They flew : a history of the impossible /
Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era, tales of levitation, bilocation and witchcraft, even as skepticism, atheism and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture increasingly d...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New Haven, Connecticut :
Yale University Press,
[2023].
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Table of Contents:
- Introduction: huge claims, vague proof
- Part one. Aloft
- 1. Hovering, flying, and all that: a brief history of levitation
- 2. Saint Teresa of Avila, reluctant aethrobat
- 3. Saint Joseph of Cupertino, shrieking aerial ecstatic
- 4. Making sense of the flying friar
- Part two. Here. . .and here too
- 5. Transvection, teleportation, and all that: a brief history of bilocation
- 6. María de Ágreda, avatar of the impossible
- 7. The trouble with María
- Part three. Malevolent
- 8. Tricksters of the impossible
- 9. Protestants, deviltry, and the impossible
- 10. The devil himself
- Epilogue: vague logic, leaps of faith
- Appendix 1: Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century bilocators in America and Europe
- Appendix 2: The emergence of the "lady in blue" legend: a chronology.