I fell in love with history when I saw how it led to alternative ways of seeing the world – ways of understanding things that are now largely abandoned. I do not believe in “dangerous spirits.” But I know that people much smarter than me once took them for granted and thought carefully about their various activities. My work tries to recreate this lost intellectual landscape. In books like Strange Histories and The Devil: A Very Short Introduction, I have done my best to map out this landscape for general readers. This complements my academic role as Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Worcester.
I wrote...
Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds
By
Darren Oldridge
What is my book about?
Strange Histories is an exploration of some of the most extraordinary beliefs that existed in the late Middle Ages through to the end of the seventeenth century. Presenting serious accounts of the appearance of angels and demons, sea monsters, and dragons within European and North American history, this book moves away from "present-centred thinking" and instead places such events firmly within their social and cultural context. By doing so, it offers a new way of understanding the world in which dragons and witches were fact rather than fiction, and presents these riveting phenomena as part of an entirely rational thought process for the time in which they existed.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
By
Brian P. Levack
Why this book?
I read the first edition of this book and fell in love with the subject. Then I spent thirty years studying the history of dangerous spirits. As a subject that belongs as much to popular culture as scholarship, the history of witchcraft has inspired many excitable and unreliable books. Levack’s study is the antidote: a superbly lucid synthesis of the best research, written with style and an easy touch. This is the book to help you really understand the complex and deeply human tragedy of witch trials.
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The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England
By
Alec Ryrie
Why this book?
A neglected classic of popular history. This book taught me things about the history of magic that now seem so obvious and important that I wonder how I missed them before. Ryrie tells the story of the fraudulent magician Gregory Wisdom, whose deception of a Tudor nobleman led to allegations of attempted murder by witchcraft. More broadly, he reveals a world in which the widespread acceptance of occult phenomena made counterfeit magic alluringly credible, and charlatans co-existed with “genuine” practitioners of magic. I know of no other book that describes the twilight world of fake and real sorcery with such vividness and insight.
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The Haunting of Hill House
By
Shirley Jackson
Why this book?
I love the idea of ghosts and ghost stories but often find them disappointing. Few things in fiction genuinely scare me, though I like to imagine things that would. Shirley Jackson’s novel carries, for me, a rare and real chill. There is something unpleasantly compelling about this story of a friendless young woman seduced by the malevolent presence – a ghost? a kind of predatory spirit? – that inhabits Hill House. There are passages in this book that give me an almost existential shudder. We are all scared by different things, of course; but I hope that new visitors will find their own cold places in the rooms of Jackson’s watchful mansion.
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The Exorcist
By
William Peter Blatty
Why this book?
The Devil has always been a great character in fiction. Often, he appears in a comic or outlandish guise. Blatty’s novel treats him more seriously. A devout Christian, he originally wanted to tell a true story of demonic possession that would persuade sceptical readers of the existence of God; he eventually resorted to fiction but retained his evangelical purpose. (Here he echoed the demonologists of the late 1600s who defended the belief in witchcraft as a rampart against atheism.) Blatty’s Devil is darkly cunning: he exploits human weakness to undermine faith in anything worthwhile in life, and he conceals his own existence to hide the possibility of God. These theological concerns could have weighed the book down. But instead, they are woven naturally into a compelling work of literary horror.
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The Shining
By
Stephen King
Why this book?
I spend a lot of time thinking about demonic temptation, mainly in the context of Tudor and Stuart England. Stephen King’s novel is set in twentieth-century America and barely mentions the Devil, but it presents a view of evil spirits in the mind that was familiar in the 1600s. The spirit haunting The Overlook Hotel preys insidiously on the weaknesses of the winter caretaker, Jack Torrance, toying with his anxieties, his frustrated ambitions, and his struggle with alcohol – and occasionally dropping poison directly into his mind. The result is a slow-acting corrosion of his better self. Torrance’s descent into depravity is chilling because so much of the violence is already inside him, and whatever spirit pervades the hotel hooks into his failings like “the ghostly tempter” in the pre-modern world.
