Shriek before lift-off
Malcolm Gaskill: Could nuns fly?, 9 May 2024
They Flew: A History of the Impossible
by Carlos Eire.
Yale, 492 pp., £30, November 2023,978 0 300 25980 3 Show More
by Carlos Eire.
Yale, 492 pp., £30, November 2023,
Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
by Anthony Grafton.
Allen Lane, 289 pp., £30, January,978 1 84614 363 2 Show More
by Anthony Grafton.
Allen Lane, 289 pp., £30, January,
“... misleading impression that it was easy to accuse someone of witchcraft on flimsy pretexts, which may have been true during severe panics but usually was not. Persistent doubt throughout the early modern period explains both the relative rarity of prosecutions – around 100,000 across an entire continent and three centuries is not that many – and the high ... ”