Stephen A. Smith and Alan Knight (Eds.). The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present. Past and Present, Vol. 199, Supplement 3. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2008. 350 pp. $23.00 (paper). ISBN-13: 9780199561377. Eric C. Schneider. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 259 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4116-7. Mary Roach. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. 288 pp. $24.95 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0393064643. Stephen Strack and Bill N. Kinder. Pioneers of Personality Science: Autobiographical Perspectives. New York: Springer, 2006. xvi + 431 pp. $62.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0826132055. Nancy D. Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden. The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008. 208 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0810972865
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 39 KB
- Volume
- 45
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This special supplement to the journal Past and Present includes a thorough Introduction by editor S. A. Smith and three groups of essays, twelve in all, based on papers presented at a conference in 2005. Three essays in the first section, "Superstition in a Non-Christian Context," focus on superstition in the writings of Theophrastus and Plutarch, the late Roman Republic and Principate, and Han China. "Superstition in Christendom" includes five essays examining superstition, witchcraft, and folklore in medieval Europe, seventeenth-century Germany, early modern Britain, and imperial Russia. The last section, "Superstition in the Modern World" (four essays), includes two essays on sorcery and witchcraft in Cameroon (one of these also focuses on South Africa), one on superstition in Mexico, and one on vampires in Puerto Rico. Together, the papers examine cultural views of superstition from classical Greece to the present and relationships between superstition and political and religious authority, as well as overlaps among superstitious, magical, and religious beliefs and practices.