Midelfort, H. C. Erik: Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-century Germany.(Book Review)

History: Review of New Books, June, 2005 by Thompson, Andrew C.

Midelfort, H. C. Erik Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-century Germany New Haven: Yale University Press 219 pp., $35.00, ISBN 0-300-10669-6 Publication Date: July 2005

H. C. Erik Midelfort, a professor at the University of Virginia, has joined an illustrious list of predecessors in publishing his Terry Lectures on religion in the light of science and philosophy, given at Yale in the spring of 2003. The book retains something of the immediacy of the lectures without compromising standards of scholarly integrity.

Johann Joseph Gassner, a Catholic priest, made quite a career for himself by practicing exorcism in Southern Germany in the 1770s. Midelfort ably shows how Gassner's story opens up a number of...

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