Gerhild Scholz Williams Knihy

In this intriguing volume, Gerhild Scholz Williams explores the roles of magic and demonology in France and Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She guides the reader through a variety of texts--many of them popular and influential in their day--to illuminate how magic came to shape people's perceptions of a changing world. This comprehensive study looks at magic as an intellectual and cultural language, as an attempt to explain the world, and as a means to control and confine women, whose propensity for satanic dalliance threatened not just their own souls but the health of the larger society.". . . Williams has done an exemplary job of analyzing the intersection of the discourses of magic (as related to women and witchcraft), discovery, and religious diversity/dissidence to explain how the confluence of these discourses eventually 'determined who occupied society's center and who was forced to move to, or remain at, its margins.' . . . Gerhild Scholz Williams is no dilettante grazing in the greener pastures of other disciplines. She has been laboring assiduously in these neighboring fields for years now, and it is breathtaking to see how all of her disparate projects have come together so elegantly articulated in this one volume." --Susan L. Cocalis, German Studies ReviewGerhild Scholz Williams is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Washington University, St. Louis.

Gerhild Scholz Williams here introduces the modern reader to the writings of Johannes Praetorius, an educated and productive German polymath of the seventeenth century. In his work we see the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies.

Die Erzählstruktur und die narrative Spannung der drei beliebtesten frühneuzeitlichen Prosaromane, der Mélusine des Jean d'Arras, des Eulenspiegelbuchs und des Faustbuchs mit seinen Fortsetzungen, sind auf auffällige Weise von Pakten und Verträgen bestimmt. Jede Vertragshandlung beruht auf den Denkstrukturen und dem Rechtsempfinden, denen sich die Gemeinschaft verpflichtet fühlt. Sie artikuliert so grundsätzliche rechtliche Ordnungsstrukturen und demarkiert in den hier behandelten Texten gleichzeitig den Berührungsraum, in dem menschliche und übermenschliche Wesen aufeinandertreffen. Die Romane konfrontieren die Leser mit Vertragsschlüssen und Vertragsbrüchen in vielen Variationen. Mélusine, Faust und Eulenspiegels Gegenspieler versuchen aber allesamt, ihr Lebensziel durch Verträge zu erreichen. Dem daraus entstehenden existentiellen narrativen Drama haben die Autoren ihre Studie gewidmet.

Early modern Germany saw the dissemination of vast quantities of information at unprecedented speed. Popular knowledge, scientific inquiry, and scholarship influenced the political order, poetic expression, public opinion, and mechanisms of social control. This collection presents twelve essays by distinguished scholars regarding the transcendent nature of the Divine, the natural world, the body, sexuality, intellectual property, aesthetics, demons, and witches.The contributors are Thomas Cramer, Walter Haug, C. Stephen Jaeger, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jan-Dirk Maller, James A. Parente, Jr., Stephan K. Schindler, Gerhard F. Strasser, Lynne Tatlock, Elaine Tennant, Horst Wenzel, and Gerhild Scholz Williams.