Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in History
Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers
Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers
Jeremy Withers
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the forest is often depicted as an ideal place for ambushing one's enemy. Such persistent attacks lead many warriors in the poem to encounter densely wooded areas with trepidation and even at times with explicit violence towards these places. However, through its use of several arresting locus amoenus passages, the Morte demonstrates alternative ways for soldiers to experience natural landscapes. Rather than suggest that forests are inherently malicious and forbidding places (as many medieval romances have done), the poem suggests that when cleared of an immediate threat of ambush, natural landscapes can be restorative and …
The Feminization Of Magic And The Emerging Idea Of The Female Witch In The Late Middle Ages, Michael D. Bailey
The Feminization Of Magic And The Emerging Idea Of The Female Witch In The Late Middle Ages, Michael D. Bailey
Michael D. Bailey
The figure of the witch first appeared in Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages. That is, while all the separate components of witchcraft—harmful sorcery or maleficium, diabolism, heretical cultic activity, and elements drawn from common folklore, such as ideas of nocturnal flight—were widely believed to exist throughout much of the medieval period, only in the fifteenth century did these components merge into the single concept of satanic witchcraft. Also in the fifteenth century an aspect of witchcraft emerged that, to many modern minds at least, is perhaps the most striking and compelling element of the stereotype—the pronounced association …
From Sorcery To Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions Of Magic In The Later Middle Ages, Michael D. Bailey
From Sorcery To Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions Of Magic In The Later Middle Ages, Michael D. Bailey
Michael D. Bailey
By the time the fires of the great European witch-hunts burned out in the seventeenth century, untold thousands had been sent to their deaths upon conviction of this terrible crime. Exact figures are understandably difficult to come by, but the best available estimates set the number of the dead near sixty thousand, and this just for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch craze reached its peak in western Europe.