Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe - University of Reading

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[see also listings for popular culture and popular religion above]
Seminar 10 : Superstition
Summary
In 1586, Pope Sixtus V in the bull Coeli et Terra drew attention to unwelcome
practices within and outside the Church. There are certain men, he complained ‗either
mad or meddlesome or impious and irreligious who take such pains to attain
knowledge of the future and other hidden things that they offend many times against
the law of God‘. So what were these ‗certain men‘ up to? The list provided by Sixtus
seems fairly comprehensive – there were those who were guilty of conjuring, of
necromancy, those who engaged in magic and magical incantations, more still who
made images and spectres miraculously appear by fraudulent means, some – mainly
women he thought – who ‗gave up to superstitious practices‘, and yet more who ‗by
means of incantations and various superstitions‘ attempted to foretell the future.
Sixtus‘ complaint made reference on more than one occasion to the prevalence of
what he deemed to be ‗superstition‘ and ‗superstitious‘ practices, a catch-all term for
unsuitable actions and misplaced trust. In fact, superstition was one of the most used
- and perhaps even overused words in the vocabulary of religious debate – both
Catholic and Protestant. Because of the ease with which accusations of superstition
slipped into the language of Reformation debate, one of the most fought over terms in
the history of early modern popular culture, especially religious culture, is also one of
the most difficult to define. What, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, was
‗superstition‘ – where were you likely to find it, what would you do with it when you
saw it, and how would you know if you were supporting it. Was there even a
comprehensive or watertight contemporary understanding of the meaning of the word
– or was it simply a stock term of abuse, and a term of abuse which has all too often
found its way into the historiography of the period.