Excerpt from A Selection of Latin Stories, And, a Dialogue of Witches and Witchcraft The following Collection of Stories is Offered merely as a specimen of the class of literature to which it belongs. The Editor has not had the leisure to carry his researches further than a few manuscripts in the Museum which were ready at his hand. He is aware of the existence of nu metous valuable manuscripts of tales Of this kind among the treasures Of the universities, which, as well as a still greater number to be found in the libraries of the continent, would, without doubt, add much to our knowledge Of the history of me dieval romance. The present volume has already exceeded the limit within which it was originally intended that it should be comprised. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches However, they die slowly, and even yet there are old people in the Romagna of the North who know the Etruscan names of the Twelve Gods, and invocations to Bacchus, jupiter, and Venus, Mercury, and the Lares or ancestral spirits, and in the cities are women who prepare strange amulets, over which they mutter spells, all known in the old Roman time, and who can astonish even the learned by their legends of Latin gods, mingled with lore which may be found in cato or theocritus. With one of these I became ia timately acquainted in 1886, and have ever since employed her specially to collect among her sisters of the hidden spell in many places all the traditions of the olden time known to them. It is true that I have drawn from other sources, but this woman by long practice has perfectly learned what few understand, or just what I want, and how to extract it from those of her kind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

English translations of two important fifteenth-century writings on witchcraft by Johannes Hartlieb and Ulrich Molitoris. Introduction discusses the writings, the authors, their historical environments, the ways they used sources, and their influence on the development of ideas about witchcraft.

In a culture where the supernatural possessed an immediacy now strange to us, magic was of great importance both in the literary mythic tradition and in ritual practice. In this book, Daniel Ogden presents 300 texts in new translations, along with brief but explicit commentaries. Authors include the well known (Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Pliny) and the less familiar, and extend across the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity.