Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Classic Audiobook Collection

08/22/23

•

265m

About

Comments

Featured In

Elizabethan Demonology by Thomas Alfred Spalding audiobook.

Genre: history

Written as a scholarly essay, Elizabethan Demonology investigates what educated and ordinary people in England believed about devils, witches, possession, and unseen spiritual forces during the Reformation and the decades that followed. Thomas Alfred Spalding argues that to read Elizabethan drama clearly, especially the plays of William Shakespeare, modern readers must recover the religious assumptions and folk ideas that shaped daily life and public imagination. Moving between theology, popular superstition, and literary evidence, Spalding traces how older pagan or foreign gods were reinterpreted as lesser spirits, how fear of diabolic agency found support in sermons and pamphlets, and how these convictions surfaced on the stage in vivid scenes of temptation, prophecy, and haunting. Along the way he pays particular attention to Shakespeare's handling of the supernatural, using close readings to show how an audience that took demons seriously would have heard certain words, symbols, and moral stakes differently than we do today. Expanded from papers first delivered to the New Shakespeare Society, this compact work is both a window into early modern belief and a guide for readers who want to understand why the devil felt so real in Elizabethan literature. citeturn0search1turn0search7turn0search0

For ad-free listening try our premium subscription

Chapters (Approximate)

(00:00:00) Chapter 01

(00:19:09) Chapter 02

(00:42:53) Chapter 03

(01:01:28) Chapter 04

(01:26:45) Chapter 05

(01:53:36) Chapter 06

(02:18:31) Chapter 07

(02:44:28) Chapter 08

(02:59:38) Chapter 09

(03:25:28) Chapter 10

(03:48:14) Chapter 11

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

The Characters Of Theophrastus by Theophrastus ~ Full Audiobook [philosophy]

August 21, 2023

•

96m

The Characters Of Theophrastus by Theophrastus audiobook.

Genre: philosophy

Written in the lively streets and marketplaces of classical Athens, The Characters offers a gallery of sharply observed human types that still feel familiar today. Attributed to Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, this compact classic presents a sequence of brief sketches, each one isolating a single vice, folly, or social habit and then showing how it plays out in daily life. You will meet the Flatterer who lives by borrowed praise, the Gossip who cannot keep a confidence, the Superstitious Man who reads omens into every coincidence, the Boor who misses every cue, and many more. Rather than telling a continuous story, the book builds its power through accumulation: scene by scene, it invites listeners to recognize patterns of behavior in neighbors, leaders, friends, and themselves. At once ethical inquiry and social satire, these portraits ask what makes a person trustworthy, civic minded, and self controlled, and what happens when small failings harden into a way of life. The result is a witty, unsettling mirror held up to human nature across time.

For ad-free listening try our premium subscription

Chapters (Approximate)

(00:00:00) Chapter 00

(00:34:18) Chapter 01

(00:53:06) Chapter 02

(01:11:42) Chapter 03

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Next Episode

The Crook in the Lot by Thomas Boston ~ Full Audiobook [religion]

August 22, 2023

•

336m

The Crook in the Lot by Thomas Boston audiobook.

Genre: religion

In The Crook in the Lot, Scottish Presbyterian pastor Thomas Boston turns a single piercing question from Ecclesiastes 7:13 into a steady guide for anyone living with burdens they cannot simply fix: if God has made something crooked in your life, who can make it straight? Boston calls the unchosen trials of daily life the 'crook' and the overall shape of a person's circumstances the 'lot.' With the directness of a preacher and the tenderness of a counselor, he argues that afflictions are not random intrusions but belong to God's wise providence, and that peace begins when the sufferer learns to see the crook as the work of God rather than a mistake to be fought at all costs. Drawing from Scripture and lived pastoral experience, Boston explores why certain troubles strike the most sensitive places in our hearts, how impatience and pride harden the soul, and what it looks like to respond with humility, repentance, prayer, and persevering faith. The book reads like a series of sermons meant to steady trembling hands and reframe suffering as a severe mercy that can shape holiness.

For ad-free listening try our premium subscription

Chapters (Approximate)

(00:00:00) Chapter 01

(00:08:29) Chapter 02

(00:40:22) Chapter 03

(01:24:19) Chapter 04

(01:44:05) Chapter 05

(02:20:42) Chapter 06

(02:40:03) Chapter 07

(03:14:39) Chapter 08

(03:49:04) Chapter 09

(04:07:39) Chapter 10