![]() The bed-rock Christian belief in spirits, both angelic and demonic, was undermined by fuller knowledge of Aristotle's works from the twelfth century onwards. While he sees 1400 as a pivotal date marking the point when significant numbers of educated Christians began to believe that human beings, especially women, interacted with demons in intensely physical ways - the most pronounced of which was through sexual intercourse - he argues that this belief was itself the end product of a long period of cumulative doubt that began in the twelfth century. Stephens takes a Braudelian "long duree" approach to witchcraft. It was in itself a theodicy that let God off the hook of seeming injustice. Witchcraft theory, to use Stephens apt phrase, was a kind of "theological damage control" (366). Neither irrational nor unscientific, witchcraft theorists deployed all the resources available from natural philosophy and theology to vindicate the goodness of God and the truth of the bible. Stephens contends that witchcraft theorists were neither credulous fools nor prurient misogynists, but tormented skeptics trying to resolve the conflicts in Christian doctrine about the benevolence of God, the existence of spirits and souls, and the efficacy of the sacraments. This is certainly true of Walter Stephens new book, which is a compelling work of scholarship elucidating what should have been obvious but somehow wasn't: namely, that European and American witchcraft theories were the logical product of Christian doubt. In 1968 Erik Midelfort protested that "more pure bunk" had been written about witchcraft than about any other field in history."] But in the last thirty years a reverse Gresham's law has taken effect: good scholarship has edged out the bad.
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