Letters on Demonology and WitchcraftLetters on Demonology and Witchcraft
Title rated 0 out of 5 stars, based on 0 ratings(0 ratings)
eBook, 2013
Current format, eBook, 2013, , Available.eBook, 2013
Current format, eBook, 2013, , Available. Offered in 0 more formatsIn ill health following a stroke, Sir Walter Scott wrote Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft at the behest of his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, who worked for a publishing firm. The book proved popular and Scott was paid six hundred pounds, which he desperately needed. (Despite his success as a novelist, Scott was almost ruined when the Ballantyne publishing firm, where he was a partner, went bankrupt in 1826.) Letters was written when educated society believed itself in enlightened times due to advances in modern science. Letters, however, revealed that all social classes still held beliefs in ghosts, witches, warlocks, fairies, elves, diabolism, the occult, and even werewolves. Sourcing from prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology along with contemporary accounts from England, Europe, and North America (Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi, for one), Scott's discourses on the psychological, religious, physical, and preternatural explanations for these beliefs are essential reading for acolytes of the dark and macabre; the letters dealing with witch hunts, trials (Letters Eight and Nine), and torture are morbidly compelling. Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past, as his skepticism of one of the "new" sciences (skullology, as he calls it) is made clear in a private letter to a friend. Thus, Letters is both a personal and intellectual examination of conflicting belief systems, when popular science began to challenge superstition in earnest.
Title availability
Find this title on
Partner libraries through LINKinAbout
Contributors
Details
Publication
- [United States] : Start Publishing LLC : Made available through hoopla, 2013.
Opinion
More from the community
Community lists featuring this title
There are no community lists featuring this title
Community contributions
Community quotations are the opinions of contributing users. These quotations do not represent the opinions of Skokie Public Library.
There are no quotations from this title
Community quotations are the opinions of contributing users. These quotations do not represent the opinions of Skokie Public Library.
There are no quotations from this title
From the community