Darren Oldridge Strange Histories.

"Strange Histories: The Trial Of The Pig, The Walking Dead, And Other Matters Of Fact From The Medieval And Renaissance Worlds."

by Darren Oldfield.

Only one good piece of advice; don't buy this book if you expect a collection of horror stories. It's a history of human intellectual behaviour and a study of the different ways we look at our surroundings, from the late 15th century until the 1700's.

In 1438 a pig was hanged for murder in Burgundy. The French judge Henri Boguet described an apple possessed by demons in 1602. A few years later, Italian Jesuits tried to calculate the physical dimensions of hell.

These and many other ideas from the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem absurd today, but they made good sense to people at the time. This book explains how beliefs that are strange to us were once widely accepted. It sets out the intellectual world of men and women in the distant past, and shows how their assumptions and expectations allowed them to believe things that we cannot: that heresy and witchcraft posed a threat to society, that demons carried people through the air and that the dead occasionally walked away from their graves.

None of these ideas were mad. They simply reflected the belief system of the medieval and Renaissance world. In fact an understanding of the rational basis of beliefs that now seem absurd suggests that modern ideas may one day seem equally ridiculous.

The reason why I like this book so much is because it compels you to study your own way of thinking but you won't be able to do that without a sense of humor.