That’s America

Stephen Greenblatt

  • ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin
    California, 366 pp, £19.95, April 1987, ISBN 0 520 05937 9

The 15th-century classic of paranoid witch-hunting, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, provides a convenient gloss on the word ‘glamour’. Witches, the Dominican inquisitors tell us, can rob a man of his penis or at least make him think that he has been robbed. The victim wakes up in the morning, looks down and sees nothing there – or rather he sees, where his penis should be, what is called a ‘glamour’.

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