Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England [Hardcover]

Anglo-Saxon England was a society governed by the competing discourses of illness, spirituality, power, and community. The concepts of demon possession and exorcism, introduced by Christian missionaries, provided a potential outlet for expressing the psychological, biological, and sociopolitical dysfunctions of a society that was at the center of multiple conflicting cultural dimensions.Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England is a reexamination of the available sources describing the possessed and a study of the currently recognized medical and psychiatric conditions that may be relevant to and resemble medieval possession. This is a richly learned and highly readable book. It is seeded throughout with a wealth of comparative material from Carolingian, Merovingian, Late Antique, and contemporary sources. [...] Peter Dendle is to be congratulated on an admirably detailed study that complements the more literary and conceptual bent of his earlier book, Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature (2001). Alice Jorgensen, Trinity College, Dublin; review in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology