Repensando con demonios. La lucha contra la superstición en la Baja Edad Media y la Primera Modernidad desde una perspectiva cognitiva

• Autores: Andrew Keitt
• Localización: Christian Discourses of the Holy and the Sacred from the 15th to the 17th Century / coord. por Teresa Hiergeist, Ismael del Olmo, 2020, ISBN 978-3-631-80081-2, págs. 363-396
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Popular religion in late medieval and early modern Europe posited an invisible world densely populated with both personal spirits and impersonal forces that interacted constantly with the natural and social realms in ambiguous and unpredictable ways. This represented a stark contrast to elite theological discourse, which insisted on dividing the spirit world into a strict moral dichotomy of good and evil spirits, operating within a rigid causal taxonomy of natural, preternatural, and supernatural. During this period, deviations from this elite theological consensus were increasingly labeled “superstitious”. The cognitive science of religion postulates that beliefs about demons and spirits are constrained by the evolved cognitive architecture of our species, and in this article I show that the patterns of religious belief and practice targeted by the critics of superstition are compatible with key hypotheses in the cognitive science of religion.