Lyndal Roper

Bio: Lyndal Roper is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Witch & German. The author has an hindex of 17, co-authored 42 publications receiving 960 citations. Previous affiliations of Lyndal Roper include Balliol College & King's College London.

Oedipus and the Devil : witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe

Abstract: This bold and imaginative book marks out a different route towards understanding the body, and its relationship to culture and subjectivity. Amongst other subjects, Lyndal Roper deals with the nature of masculinity and feminity.

The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg

Abstract: The domestication of the Reformation the politics of sin prostitution and moral order weddings and the control of marriage discipline and marital disharmony the reformation of convents the Holy Family.

Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

Abstract: A powerful account of witches, crones, and the societies that make them From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches--of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops--and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond. Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families, and tribulations. She also explores the psychology of witch-hunting, explaining why it was mostly older women that were the victims of witch crazes, why they confessed to crimes, and how the depiction of witches in art and literature has influenced the characterization of elderly women in our own culture.

Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany

Abstract: In January 1669, Anna Ebeler found herself accused of murdering the woman for whom she had worked as a lying-in-maid. The means were a bowl of soup. Instead of restoring the young mother's strength, the soup, made of malmsey and brandy in place of rhine wine, had increased her fever. The mother became delirious but, as the watchers at her deathbed claimed, she was of sound mind when she blamed the lying in maid for her death. As word spread, other women came forward stating that Ebeler had poisoned their young children too. The child of one had lost its baby flesh and its whole little body had become pitifully thin and dried out. Another's child had been unable to suckle from its mother, even though it was greedy for milk and able to suck vigorously from other women: shortly after, it died in agony. In a third house, an infant had died after its body had suddenly become covered in hot, poisonous pustules and blisters which broke open. The baby's seven-year old brother suffered from aches and pains caused by sorcery and saw strange visions, his mother suffered from headaches, and the whole household started to notice strange growths on their bodies. And a fourth woman found her infant covered with red splotches and blisters, her baby's skin drying out until it could be peeled off like a shirt. The child died most piteously, and its mother's menstruation ceased. All had employed Ebeler as their lying-in-maid. Anna Ebeler was interrogated six times and confessed at

Society and Culture in Early Modern France

Abstract: taking as his central theme the problem of the declining hold of the church on late nineteenth-century Europe. The reasons for this recession are multiple, as is obvious, and they include the new technology, German materialism, a cheap press, the organization of the working man, together with the impact of Marx, evolutionary science, scientific history and politics. \"Secularization\" is the term selected by the author to describe this phenomenon, and it denotes \"a process, a fundamental change in attitudes and ways of life\". As is to be expected, this is a brilliant work of scholarship, which deals lucidly with an enormous and complex topic; it represents intellectual history at its best, with ideas and suggestions leaping from almost every page. The author traces the many strands which make up the pattern, one of them being the outstanding polemic of science versus religion (pp. 161-188), and the revolution incited by Darwin. This technique renders the book episodic in nature, but this is inevitable and does not detract from its overall worth. For the historian of science and of medicine of the nineteenth century Professor Chadwick's book will be essential reading, for it helps to provide the\"external\" background to the \"internals\" minutiae of his research if he is studying technical advances. For the student of the social aspects of Victorian science or medicine a close acquaintance with this book will be even more mandatory. They explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition amongst the mostly illiterate peasants and artisans of sixteenth-century France, in a series of case studies linked historically. A great deal of literature and source material providing data on them has been surveyed, and they first deal with the social, vocational and sexual context of the Reformation, in so doing revealing the consequences for urban women and the new attitudes to poverty which, for example, were common in Catholic or Protestant in Lyons. Other essays consider the political and social uses made by festive occasions, and analyse the meaning of symbols in cultural play, the festive reversal of sex roles, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The last two discuss the interaction between literate and oral culture, the impact of printing on the lower orders. This leads to a survey of the collecting of proverbs and medical folklore: 'Proverbial wisdom and popular error'. The second of these, and other parts of this scholarly work, will be …

Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions

Abstract: A coherent account of emotional change must find a dynamic, a vector of alteration, outside the discursive structures and normative practices that have monopolized ethnographic attention in research on affect. But this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression. Emotion talk and emotional gestures are not well characterized by the notion of “discourse” derived from the poststructuralist theories of Foucault or by that of “practice” derived from the theoretical writings of Bourdieu, Giddens, and others. These concepts do not capture the two‐way character of emotional utterances and acts, their unique capacity to alter what they “refer” to or what they “represent”–‐a capacity which makes them neither “constative” nor “performative” utterances but a third type of communicative utterance entirely, one that has never received adequate theoretical formulation. An attempt is made to formulate a framework for emotional utterances, and the framework is applied to a number of examples.

Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200-1450

Abstract: Starting in the mid-thirteenth century, kings, bishops, and local rulers throughout western Europe repeatedly ordered the banishment of foreigners who were lending at interest. The expulsion of these foreigners, mostly Christians hailing from northern Italy, took place against a backdrop of rising anxieties over the social and spiritual implications of a rapidly expanding credit economy. Moreover, from 1274 onward, such expulsions were backed by the weight of canon law, as the church hierarchy—inspired by secular precedents—commanded rulers everywhere to expel foreign moneylenders from their lands. Standing threats of expulsion were duly entered into statute-books from Salzburg to northern Spain. This dissertation explores the emergence and spread of the idea of expelling foreign usurers across the intellectual and legal landscape of late medieval Europe. Building on a wide array of evidence gathered from seventy archives and libraries, the dissertation examines how the idea of expulsion expressed itself in practice, how its targets came to be defined, and how the resulting expulsion orders were enforced—or not. It shows how administrative procedures, intellectual categories and linguistic habits circulated and evolved to shape the banishment not only of foreign usurers, but of other targets as well, most notably the Jews. By reconstructing these expulsions and their accompanying legal and theological debates, this dissertation weaves together broad themes ranging from the circulation of merchants and manuscripts to conflicting overlaps in political jurisdictions and commercial practices; from the resilience of Biblical exegesis to the flexibility of legal hermeneutics; and from shifts in political