num_pages: 316
description: This intriguing book examines popular religion, traditional medicine, witchcraft, apparitions, demonology, and magic in nineteenth-century rural France. Devlin demonstrates that many of the impulses and mental processes now considered superstitious constituted a wholly reasonable response to the pressures of a harsh and impoverished life. Far from the product of a primitive mentality, many of these beliefs have survived in modern culture and can even illuminate the nature of modern mass politics.
language: English
title: The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century
titlecomplete: The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Yale University Press