Sacred and the Sinister

Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation.In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science.Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science.In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.

“This collection of essays brings together two areas that are still often looked at separately: the history of magic and the history of saints, mystics, and more everyday parishioners. As well as celebrating the work of Richard Kieckhefer, Collins’s volume showcases the original work being done by leading scholars in the field. It should stimulate new work on the relationship between holiness and unholiness in the Middle Ages.”—Catherine Rider, author of Magic and Religion in Medieval England, “This fascinating collection explores, as its dedicatee has done throughout his career, the fundamental ambivalence between ‘the holy and the unholy.’ Perfectly capturing Richard Kieckhefer’s eclectic interests, the book includes essays on topics ranging from saints and their hagiographers, to church buildings (and their embodiments of identities and meanings), to heresy, demons, and magic. Kieckhefer once quipped that his scholarship has a right hand and a left hand. Both sides are delightfully represented here.”—Laura Ackerman Smoller, author of The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, “Apart from the introduction, this volume contains ten contributions by Anglophone authors—discipuli, collegae, amici—which, as usual, prove to be of quite diverse subject matter and quality.”—Peter Dinzelbacher, Sehepunkte, “The collection of essays presented here represents a valuable contribution to recent and ongoing efforts to complicate assumptions about religion, science and magic as operating within distinct environments with distinct ideological underpinnings. This fascinating range of essays is suggestive of the multiplicity of environments and contexts in which the sacred and the sinister became sometimes disturbingly entangled.”—Jennifer Farrell, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

David J. Collins, S.J., is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University.