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Reference Books

Old book bindings
Disclaimer: Some links on this pager are Amazon Affiliate links and as such, I earn from qualifying purchases.  The books here are books that I can personally recommend and have either referenced in blog posts or used in the past for coursework.

General

The historian Lecouteux has put together what amounts to a dictionary of stones and gems. It is extensively researched and pulls from a number of ancient sources, though the names used often aren't the colloquial names for the stones.

Christianity

Ehrman and Plese have put together a collection of the apocryphal Gospels, including the fragments, in a single volume set 

Renowned scholar Bruce Metzger's work examining the development of New Testament canon

Malleus Maleficarum

By the same editor who created the two-volume set below, this is an English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum

This is a two volume set of a heavily annotated and thoroughly researched version of the Malleus Maleficarum. Volume 1 is the Latin text and volume 2 is the English

Malleus Maleficarum is a weird book that didn't necessarily reflect any common views of its time period and as such can be hard to understand. This book examines the Malleus Maleficarum in its medieval context and explains the twisted perspective it's working from.







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Malleus Maleficarum: intro

The Malleus Maleficarum ( Hexenhammer in German) is a witchhunting manual from the 1400s. It is a disturbingly evil book that has lead to the death of thousands during the witchhunts (though some sources do debate its impact). It was written by Dominican clergymen Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, though Kramer appears to have written the bulk of it. Allegedly, Sprenger’s name was attached to give it more credibility, because Kramer was a known pest in his area.  It was the first book to deal with witchcraft, though an earlier work, the Formicarius , touched on the topic. The story goes that the entire existence of the book was is the result of Kramer being angry at not being allowed to ask probing, inappropriately sexual questions to a woman during a heresy trial. So he went back to Cologne and wrote an entire book to explain his views.  It is almost three separate books in one, and each section isn’t really related to any of the others. They were intended for d...
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