The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century
ISBN: 9780300163551
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Occult sciences -- France -- History -- 19th century; France -- Social life and customs;

This intriguing book examines popular religion, traditional medicine, witchcraft, apparitions, demonology, and magic in nineteenth-century rural France. Devlin demonstrates that many of the impulses and mental processes now considered superstitious constituted a wholly reasonable response to the pressures of a harsh and impoverished life. Far from the product of a primitive mentality, many of these beliefs have survived in modern culture and can even illuminate the nature of modern mass politics.


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