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,
“... and hindsight, would find questionable. Pre-modern reasoning was more deductive than inductive: man was the measure of all things, geocentricity sidelined the sun and unseen forces were morally reflexive, harnessed to turbulent inner lives. These forces were personified as angels and demons and reified in the shape of heinous sinners, including heretics and ... ”