Reviewed by: Communicating with the Spirits Michael D. Bailey Gábo Klaniczayr and Éva Pócs, eds., in collaboration with Eszter Csonka-Takács. Communicating with the Spirits, Demons, Spirits, Witches 1. Buda-pest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 295. This is the first in a series of three planned volumes containing essays presented at a conference on “Demons, Spirits, and Witches” held in Buda-pest in 1999. While this volume offers essays dealing with demonic possession, visionary experiences, trance states, and shamanism, future volumes (the [End Page 257] contents of which are listed) will focus on demonology, both elite and popular, and on witchcraft. In all, forty-three articles will be published. As is typical with conference proceedings, indeed with essay collections of any sort, the articles in this volume vary considerably in their focus, and in the depth and breadth of their coverage. The most extended contribution is that of Éva Pócs, who seems to have exercised editor’s privilege and expanded her essay to sixty-eight pages. Most of the other articles, however, appear to have been revised only slightly, if at all, beyond their original forms as conference papers. Many are only ten to twelve pages long. In terms of coverage, Pócs’s article spans several periods, but focuses on East-Central Europe. Of the other ten essays, five focus on medieval Europe, three on the early modern period, one on the modern, and one is essentially ahistorical. The authors come from several different disciplines, including history, literary studies, and folklore, although only one article really makes an issue of its particular disciplinary approach. Almost all of the articles are worthwhile. Because of their typically short length, however, few can do more than offer preliminary insights or pose interesting questions. Nancy Caciola introduces the notion that medieval concepts of demonic possession presented demons as physical presences occupying various spaces within the body. In the years since the original 1999 conference, she has actually worked out this argument to much greater extent in other article and monograph publications, which she cites here. Renata Mikolajczyk presents the demonological thought of the medieval Silesian scholar Witelo. While some of his natural interpretations for demonic activity are intriguing, she herself admits that most of his thought was not extraordinary but drew on standard demonological notions. She does not have space, however, to develop these issues fully. Moshe Sluhovsky examines ideas of demonic possession in early modern Catholic countries. His main conclusion is that problems of discernment continued unresolved from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Sophie Houdard, examining visionary activity in seventeenth-century France, indicates that these problems persisted, but that in this period visionary activity as a whole was coming under greater suspicion. Regardless of whether visions were supposedly divine or demonic, all such experiences were now more frequently regarded as fake. Éva Pócs closes out the section on demonic possession by presenting a long survey of categories of possession phenomena and what she calls “possession systems”—the social and cultural forms that possession experiences took in Central Europe over an extended span of time. She argues for these effectively, but also cautions that her results are only preliminary. The next section of the volume, on “Contacts with the Other World,” [End Page 258] begins with an excellent article by Wolfgang Behringer, in which he argues that late-medieval Waldensian heretics became associated with witchcraft because their holy men (and women) claimed to possess the ability to be in contact with the dead, as well as having other supernatural powers. The argument is necessarily more suggestive than conclusive, but sheds useful light on the otherwise odd association of Waldensians with witchcraft. This is followed by a short article on “thanotopic aspects of the Irish Sidhe” by Tok Thompson. Here he asserts that Irish fairy-beliefs are rooted in archaic notions of communication with the dead, since the Sidhe are associated with Neolithic burial mounds. At the end of his paper, however, he admits that he has not actually established the central linkages on which his argument hinges (pp. 200–201); instead he refers readers to his unpublished master...
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