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“... his hypothesis is widely applicable. It should, however, be of some relevance to those who, like Norman Cohn, are concerned with the dynamics of persecution. Cohn’s classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, posited a connection between millenarian thought and the persecuting impulse, and one of the ways in which ...”

“... Thanks to​ the work of Norman Cohn, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas and others, we have, over the past few years, acquired a lot of information about millenarianism as a social and historical force. The belief that the end is nigh, or that a new series of times is about to begin, is very ancient, but it is also modern ...”

“... social group can perceive itself as threatened by the people whom it exploits and persecutes. As Norman Cohn has written in his masterly study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Warrant for Genocide, ‘what these people see as the enemy is in fact the destructiveness and cruelty in their own psyches, externalised. And the greater the unconscious ...”

“... Confessions and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for ...”

“... such an emperor led to all sorts of extraordinary charismatic outbursts, familiar from the work of Norman Cohn. Fra Dolcino, one of the chiliasts Cohn mentions, figures prominently in Eco’s book. The story is supposed to be told by an old Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk, writing near the end of the 14th century. As a ...”

“... The ‘craze’ was a short one, coinciding with the late wave of the general European scare. Norman Cohn has established that the existence of a witch scare in the early 14th century is an invention of historians. Witchcraft, in theory and in suppression, was a growth at the end of the 14th century, died down in the early 16th century to return in ...”

“... or not induced by drugs), to which the authorities had given an unfavourable interpretation. As Norman Cohn showed in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), the perception of witches – like that of saints, visions and other cultures – was governed by ancient stereotypes. The history of stereotypes, and collective perceptions, is a rapidly growing subject ...”

“... The books may nowadays be mentioned with respect by such learned and adventurous historians as Norman Cohn; and if one wants to see where an educated 17th-century scholar or amateur looked for information about the history and theory of music, his Musurgia Universalis of 1650 is a good place to start. But Kircher’s career offers sad testimony to the ...”

“... In Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn described the medieval witch craze as a ‘supreme example of a massive killing of innocent people by a bureaucracy acting in accordance with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and small-town societies were rich in resentments, ancestral curses and fears of the unknown ...”

“... in cursing. The only thing all witches had in common was that ‘she ys deveelishe of her tonge.’Norman Cohn argued that the witch’s Sabbat was a projection of the witchhunters’ own minds, comparing it to the orgies of which the ancient Romans accused the Christians and the Christians, in their turn, accused dissident groups: meetings ‘at which ...”

“... Huizinga saw the Malleus maleficarum as the outcome of ‘medieval thought’ rather than – as Norman Cohn and others have shown – of conditions peculiar to the later 15th century and the two centuries that followed. Another example is medieval saints. For Huizinga they were ‘timeless’, whereas shifting models of sainthood are now a busy subject ...”

“... wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn (whose membership of the CP Historians Group has gone unrecorded) wished to clobber that culture, and to show the way in which millenial Ranting led on to totalitarianism. So the old bugaboo was dug up and dressed in modern jeans. What is silly ...”

“... glorious page in our history’. An enterprise of this kind needs a rationalisation, which is why Norman Cohn entitled his classic history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Warrant for Genocide. What about the perpetrators? Goldhagen makes the valid claim that there has been relatively little scholarly interest in them. True, there are studies of ...”

“... terrible to behold. The tale is told in the form of a biography of one of the minor players. Roy Cohn was a personification, but not a creator, of the rot that has spread through the élite of American life since World War Two. He was Jewish, son of a New York State Supeme Court judge, a mama’s boy (he lived with his mother until she died when he was ...”

“... one has its own multitudes of the faithful, armed and ready for great encounters still to come. Norman Cohn, the historian of millennial thought, traces the idea back to Zoroaster (Zarathustra), who added the idea of a happy ending to previous visions of disaster: ‘a glorious consummation of order over disorder, known as “the making ...”