Fathers, Pastors and Kings


Book Description

Fathers, Pastors and Kings is a first-class research monograph on an important issue in the history of the Catholic Church, exploring the conceptions of episcopacy that shaped the identity of the bishops of France in the wake of the reforming Council of T.



















Huguenot Pedigrees


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The Papal Prince


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The Rise of Richelieu


Book Description

Presents a biography of Richelieu up to the point where he took ministerial office for the second time in 1624.




The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft


Book Description

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.