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5 unusual facts about Jeffrey Burton Russell


Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

Jeffrey Burton Russell notes that "A woman named Marta was tortured in Florence about 1375: she was alleged to have placed candles round a dish and to have taken off her clothes and stood above the dish in the nude, making magical signs".

Witchcraft scholar Jeffrey Russell devoted some of his 1980 book A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans to arguing against the claims in Aradia, Murray's thesis, and Jules Michelet's 1862 La Sorcière, which also theorised that witchcraft represented an underground religion.

Inventing the Flat Earth

Inventing the Flat Earth (1991; ISBN 978-0-275-95904-3) is a book by historian Jeffrey Burton Russell debunking the notion that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat.

Jeffrey Burton Russell

In Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) he argues that 19th century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat.

He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of the Devil: The Devil (1977), Satan (1981), Lucifer (1984), Mephistopheles (1986) and The Prince of Darkness (1988).



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