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Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds Paperback – December 4, 2004

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Darren Oldridge (Author)
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Darren Oldridge (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 11 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (December 4, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0415404924
  • ISBN-13: 978-0415404921
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,914 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating look at beliefs of the past
By L O'connor on April 9, 2005
Format: Hardcover
This book explains clearly and convincingly why the people of the medieval and early modern periods believed in things that seem to us biazarre and irrational. If you want to understand why people believed in witchcraft,werewolves, the persecution of heretics, the trying of animals for crimes against humans etc, this book explains it all. It clearly shows that the beliefs of past times were no more irrational than our own, given the way people knew the world to be. If you read this book you can understand why, for instance,in 1545 it seemed reasonable to the townsfolk of Saint-Julien-de-Maurienne in France to sue a plague of flies for destroying a vinyard.

More disconcertingly, the book also shows that our own modern beliefs are often no more rational than the beliefs of the past, and that for instance the same reasons that led people to accept the truth of confessions of witchcraft, led people in modern times to accept the reality of Satanic abuse. If you pride yourself on being more rational than folk in past times, your opinion may be shaken by this book. The book is written in a lucid, witty style that makes it pleasantly easy to read for the unscholarly (like me), and should be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history and why people believe what they do.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
An Eye-Opening Scholarly Work
By George Poirier on March 23, 2005
Format: Hardcover
This book puts into perspective the way we modern humans think about the world. In pre-modern times, educated people thought very seriously about such things that today most of us would consider absurd, e.g.., werewolves, witches, walking dead, etc. Also, in those olden times, people thought rather differently about God, angels, saints, demons, demonic possessions and the devil than most of us do today. Intelligent, educated thinkers of pre-modern times had a way of looking at things that may seem strange to us yet were perfectly in line with their times. The logical arguments that they used to address their contemporary problems had common sense structure - only their starting assumptions were vastly different from those we would use today. One can only guess at what humans living, say, a thousand years from now will think about our own ways of viewing the world. Through discussing specific cases and quoting contemporary writers, the author of this excellent book does a commendable job of illustrating the above. This book is hard to put down and I heartily recommend it.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
A smart, fun book with an excellent (if surprising) point
By RDG Stout on May 12, 2005
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Here we have a fun, fascinating, and insightful book which starts out strong -- but which REALLY hits its stride and makes its point in the final two chapters. From witches and werewolves to demons and walking corpses, this is an illuminating romp into the medieval worldview.

So what exactly is Oldridge's point in writing this book? Simply this: The people of the medieval and Renaissance worlds were not ignorant, superstitious, irrational, bestial, or stupid. They had the same brains and intelligence that we have. Their actions and beliefs, far from being irrational, were perfectly sensible given their worldview. Furthermore, we are no better: The modern West has plenty of irrational beliefs and habits of our own!

Thought-provoking, honest, and exceedingly readable, Oldridge has produced a work which educates, entertains, and gently rattles about our assumptions of our own superiority. I highly recommend this book.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Are we smarter than people who lived 500 years ago?
By Jan Dierckx on May 20, 2005
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Only one good piece of advice; don't buy this book if you expect a collection of horror stories. It's a history of human intellectual behaviour and a study of the different ways we look at our surroundings, from the late 15th century until the 1700's.
In 1438 a pig was hanged for murder in Burgundy. The French judge Henri Boguet described an apple possessed by demons in 1602. A few years later, Italian Jesuits tried to calculate the physical dimensions of hell.

These and many other ideas from the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem absurd today, but they made good sense to people at the time. This book explains how beliefs that are strange to us were once widely accepted. It sets out the intellectual world of men and women in the distant past, and shows how their assumptions and expectations allowed them to believe things that we cannot: that heresy and witchcraft posed a threat to society, that demons carried people through the air and that the dead occasionally walked away from their graves.

None of these ideas were mad. They simply reflected the belief system of the medieval and Renaissance world. In fact an understanding of the rational basis of beliefs that now seem absurd suggests that modern ideas may one day seem equally ridiculous.

The reason why I like this book so much is because it compels you to study your own way of thinking but you won't be able to do that without a sense of humor
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
An intriguing worldview of the past is analyzed
By Midwest Book Review on October 10, 2005
Format: Hardcover
In 1438 a pig was hanged for murder in Burgundy, an apple was judged possessed by demons in 1602, and werewolves and flying witches were part of the belief system of everyday man. Strange Histories: The Trial Of The Pig, The Walking Dead, And Motehr Matters Of Fact From The Medieval And Renaissance Worlds is packed with intriguing beliefs and accounts of Middle Ages ideas, explaining how and why these beliefs were widely accepted and showing how assumptions about witches and demons affected social and political systems and ideas of rational enforcement. An intriguing worldview of the past is analyzed.
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