The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish is a brilliant and accessible case study of witchcraft and heresy, based on Celtic sources. Exploring the competing forces of gender, politics, colonialism, religion and theology in a unique and limited period in Irish cultural history, this book also offers distinctive insights into our understanding of the factors involved in contemporary violence ... Read morecarried out under religious and/or political auspices.
Mary Condren, author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion and Power in Celtic Ireland In The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish, Maeve Brigid Callan presents in detail material important for understanding both fourteen-century Ireland and the development of witchcraft trials in western Europe. She looks at the subject as a whole, showing the relationship between the various accusations of heresy and witchcraft during the first half of the fourteenth century and putting these events into their wider context.
Helen Nicholson, Cardiff University, author of The Proceedings Against the Templars in the British Isles The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish is a valuable book that will become the standard work on heresy and witchcraft in medieval ireland. Maeve Brigid Callan provides some very useful and important correctives to the conventional view of Irish heresy and witchcraft.
Frank Klaassen, University of Saskatchewan, author of The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance Maeve Callan's readable, well-structured, and scholarly book examines Irish medieval heresy trials of the volatile fourteenth century through the lens of three little-studied, interlocking case studies.... Callan's book is a novel, commendable study of the political, interpersonal, and to a lesser extent ethnic issues that underpinned artificial Irish heresy trials in the fourteenth century. It displays a deep understanding of the period and the people involved and will be read with profit by students of all levels of late medieval Ireland, as well as those studying sorcery trials in the prewitch-hunt period.
Andrew Sneddon
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
Maeve Brigid Callan weaves Irish and wider European patterns together convincingly in her account of incidents concerning heresy and witchcraft that occurred in Ireland between 1310 and 1360.... [T]his is a bold, fresh and scholarly account that will be warmly welcomed by medieval historians and the general reader wishing to enter the stormy world of fourteenth-century Ireland.
Brendan Smith
The Tablet
Heresy in Ireland has been a neglected topic, and this well-researched work is a welcome contribution to our understanding of it.
Art Cosgrove
American Historical Review
Callan's style is vivid and evocative of her level of comfort with the topic. Discussion of each trial relies heavily on descriptions from witness testimonies as well as the available legal records, allowing Callan to reconstruct the circumstances of each trial for her readership. Her deft handling of interdisciplinary approaches and the extensive usage of primary sources to set up the trials discussed makes this book an entertaining read for both students and seasoned scholars of Irish studies.
Sarah J. Sprouse
Comitatus 47
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