Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. By Michael D. Bailey. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. xv + 296 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe . By Michael D. Bailey . Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2013. xv + 296 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is a well-planned and clearly-written book on an important subject: the ways in which theologians and other intellectuals defined in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Michael Bailey's main title may be confusing and impenetrable, but his subtitle, pointing to the boundaries of superstition, is apt and precise.The book's introduction, setting out the relational nature of the term and outlining its changing meanings, will be valuable for students, and remains thought-provoking for more advanced scholars. Briefly, the argument is that superstition was defined in terms of what it was not; in this period it was mostly not-religion, but occasionally it could be not-science, as it usually has been in times. Related terms are unpacked with care: magic, science, religion, and as well as more specialized terms like witchcraft, divination, and necromancy.Bailey's sources are mainly theological texts, and he has ranged widely in his search for them. His eleven-page appendix of texts is a feat of scholarship, discussing location, authorship, and dating of each text, and citing important printed editions, either contemporary, near contemporary, or modern. Many texts remain in manuscript. Most are from France and Germany; Bailey largely excludes the region south of the Alps for unexplained reasons (17). Perhaps as a result, there is little in the book about the Renaissance; Bailey's own concerns are very much medieval, and he worries (perhaps overmuch) about the shadow cast by Johan Huizinga.The book's structure is simple enough. Chapter 1 deals with the millennium or so before 1300, in largely narrative mode, and Chapters 2 and 3 continue the narrative, in much more detail, to about 1400. There is then a bifurcation. Chapters 4 and 5 both cover the fifteenth century, but Chapter 4 is largely thematic, discussing a large number of writings worrying about popular superstition. Chapter 5 discusses the century's witchcraft writings, culminating in the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486. These demonological writings have been studied from numerous angles, but Bailey finds a fresh line of approach, focusing on what they said about how to counteract witchcraft. Was it legitimate to counter demonic hailstorms by casting hailstones into a fire in the name of the Holy Trinity? The Malleus argued that it was (218).The concluding chapter is Towards Disenchantment? This looks forward to times. Bailey reviews the debate on and disenchantment, outlines changes in the concept of since 1500, and seeks (perhaps over-ambitiously) to argue that his late medieval writers have something distinct to contribute to the debate. These different purposes are not always signposted clearly, particularly when it comes to rationality, and Bailey's problematizing of modernity may lead unwary students into simplistic generalizations. There is a passage (248-249) that could lead them to conclude that late-medieval theologians were as modern as we are because they used rational argument-though Bailey himself, of course, says nothing as crude as that. …