Overview

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 supernatural that marked the transition to modernity. Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges listeners to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural's relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores have resonance and lessons for our time.

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Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, winner of the National Book Award, and of War Against the Idols; A Very Brief History of Eternity; and Reformations. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut. Emmanuel Chumaceiro is a first generation Cuban-American and classically trained opera singer who has lent his rich baritone voice to stage productions throughout the Tri-state area, in addition to audiobooks and voice-over projects. He appeared in the US premiere of New Guidelines for Peaceful Times at the historic Cherry Lane Theatre, and the world opera premieres of Ulysses at Symphony Space and Gulliver's Travels at American Opera Project.

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