An award-winning historians examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significanceHistorically rich and superbly written.David J. Davis, Wall Street JournalShortlisted for the International Society for Science and Religion Book PrizeAccounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern eratales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcrafteven as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos M. N. Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals. Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newtons scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundar
