Yesterday, 11:55 AM
Rana Banna, UCL
"During the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, magic was not considered esoteric or removed from the mainstream. Rather, it was a key route to knowledge, often inextricable from theology and science. Although the latter may have prevailed—the empirical New-Scientific revolution of the mid-seventeenth century claiming to supersede such arcane modes of thought—before this, magic was prevalent. Early modern linguistic theory had not lost the occultist or religious faith that language could conjure, summon, curse, cure, or bind with oaths, and therefore sustained conceptions of a fertile semiotics whereby the word did not just refer or designate, but could also create and invoke."
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewc...t=accessus
"During the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, magic was not considered esoteric or removed from the mainstream. Rather, it was a key route to knowledge, often inextricable from theology and science. Although the latter may have prevailed—the empirical New-Scientific revolution of the mid-seventeenth century claiming to supersede such arcane modes of thought—before this, magic was prevalent. Early modern linguistic theory had not lost the occultist or religious faith that language could conjure, summon, curse, cure, or bind with oaths, and therefore sustained conceptions of a fertile semiotics whereby the word did not just refer or designate, but could also create and invoke."
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewc...t=accessus