This chapter is about the flourishing of a variety of distinctively postmodern ‘alternative realisms’ in the early Twenty-First Century, which are predicated on the ontological questions Brian McHale famously identified as a recurrent element of postmodernism. It shows how a range of novels – especially examples by David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Maggie Gee and Kazuo Ishiguro – are charged with a postmodern sense that literature evokes a ‘plurality of worlds’, as dream-logic and mundane reality collide in comic and destabilizing ways, and the boundary between the mundane and the magical is rendered porous. These novels, the chapter contends, might productively be considered apocalyptic, a form of narrative in which veiled, hidden or buried stories are revealed. As a result, twenty-first-century alternative realism redoubles the impetus of late twentieth-century postmodernism to convey a distrust of authoritarianism by preserving a sense of the sublime.

The Introduction presents the central ideas of the book. The major theme is acculturation. Dominant forms of ethnohistory discuss Native peoples of the Americas and the ways they responded to Spanish political domination. This book reverses the approach by analyzing how non-Native women adapted to their predominantly Native Mesoamerican cultural environment. Witchcraft and sorcery and their suppression by inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts represent the particular entry point for understanding these processes of acculturation. Non-Native women in this book were Spanish, Canarian, North African, Basque, and Senegambian. They adopted Mesoamerican rituals, such as corn hurling (tlapohualiztli), Nahua healing and midwifery, and peyote consumption, and spoke Nahuatl in everyday lives. Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish, such as metate, tianguis, and patle, symbolize the processes of acculturation. This book studies the earliest forms of non-Native women adapting Mesoamerican sorcery, magic, and healing, limited to the period 1521–71.

This chapter analyzes magic and attitudes toward magic in early modern Spain. The time period for review is primarily the sixteenth century. The chapter summarizes basic Spanish terminology such as hechicería, bruja, and sortilegio. There are two elements to this discussion. First, the chapter examines the cases of famous witch crazes in the Basque region of Spain in 1525 and 1609–11 in Zugarramurdi. There is a lot of popular imagery concerning witch crazes, seen for example in Goya’s painting of the Aquelarre, or the witches’ sabbath. In reality, Catholic courts and the Inquisition were skeptical of the existence of witches. The chapter analyzes some specific anti-sorcery writings such as treatises by Martín de Arlés and Martín de Castañega. It also looks at inquisitor manuals such as those by Alfonso de Castro, Nicolau Eimeric, and Diego de Simancas. Furthermore, this chapter examines the role of royal law in Siete Partidas in establishing jurisdiction over witchcraft. The chapter also includes some observations about uniquely Spanish types of magic and folk healing, such as the belief in the evil eye, herbal remedies, and Saint John’s Night.

This chapter provides examples of how attention plays an important role in our everyday lives. Real-world examples are used to explain the motivations behind cutting-edge attention research being done in neuroscience labs. These include distracted driving, airport security screening, and radar and sonar monitoring. Vigilance and the ability to sustain attention are introduced as critical mental processes for success at certain jobs. The influence of attention on reading and memory, and the choice of whether to study in silence or with music are discussed. Lapses of attention are described, including how these can have a range of consequences, from the brief embarrassment of not knowing what someone just said to us to the potentially fatal effect of not attending to our driving. Theories of joint attention and social-gaze orienting are introduced to explain how our attention is linked to those around us. The purposeful misdirection of a person’s attention, at multiple levels, by skilled magicians is linked to core processes of attention and perception. This chapter also introduces the idea of training attention, including the effects of playing video games, and explains how proper training protocols require detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of attention.

Chapter 4 discusses the sign of the cross, another gesture with a long history going back to the early church. In the Middle Ages the cross was believed to have power to protect against evil, and was widely used both as a gesture of everyday blessing and in rituals and charms of healing. After the Reformation its use was discouraged, but it survived in the Prayer Book rite of baptism, where the minister was instructed to trace a cross on the child’s forehead. This necessitated a radical transformation in its meaning, removing the associations with exorcism and purification and redefining it simply as a symbol of allegiance to Christ. Yet the belief in the apotropaic power of the cross persisted in early modern England and was reflected both officially, in the ritual of the royal touch, and unofficially, in the use of the gesture as a form of protection against witchcraft. Even among theologians who regarded the cross as symbolic, there was still a sense that it was not ‘merely’ symbolic but retained some kind of operative power to effect change.

How did religious and political debates that had only recently generated violent conflicts become relatively peaceably conducted in growing numbers of publications and clubs?

War has been a central part of American life in the twentieth century, but paradoxically the historical profession has been deplorably inattentive to its study. Military history is seen as largely a popular genre of history done by amateurs for what academic historians considered an unsophisticated readership. This chapter nevertheless demonstrates the important contributions made by two military historians whose research supported and extended the orthodox interpretation. They showed that American decision makers were influenced by facts on the ground, especially a massive Japanese buildup to defend against an American invasion which helped impel the decision to use the bomb. Military history is increasingly incorporating cultural and social history, recognizing that war embraces much more than politics and is always an expression of culture. We discuss how recent work that integrates military history with cultural and social history has helped it gain more academic respect and has contributed to further understanding of the Hiroshima decision.

A Greek hymn is selected among other examples in the corpus of Greek ‘magical’ papyri written in Egypt during the Roman Imperial time. Addressed to the Moon goddess in a plurality of forms and names, it draws a complex portrait of a powerful divinity for love affairs. The incantation weaves innovative denominations together with a poetic and ritual tradition in order to enact power. The poet realised a technical ‘tour de main’ to picture a many-faced goddess, tying heavenly and shining traits to the gloomiest and the deadliest, and entangling anthropomorphic characteristics to a patchwork of animal features. The poetic mastery over names and figures offers tools for the making of the divine inside the ritual performance, with the effect of rendering a vivid perception of the Moon goddess encompassing all her aspects.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

This final chapter extends the argument in chapter five by investing the “Prince of Torah” section in the earliest Jewish mystical corpus known as the Hekhalot literature. It reads through the extended narrative of this text through the genre of a historiola, demonstrating that the rhetoric through which it separates between a “human, earthly” Torah and a “divine Torah” resonates with the manner in which Neoplatonists, Manichaeans, and “Jewish Christians” distinguished between “mere prognosis” and “divine prognosis” in chapter five. Not only does this text present the reader with a way of elevating his own learning faculties to be more like the angels, but Torah itself is conceptualized as something that is “instantly knowable” in a moment of divine comprehension.