Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The availability of paper a medium far less costly than parchment made books more readily accessible than they had previously been and allowed for more abundant supply of reading matter to feed this demand even before the invention of printing with movable type. And the emergence of silent reading habits made reading a more private activity. Historians have attended to the impact of these developments on medieval heresy on churchmen’s fear that literacy contributed to the diffusion of heretical views and on the efforts at censorship that ensued. But less work has been done on the dissemination of magical texts which in some ways represented an even more sinister threat to orthodox culture and on attempts to control these texts. A book of magic which deliberately and expressly invited contact with demons presented all the hazards of reading in their deepest and most pressing form. ??? Beginning around the early fourteenth century possession and use of magical writings becomes a recurrent theme in the records of prosecution. When Bernard D?licieux was accused in 1319 of having used necromancy against the pope he was cleared of that charge but nevertheless condemned to prison for merely possessing a book of necromancy.3 Fear of necromancy and of necromantic writings was becoming an obsession at the time especially at the court of Pope John XXII who in the previous year had commissioned the bishop of Frejus and others to investigate a group of clerics and laymen charged (SP)