2024 I was appointed a Distinguished Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State. I regularly teach courses covering the whole of the European Middle Ages and beyond, including: Hist 2010, Introduction to Western Civilization I; Hist 2120, Medieval Kingdoms, which surveys the all of medieval history in one class; and a series of upper-level classes (Hist 4050, 4060, and 4070), which cover the early, high, and late Middle Ages respectively, and which, while still presenting broad coverage, allow students to engage in more focused ways with historical sources, themes, and scholarship. Beyond Europe, I also teach Hist 3310, Islamic World to 1800.
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Publications

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Paganism

2023-06-18 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

Paganism was a term used by Christians to describe various systems of non-Christian beliefs or practices from late antiquity through the medieval period and beyond. Essentially, all people who were not Christians or Jews were considered pagan. In practice, during the medieval period the term most often applied to Northern European German and Slavic peoples who had not yet converted to Christianity, but it could be used in many other contexts as well. Scholarly understanding of medieval paganism is complicated by the fact that most societies described as pagan left few if any written records, and Christian accounts of paganism are always polemical.

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Review of: Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe. By Mark A. Waddell. New Approaches to the History of Science and Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. x+220. $89.99 (cloth); $25.99 (paper); $21.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

2023 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

This short, engagingly written book appears in a series offering “New Approaches to the History of Science and Medicine.” As such, it is more a survey of early modern science that draws connections to religion and magic than it is an entirely balanced exploration of all three areas. The undergraduate audience that it presumably targets may indeed be surprised by the notion that magic has frequently overlapped with science in European history, or that religion and science were not always diametrical opposites. Otherwise, the volume offers relatively traditional perspectives on the topics that it covers, both magical and scientific.

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Review of: The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England , by Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright

2022-05-19 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

The historical study of magic and the occult in Western Europe is often split in two. One main approach, drawing on the fact that practices deemed to be magical have frequently been condemned by both secular and religious authorities, approaches magic as an illicit activity and studies the records of that condemnation. Such an approach is centered above all on the study of witchcraft and witch trials, even though the sort of practices alleged in cases of witchcraft are often in no way representative of the sort of magical rites people in premodern Europe actually employed in the course of their daily lives. As Klaassen and Wright note in their introduction to this volume, “those accused of witchcraft were commonly not magic practitioners at all” (1-2). Scholarship of this sort lends itself to the study of perceptions about magic, as well as to the social contexts in which magic was practiced or at least out of which accusations arose. The other line of study, becoming more common since the 1990s, focuses on magical texts. Here scholarship tends to operate in the style of intellectual history. It can tell us much about how practitioners (at least relatively elite practitioners who could write) understood their own practices, and about the influences that shaped them. Because of their illicit nature, however, such texts were almost always anonymous and generally reveal little about the historical contexts in which they arose.

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Article

Muslims in Medieval Inquisitorial Thought: Nicolau Eymeric and His Contexts

2021 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

This article analyzes the scant treatment of Muslims in medieval inquisitorial thought, focusing mainly on the late fourteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor Nicolau Eymeric's Directorium inquisitorum (1376). It argues for four contexts in which to understand his engagement with Islam. First, as background, is a longstanding Christian (although not inquisitorial) tradition categorizing Islam as a heresy, with which he did not substantially engage. Second is his own goal to extend inquisitorial authority to new subjects, in which he drew on previous inquisitorial thought about Jews. The third involves conflicts between church officials and the Crown of Aragon about jurisdiction over non-Christian subjects. The fourth centers on the supposition that he did not view Muslims living within Christendom as an especially covert or insidious threat requiring special investigation to uncover, which speaks to how he and other inquisitors viewed their role and the nature of the threats they aimed to counter. In broad terms, this article contributes to our understanding of one important way in which medieval Christianity engaged with other religions. It also provides a basis for understanding later developments in early modern Europe.

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Review of: Eugene Smelyansky, Heresy and Citizenship: Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities

2023-06-12 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

This book examines a series of anti-heresy persecutions in several Germanspeaking cities between 1390 and 1404, which were "unprecedented in central Europe in their intensity and geographic range" (1). The heresy in question was Waldensianism, which, as Smelansky points out, developed in the late twelfth century in an urban milieu (Lyons), but by this time had become a more rural phenomenon. Large numbers of rural Waldensians also suffered persecution in these years, notably in the Mark of Brandenburg and upper Austria, but Smelansky concentrates on cities. He sets the persecutions thoroughly within the context of civic politics, both among lay urban elites and between city governments and the bishops or other powerful religious institutions that also dominated German towns. The cities [End Page 789] examined are Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and (taken together) Bern and Fribourg (Switzerland). For some of these places, Waldensian persecutions have already been studied in great detail; for example, in Strasbourg by Georg Modestin and in Fribourg by Kathrin Utz Tremp. Smelyansky draws diligently on this scholarship, and on that of other Waldensian persecutions across central Europe, but he also establishes his own focus.

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Review of: Chantal Ammann-Doubliez. Procès de sorcellerie dans la vallée de Conches (1466–1467) et chasses aux sorceirs et sorcières en Valais au XVe siècle. Cahiers de Vallesia 32. Sion: Archives de l’Etat du Valais, 2020. Pp. 690.

2023 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

The western Alps have long been associated with the emergence of the concept of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft—the dark set of imaginings that blended belief in malefic magic with stereotypes of satanic gatherings, the murder and often cannibalism of innocent babies, and other horrors. Several early demonological tracts and treatises that codified this idea were written in this region in the early fifteenth century, drawing on, and in turn feeding back into, some of the first major witch hunts in European history. For the last few decades, much of the scholarship on these processes has focused on what is now the Swiss canton of Vaud, centered on Lausanne, where an important inquisitorial court was based.

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Review of: Peter Gorzolla, Magie, Politik und Religion: Theologische Magiekritik als politisches Handeln im Frankreich Karls VI. (Geschichte 166). Münster: LIT, 2019. Paper. Pp. vi, 499; black-and-white figures. €49.90. ISBN: 978-3-6431-4279-5.

2022 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

Ever since the pioneering work of Edward Peters, among others, into the magical courtly “demimonde” in the later Middle Ages, the eruption of magical accusations in and around the court of Charles VI (r. 1380-1422) has often served as a springboard into the early witch trials and demonological literature of the fifteenth century. Things were getting bad, the narrative goes, then they got much worse. Given the gravitational pull that the immense historiography built up around witchcraft exerts, fully contextualized analysis of its precursors can suffer from this connection. In his introduction, for example, Peter Gorzolla argues that the trails of four different women in Paris around 1390 were not proto-witch trials but rather must be understood in terms of these women’s connections to the royal court.

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Book chapter

De la política al cuidado pastoral: Demonologia y supersticion en Francia y en Alemania durante el Medioevo tardio

2023 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

Muchos de los episodios más tempranos de caza de brujas en Europa tuvieron lugar en la frontera entre Francia y Alemania, en una zona que se extendía desde lo que actualmente es Suiza occidental, el noroeste de Italia y el Delfinado francés, hasta Artois, Flandes y los Países Bajos meridionales.1 Se trata de territorios que con frecuencia estaban divididos políticamente pero también en términos culturales y lingüísticos, circunstancia que pudo haber sido un factor de promoción de los procesos por brujería en dichas regiones. También en dicha área irrumpieron muchos de los textos demonológicos más tempranos relacionados con la brujería, desde el relevante corpus de fuentes generadas en torno a los Alpes occidentales en la década de 1430, hasta los textos asociados con la vauderie de Arras –por entonces bajo control del Duque de Borgoña– entre 1459 y 1460.

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Review of: Eva Pocs, Bea Vidacs, eds. Faith, Doubt and Knowledge in Religious Thinking. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2020. Pp. 409.

2023 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

This collection contains one of the most attention-grabbing chapter titles that I have read in a long time: “I was Angry with the Angels for F*cking Me Over.” Beyond mere shock value, the subtitle of that piece helps to give some sense of the range of religions and religious movements covered in the volume as a whole: “Angel-Cult and UFO-Religion in Hungary.” Indeed, the volume ends with several chapters addressing present-day new religious movements, including those involving beliefs about angels and extraterrestrials (and angels as extraterrestrials), a fundamentalist Christian prophetic movement, and Hare Krishnas in Hungary. Yet the volume begins, chronologically, in Western antiquity, with chapters focusing on Greek philosophy and different miracle narratives in both pagan and early Christian texts. In between are chapters addressing, among other things, medieval stigmata, exorcism during the Enlightenment, Sami cultural practices in modern Scandinavia, and the interactions of different religious groups in war-torn northern Iraq.

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Review of: Jan Machielsen, ed. The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil. Routledge Studies in the History of Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic. London: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 324. $155.00 (cloth).

2021-06-29 , Bailey, Michael , Department of History

Scholars tend to approach early modern European witchcraft first and foremost through trial records. For many decades, this has led to a strong social/cultural slant to the study of witchcraft. The intellectual history behind the witch hunts and the work of early modern demonologists can sometimes seem a bit passé. Of course, cutting-edge studies have been done in this area. The Science of Demons takes as its inspiration two profoundly important examples of such work: Sydney Anglo’s The Damned Art (1977) and Stuart Clark’s magisterial Thinking with Demons (1997). That those books appeared twenty years apart, however, and that the younger of them is now itself more than twenty years old, is telling.