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Richard Kieckhefer

Autor von Magie im Mittelalter

14+ Werke 1,193 Mitglieder 6 Rezensionen Lieblingsautor von 3 Lesern

Über den Autor

Richard Kieckhefer is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University and author of Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century, also published by Penn State University Press.

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Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (1998) — Mitwirkender — 138 Exemplare
A Razor for a Goat (1962) — Vorwort, einige Ausgaben60 Exemplare
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts (Oxford Handbooks) (2014) — Mitwirkender — 15 Exemplare

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Kieckhefer's Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany is only incidentally concerned with heresy or heretics; it is focused on the activity and social apparatus of repression. His reason for not calling it Inquisitors and Inquisition in Medieval Germany was doubtless twofold. On the one hand, he focuses here chiefly on heresy as the object of inquisitional proceedings, as opposed to witchcraft, blasphemy, or or other possible crimes. On the other hand, it is his thesis that while there were instances and episodes of inquisition in Medieval Germany, there was no Inquisition as a durable institution that could either support or constrain individual inquisitors. It is this lack that Kieckhefer foregrounds as the reason for the relative failures of medieval inquisitors to eliminate or control heresy and its spread in Germany. This explanation is counter to the longstanding prior assumption (credited chiefly to Henry Charles Lea's 1888 History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages) that inquisitors were hampered by local powers jealous of their prerogatives and jurisdictions.

In the absence of a durable institution of their own, inquisitors had two possible sources of authority: bishops or the pope. The former would necessarily be aligned with the diocesan clergy whom they supervised, and the latter typically appointed Dominicans. Still, cooperation between papal inquisitors and local bishops was the rule rather than the exception, according to Kieckhefer's account. The lack of institutional grounding made inquisitorial proceedings both less effectual and more prone to abuses than they would otherwise have been, and where there was genuine resistance of local authorities, it tended to arise from concern over the fairness and accuracy of the proceedings.

The book is organized chronologically, with different conspicuous heresies serving to characterize its periods: the rise of Waldensianism, the Free Spirit, beghards and beguines, the Waldensian "crisis" of the late fourteenth century, flagellants, and Hussites. Kieckhefer is careful to point out that his treatment of these heretics is far from comprehensive, being limited to the details bearing on his study of the inquisitors and their work, along with some general information for contextual purposes, and he refers the reader to other books for purposes of studying the heretical movements themselves. (Repression of Heresy is a scholarly work with a full apparatus, and the endnotes and bibliography are more than a third of the length of the body text.)

Although this book is now nearly forty years old, I suspect it has yet to be superseded with respect to its central focus. (For one with a somewhat wider geographic and conceptual scope, restricted to the earlier periods treated in Kiekhefer's study, see Moore's Formation of a Persecuting Society.) As Kieckhefer remarks at the outset, the study of medieval inquisition has traditionally drawn much of its impetus from "Protestant-Catholic polemics" which have been undermined by Christian ecumenism (ix). The relative lack of inquisitorial achievement in Germany means that it has not been an attractive object for study. The explanation proposed in this book, taking institutional development as its index, is one that might be applied to other historical problems. But in his closing, the author cautions that the relationship is unlikely to be a simple one, and that while too anemic an institution could lead to failure and abuse, overweening institutional development might do so as well, and the latter might be a more fitting consideration for our own time.
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paradoxosalpha | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 24, 2020 |
This is one of my favorite books on the subject.
 
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Tchipakkan | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 26, 2019 |
LA MAGIA EN LA EDAD MEDIA

Introducción: la magia como encrucijada.

Este libro tratará de la magia como una especie de punto de confluencia
donde convergen diferentes caminos de la cultura medieval. La magia es
en primer lugar, un punto de intersección entre la religión y la ciencia. La magia
diabólica invoca a los espíritus demoníacos y reposa en una red de creencias
y prácticas religiosas, mientras que la magia natural explota los poderes
“ocultos” y es, en esencia, una rama de la ciencia medieval. Pero, de hecho,
la magia diabólica y la magia natural no son siempre tan distintas como en
un principio pudiera parecer. Incluso cuando la magia es claramente no
demoníaca mezcla a veces elementos de la religión y de la ciencia: una cura
mágica, por ejemplo, puede incorporar los conocimientos herbolarios de la medicina
popular y al mismo tiempo frases procedentes de plegarias del ritual cristiano
En segundo lugar, la magia es un área donde la cultura popular se encuentra
con la cultura erudita. Las nociones populares de la magia fueron adoptadas
e interpretadas por «intelectuales»-término utilizado aquí para designar a quienes
tuvieron una formación filosófica o teológica-y sus ideas sobre la magia,
los demonios y otros temas afines fueron a su vez difundidas aquí y allá por
los predicadores. Una de las tareas más importantes de la historia cultural es
analizar estas vías de transmisión. En tercer lugar, la magia representa una
encrucijada particularmente interesante entre ficción y realidad. La literatura de
ficción de la Europa medieval refleja a veces la realidad de la vida de la época
y a veces la distorsiona; en ocasiones proporcionó vías de escape de la realidad y
a veces ofreció ideales para ser imitados. Cuando este tipo de literatura resaltó
los rasgos distintivos de hechiceros, hadas y otros profesionales de la magia,
quizá no los presentó con demasiado realismo. A pesar de ello, la magia que
describe la literatura medieval tenía similitudes con las prácticas mágicas rea-
les, similitudes dificiles de precisar pero interesantes de desentrañar.

En resumen, la magia es un cruce de caminos donde la religión converge
con la ciencia, las creencias populares se interseccionan con las de las clases
educadas, y las convenciones de la ficción se encuentran con las realidades de
la vida diaria. Si nos situamos en este cruce podremos seguir adelante por…
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FundacionRosacruz | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Jan 12, 2018 |
REPRESSION OF HERESY IN MEDIEVAL GERMANY

PREFACE

Much of the historical literature on the repression of medieval heresy
grew out of Protestant-Catholic polemics, and derived its relevance
from this polemical context. Historians and their readers were inter-
ested in knowing about the subject because of the light it purportedly
shed on Catholicism in general and on the position of Protestantism
vis-à-vis Catholicism. But in an ecumenical age there is less zeal
among Protestants for exposing the enormities of the whore of Babylon,
and few Catholics are eager to exert themselves in defense of the
medieval Church. Thus, the traditional reasons for interest in medieval
repression no longer inspire much enthusiasm. During the 1950s
the McCarthy hearings may have been partly responsible for a new
kind of interest in matters inquisitorial, but this approach, too, now
seems dated. And yet the general topic of repression has scarcely
become irrelevant in today's world. As Amnesty International ard
other organizations remind us repeatedly, principles of toleration are
by no means flourishing in contemporary society; indeed, in nations
throughout the world, forms of repression--intimidation, imprison
ment, torture, and execution-have become common which are far
more brutal and systematic than their medieval counterparts. The
problem of intolerance is perennial, though its forms may vary. It
would be hazardous to draw conclusions from one historical period
and apply them hastily to another. Medieval inquisitors, whose primary
goal was at least ostensibly the salvation of the heretic's soul,
operated quite differently from agents of twentieth-century police
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FundacionRosacruz | 1 weitere Rezension | Jan 2, 2018 |

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