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Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England: 12 New Edition
Author(s): Peter Dendle (Author)
- Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
- Publication Date: 22 Jan. 2015
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 322 pages
- ISBN-10: 1580441696
- ISBN-13: 9781580441698
Book Description
Anglo-Saxon England was a society governed by the competing discourses of illness, spirituality, power, and community. The concepts of demon possession and exorcism, introduced by Christian missionaries, provided a potential outlet for expressing the psychological, biological, and sociopolitical dysfunctions of a society that was at the center of multiple conflicting cultural dimensions.Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England is a reexamination of the available sources describing the possessed and a study of the currently recognized medical and psychiatric conditions that may be relevant to and resemble medieval possession.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is a richly learned and highly readable book. It is seeded throughout with a wealth of comparative material from Carolingian, Merovingian, Late Antique, and contemporary sources. […] Peter Dendle is to be congratulated on an admirably detailed study that complements the more literary and conceptual bent of his earlier book, Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature (2001).” Alice Jorgensen, Trinity College, Dublin; review in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology
About the Author
Peter Dendle is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto
