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       #Post#: 28--------------------------------------------------
       The Visions of Isobel Gowdie by Emma Wilby
       By: Alfred Raeburne Date: October 27, 2014, 11:25 am
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  HTML http://www.amazon.com/The-Visions-Isobel-Gowdie-Seventeenth-Century/dp/1845191803/ref=pd_sim_b_64?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KVAGK0YEGXBDKDZQEA4
       "The witchcraft confessions given by Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn,
       1662, are widely celebrated as the most extraordinary on record
       in Britain and this book provides the first full-length
       examination of the confessions and the life and character of the
       woman behind them. Their descriptive power, vivid imagery, and
       contentious subject matter have attracted considerable interest
       on both academic and popular levels. The author’s discovery of
       the original trial records, deemed lost for nearly 200 years,
       provides a starting point for an interdisciplinary endeavor to
       separate Isobel’s voice from that of her interrogators, identify
       the beliefs and experiences that informed her testimony, and
       analyze why her confessions differ so markedly from those of
       other witchcraft suspects from the period. In the course of
       these enquiries, the author develops wider hypotheses relevant
       to the study of early modern witchcraft as a whole, with recent
       research into Amazonian “dark” shamanism, false-memory
       generation, and mutual-dream experience, along with literature
       on marriage-covenant mysticism and protection-charm traditions,
       all being brought to the investigation of early modern
       witch-records for the first time. Author Emma Wilby concludes
       that close analysis of Isobel’s confessions supports the
       still-controversial hypothesis that in 17th-century Scotland, as
       in other parts of Europe in this period, popular spirituality
       was shaped through a deep interaction between church teachings
       and shamanistic traditions of pre-Christian origin. She also
       extends this thesis beyond its normal association with
       beneficent magic and overtly folkloric themes to speculate that
       some of Europe’s more malevolent and demonological
       witch-narratives may also have emerged out of visionary rites
       underpinned by cogent shamanistic rationales."~Amazon Review
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