Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition

This course explores the concept of the terror of history through a study of mysticism, heresy, apocalyptic movements, and the witch hunting craze in Europe between 1000 and 1700. It examines new sources and it thinks in new ways about events in the centuries from the late medieval period to early modern Europe. Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz introduces texts such as the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, the text of Jewish Kabbalistic mysticism. Or the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, a handbook for identifying, interrogating, and trying witches. The course views the Renaissance not from the perspective that it was the beginning of modernity but that it was a time when many among the educated were fascinated by alchemy and magic, when the Pope depended on his astrologer, when the learned considered the Corpus Hermeticum - a mixture of magic and astrology believed to date from the time of Moses - to be a more valuable text than Plato's Symposium.