In August 1940, the poet Wallace Stevens wrote a series of letters to Hi Simons, a Chicago literary critic who had sent Stevens a list of questions concerning various images in his poems. Wary of explanations of poetry that betray the poetic voice, Stevens composed notes which intensified his images, rendering them, if anything, stranger rather than more common. In the course of one letter, he was moved to comment on the nature of poetry itself.

Recent discussions of the major literary works of the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have advanced significantly our understanding of this important episode in European history. Clearly, our efforts no longer are controlled by the anticlerical and even antireligious sentiments that corrupted so much late nineteenth-century scholarship on this subject. Yet a more subtle nineteenth-century prejudice still remains with us. We still wish to believe that those who opposed the craze did so because in some fundamental way they were more enlightened, or more rational, or more scientific than those who accepted and even supported witch hunting. Recent anthropological research, however, stressing both the ubiquity and the intellectual integrity of a belief in witches, suggests strongly that this modern viewpoint is probably not correct. Certainly, this prejudice has seriously distorted our understanding of one important contribution to the witch debate, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Modern commentators have invested this book with an aura of scientific rationality that it ill deserves. A closer inspection, I believe, reveals an entirely different source for Scot's ideas and, more importantly, sheds some new light on what it really was that brought witch hunting in Europe to an end.

Since the eighteenth century, critics and historians have looked with embarrassment and horror at the belief in and persecution of witches in France, as well as in the rest of Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The witchcraft crisis has seemed to be either an example of the evils of traditional religious bigotry or an odd aberration in the march of progress following the Renaissance. Those who defined and propagated the learned theories of witchcraft—its reality and dangers and the need for severe persecution of witches—have been depicted almost universally as oppressive, bigoted extremists. In recent years historians have dealt with witchcraft from new points of view and have provided valuable new information and interpretations, but they still have tended to confirm the traditional images of the writers of demonological tracts. They are horrified and repulsed by the demonologists, whom they see as spokesmen for a unified oppressive upper class.

One of the more frequently cited but less well understood issues involving Eastern Orthodox interests and modern nationalism in the Balkans has been that of the so-called dedicated monasteries. Dedicated monasteries (prek Ionennye or, in Moldavian, inchinat monasteries) were those landed estates, mainly in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were entrusted to the administration of one or another of the Greek patriarchates, holy places, or monasteries of the Near East so that the profits from the land might be used to sustain Greek Orthodox institutions under Ottoman, Islamic rule. These estates, dating to the first such bequests by Danubian boyars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became the loci for monastic institutions which yielded a constant source of revenue to their Orthodox trustees in the Near East up to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Between 1918 and 1932 representatives from three black denominations— African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal—devised plans to merge into one religious body which they hoped to name the United Methodist Episcopal church. During this period the clergy and laity of these three black denominations debated the advantages and shortcomings of the Birmingham Plan of 1918 and the Pittsburgh proposals of 1927 which sought to create a single black Methodist organization. Opponents of the Birmingham and Pittsburgh agreements feared that organic union would work against their particular denominational interests and destroy their historical identity. Advocates of merger stressed the common religious and racial background of the three churches and argued that black Methodist unity would benefit the nation's black population. By 1932, however, the deep denominational divisions among black Methodists slowed the movement toward merger and undermined efforts to end the religious rivalry among these three important black institutions.