Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Flirting Between Heaven and Hell

David J. Collins, S.J.

Part 1: Traditional Holiness

1. Extreme Sanctity at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century: The Metamorphosis of Body and Community in the Vitae of Christina Mirabilis and Francis of Assisi

Claire Fanger

2. The Sources and Significance of Stefania’s New Statement on Margherita Colonna’s Perfection of the Virtues

Sean L. Field

Part 2: Conflicts over the Holy

3. Materializing Conflict: How Parish Communities Remember

Their Medieval Pasts

Kristi Woodward Bain

4. Rape and Rapture: Violence, Ambiguity, and Raptus in Medieval Thought

Elizabeth Casteen

5. Syneisaktism : Sacred Partnership and Sinister Scandal

Maeve B. Callan

Part 3: Identifying and Grappling with the Unholy

6. Was Magic a Religious Movement?

Michael D. Bailey

7. The Jurisdiction of Medieval Inquisitors over Jews and Muslims: Nicholas Eymeric’s Contra infideles demones invocantes

Katelyn Mesler

8. Magicking Madness: Secret Workings and Public Narratives of Disordered Minds in Late Medieval Germany

Anne M. Koenig

Part 4: Magic and the Cosmos

9. A Late Medieval Demonic Invasion of the Heavens

Sophie Page

10. Scholastics, Stars, and Magi: Albert the Great on Matthew 2

David J. Collins, S.J.

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

About the Author

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

Reviews

“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

“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