The Sacred and the Sinister

“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

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