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.
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2022
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The University of Chicago Press
Abstract
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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This accepted manuscript is published as Bailey, M.D., Peter Gorzolla, Magie, Politik und Religion: Theologische Magiekritik als politisches Handeln im Frankreich Karls VI., reviewed in Speculum, 2022, 97(1);188-89. https://doi.org/10.1086/717709. Posted with permission.