How superstitious were people during the Middle Ages? I'm talking before the Renaissance.
And more specifically, did they believe in witches? If they did, how were witches viewed? Most hostility towards them, as far as I know, began during the renaissance and reached its apex in the Enlightenment.
At least where i lived they gave food to gnomes and other spirits so they wouldnt cause problems for them. At the same time they worshiped christ just to be sure.
If you told your men they were going to become immortal before going into battle they would've believed it
>>878528
When did that happen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
>Typically, the idea was that certain forms such as fleas could arise from inanimate matter such as dust, or that maggots could arise from dead flesh. A variant idea was that of equivocal generation, in which species such as tapeworms arose from unrelated living organisms, now understood to be their hosts. Doctrines supporting such processes of generation held that these processes are commonplace and regular.
>Spontaneous generation is discussed as a fact in literature well into the Renaissance. Where, in passing, Shakespeare discusses snakes and crocodiles forming from the mud of the Nile (Ant 2.7 F1), Izaak Walton again raises the question of the origin of eels "as rats and mice, and many other living creatures, are bred in Egypt, by the sun's heat when it shines upon the overflowing of the river...". While the ancient question of the origin of eels remained unanswered and the additional idea that eels reproduced from corruption of age was mentioned, the spontaneous generation of rats and mice engendered no debate.
They thought that certain animals just spontaneously appeared all the time. Even Thomas Aquinas supported spontaneous generation.
>>878558
The Crusades.
People believed there were spirits of nature everywhere (demoted angels and ghosts in syncretism)
Witches were more of a germanic superstition the catholic church suppressed
After the Protestant reformation nothing could stop them from going into mass panics ending in violence
>>878580
That's not really superstition, it's just an incorrect theory of where tiny animals come from. Unless you observe very closely, vermin like maggots really do appear to come from nowhere.
>>878580
One of the reason for that believe was that insects such as flies just spawned (they could see birds hatching eggs, but not flies doing the same). But butchers were aware that simple sheet covering the meat could prevent a flies from "spawning".
>>878600
>That's not really superstition, it's just an incorrect theory
Isn't that what superstition is though?
>>878650
No, the definition isn't rigorous. According to this definition, the theory that Troy was complete legend , or the plum pudding model of the atom , or the idea that objects fall at a constant rate, were superstitions instead of errors.
>>878671
>Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality—that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events—such as astrology and certain aspects linked to religion, like omens, witchcraft and prophecies, that contradict natural science.
>one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events
Sounds like spontaneous generation would count.
>>878695
Supersitition is an idea out of its place.
It's from the roman Super-Sitio.
>>878739
The understood meaning of a word and the literal Greco-Latin roots of the word are pretty often different.
