出版社 : Yale University Press (2023年 4月 25日) 出版日期 : 2023年 4月 25日 语言 : 英语 精装 : 616页 ISBN-10 : 0300244053 ISBN-13 : 978-0300244052 尺寸 : 16.38 x 3.94 x 24.13 cm National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction ? Finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History ? Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction Named a best book of 2023 by New Yorker, Esquire, Barnes Noble A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 ? A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 ? An NPR “Book We Love” for 2023 “Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book’s sweeping synthesis, standard

An award-winning historian’s examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significance 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 devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals. Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newton’s scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundaries between the natural and supernat