"This monumental work has now become... the indispensable tool of all folk narrative scholars." --Southern Folklore Quarterly "A work of this kind can never be quite complete, but in this work Stith Thompson has approached perfection." --Volkskunde "An invaluable aid to students and scholars... " --Reference & Research Book News Indiana University Press, with the generous support of the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, is pleased to announce the republication of this folklore classic, in honor of the centenary of the American Folklore Society.
"This monumental work has now become... the indispensable tool of all folk narrative scholars." --Southern Folklore Quarterly "A work of this kind can never be quite complete, but in this work Stith Thompson has approached perfection." --Volkskunde "An invaluable aid to students and scholars... " --Reference & Research Book News Indiana University Press, with the generous support of the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, is pleased to announce the republication of this folklore classic, in honor of the centenary of the American Folklore Society.
"If, as Chesterton claimed, the devil's greatest triumph was convincing the modern world that he does not exist, Jeffrey Burton Russell means to rob him of his victory. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages is both a scholarly assessment of the development of diabology in the Middle Ages and an impassioned plea to the 20th century to recognize and acknowledge the existence of real, objective evil. The third in a series of works tracing the history of the devil from his Judeo-Christian roots, it represents a formidable undertaking: the devil's history is integrally related to the problem of evil, which is in turn at the heart of Western religious thought. Each of the volumes on Satan comprises, in essence, a judicious and able tour of Christian theology from the villain's point of view... Book jacket.
As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. Particularly, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars, and other conflicts are vivid testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of noncombatants. Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages. Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentalite. This work expands our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that colored and shaped it.
