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Product Description<br/><br/><br/>In early modern Europe, ideas about nature, God, demons, and occult forces were inextricably connected and much ink and blood was spilled in arguments over the characteristics and boundaries of nature and the supernatural. Seitz uses records of Inquisition witchcraft trials in Venice to uncover how individuals across society, from servants to aristocrats, understood these two fundamental categories. Others have examined this issue from the points of view of religious history, the history of science and medicine, or the history of witchcraft alone, but this work brings these sub-fields together to illuminate comprehensively the complex forces shaping early modern beliefs.<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>"In a beautifully nuanced exploration of the treatment of maleficio or malevolent witchcraft by the Venetian Inquisition, Jonathan Seitz opens fresh perspectives by probing the uncertain boundary between natural and supernatural affliction - especially those offered by two types of experts, exorcists and physicians - in an unusually cosmopolitan and sophisticated corner of early modern Europe." - E. William Monter, Professor Emeritus of History, Northwestern University<br/><br/>"This carefully researched and thoroughly engrossing book examines one of the key features of modernity: the hard-won distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Meticulously examining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials in Venice, Seitz dissects and lays bare the mechanisms by which the Inquisition struggled to demarcate natural and supernatural agency in cases of alleged witchcraft. In the process, Seitz recovers a lost world in which casting beans could forecast love and finding a bundle of feathers under a pillow could reveal the causes of an illness. With remarkable insight, Seitz challenges traditional interpretations of the relation between popular and elite cultures and teases out of the archives a subtle new understanding