Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds by Darren Oldridge (review)

Darren Oldridge's Strange Historiesis bright, colorful, and perpetually engaging. In ten concise chapters, Oldridge explores beliefs about dragons, trials by ordeal, angels and demons, the walking dead, criminal trials brought against animals, witchcraft, werewolves, visionary experiences, attitudes toward suffering, and religious persecution. He writes in a clear, accessible style, and the chapters contain a fascinating assortment of examples. Focusing on Europe and North America, the book spans the period from the late Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. Scholarship on the preternatural has expanded rapidly since Strange Historieswas first published in 2004, and this second edition contains some additional examples and a useful discussion of further reading. Also welcome are the new illustrations. The plates in the first edition were not referenced in the main text, and several images were nineteenth-century artworks that had no obvious bearing on Oldridge's arguments. The illustrations here are better chosen and better integrated.

For experts in the field, this book will contain no great surprises. Most of Oldridge's sources are well-known primary texts or secondary works. His thesis, moreover, has a considerable intellectual legacy and is uncontroversial within contemporary academic circles. He argues that beliefs must be understood in relation to their social and cultural contexts. The idea of trying an accused witch by ducking her, or compelling her to carry a red-hot iron, may strike modern readers as absurd and inhumane. But the premodern men and women who believed in trials by ordeal were not necessarily irrational, nor immoral. Rather, they operated within a conceptual framework, since abandoned, by which these judicial methods made sense. For historians, this way of understanding unfamiliar beliefs—and, especially, beliefs in the super- and preternatural—was most famously set out by Stuart Clark in his 1997 Thinking with Demons. Anthropologists might look back to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's 1937 study of the Azande. Oldridge himself acknowledges debts to Clifford Geertz's work on belief systems and Quentin Skinner's analysis of intellectual history as a practice.

Yet there is truth in Oldridge's statement that this method of approaching past beliefs is something of a "professional secret" (x). When first encountering tales of walking corpses or flying witches, students often fall back on the assumption that premodern people were ignorant or irrational. There is value, therefore, in Oldridge's endeavor to address a nonexpert audience. Strange Historiesacts as a guidebook for approaching the past in an open-minded and empathetic way. It also encourages us to think differently about the present. Oldridge demonstrates how contemporary society can drum up "truths" based on relatively little factual evidence. He draws parallels, for example, between early modern fears of the witches' Sabbath and modern panics about satanic cults. More broadly, he invites his audience to reflect on beliefs as cultural constructs. In considering the social forces that have shaped contemporary ways of understanding the world, we may come to recognize the strangeness of many modern beliefs. This is a worthwhile message for all potential readers.

As a short book that surveys a wide geographical area and a time span of several centuries, Strange Historiesserves as an excellent introduction to the topics it covers, but there is inevitably some degree of generalization. Oldridge usually gives due consideration to differences between religious denominations, but there are occasional lapses. The chapter on religious suffering, for example (chapter 8, "Suffering Saints"), moves from the mortification of medieval saints to the spiritual trials of seventeenth-century Puritan communities without regard for the differing theological contexts. Also, Oldridge pays relatively little attention to geographical variation, and although his work spans Europe as a whole, most of his sources are English. He seldom analyzes differences related to gender or social status...