A Thousand Years of Rituals

A Thousand Years of Rituals examines the long history of German charms — Beschwörungsformeln, Zauberspruch, or Segen in German— and how they were used in healing prayers or rituals from the ninth to the twentieth century.

The book analyzes how these charms were recorded, perceived, and used based on ninth to late-sixteenth-century manuscripts, late-sixteenth to seventeenth-century treatises and witch trial records, and eighteenth to nineteenth-century printed books and booklets. The research also examines manuscripts currently used in a German immigrant community in Southern Brazil, as well as interviews with local healers from immigrant communities in Brazil and in Pennsylvania, USA. Although these charms have received increasing attention in German scholarship, this book will provide a new, transcontinental approach to this material and situate the German sources in the global study of charms, magical practices, and folk healing traditions.

A Thousand Years of Rituals will be of interest to scholars of history of religion, history of medicine and healing, folklore studies, history of magic, and German philology.