The Magical and Sacred Medical World
This collection of papers explores the sacred and magical aspects of ethno-medicine. The subject area is marked out by the points of connection between religious anthropology, ethno-medicine and medical anthropology, focusing on topics such as magical and religious concepts of health and disease, causes of disease, religious and magical averting and healing rites, healing gods, saints and, last but not least, the role that these play in the society, religion, mentality and everyday life of a community, as well as their various representations in folklore, literature or art.
This volume includes, without restrictions of a methodological, temporal or geographical nature, works from the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, cultural history, comparative historical and textual philology, as well as research findings using the latest methods of analysis in textual folklore or based on archival research or fieldwork in or outside of Europe.
This book will appeal to researchers and students of religion, folklore, and medical anthropology, as well as general readers interested in the humanities and cultural history.
Éva Pócs is Professor Emeritus and Principal Investigator of the ERC project “East-West” at the Institute of Ethnology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include the basic concepts of religious anthropology, such as the cult of the dead, divination, supernatural communication, witchcraft, fairy cult, shamanism, and the comprehensive analysis of modern folk religion and folk beliefs. She is the series editor of sourcebooks on early modern religion and the editor and co-editor of 31 volumes on the anthropology of religion and folklore, including Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania (2017). She has 424 academic publications, of which 12 are books, including Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe (1989) and Between the Living and the Dead: a Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (1998).
“This is a collection that encompasses both a wide range of disciplinary approaches and a broad range of topics underneath its over-arching theme. […] Any explorer of magical and sacred medical worlds, no matter their disciplinary background, will find something to inspire and provoke in this volume.”
Ross MacFarlane
Wellcome Collection, London, UK; Folklore, 2020
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