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In the editorial history of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), one of its signal events was the landmark edition published in London in 1738. The result of an unusual Anglo-Spanish collaboration commissioned by an English nobleman, the project may have been set in motion by his exchange with a Hanoverian princess newly arrived in Great Britain. This major editorial undertaking and two strong personalities -- one directly involved, the other only possibly pertinent -- occupy the following pages. The legendary Merlin the sorcerer plays a dual role and links the two, as a personality in the Quixote and as the name of a collection of books of fiction that later became the site of an amusement-park-style spectacle at a royal London residence. These intertwined stories reveal how canonical literature and popular legend can serve the twin pursuits of cultural prestige and historical standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Between 1987 and 2015, Terry Pratchett published eleven novels and one short story within his Discworld universe that came to be known as his “Witches” sub-series. In these texts he engaged with the narrative imperatives, preoccupations, and tropes which together make up the consensus fantasy universe, and those deeper mythologies and legendarium with which the author necessarily has an intertextual relationship. This paper focuses upon one aspect of that consensus universe, which is the difference between male and female magical practitioners—witches and wizards—in the fantasy canon, and how Pratchett sought to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of the genre in his own work. The primary means by which Pratchett achieved this, I have argued, is by exposing the fictionality of these stereotypes through parody and satire, whilst at the same time embedding these same tropes within his own universe as the building blocks of his secondary world. The period during which the “Witches” novels were produced is roughly commensurate with a timeframe in which the range of academic and activist positions which are broadly regarded as constituting secondwave feminism were giving rise to, being overtaken by (or in some cases were in direct conflict with) a multiplicity of newer scholarly approaches which have been described as comprising a third wave. Whilst it would be wrong-footed to attempt to position Pratchett’s ‘Witches” novels as a direct engagement with any of these theories, we can see in his writing an awareness of the shifting landscape of feminist thought, with themes in the earliest novels that take up ideas of equality of access similar to those that dominated first-wave discourse, as well as a growing cast of characters and range of thematic concerns that come to reflect the divergence of second and third-wave debates about biological sex and gender identity. Although Pratchett’s work does not itself constitute feminist scholarship, I have argued that through his engagement with some of the evolving ideas about women and their relative position in society, his “Witches” novels can be read as an attempt to change the way that women are portrayed in fantasy literature by intersecting with ideas that are external to it. In this respect, and by interpreting his work in terms of de Beauvoir’s archetypal stereotypes and her theory of Other, as well as Grosz’s work on feminine corporeality and Butler’s ideas of gender performativity, I have sought to illuminate how Pratchett’s fiction not only sits within a wider body of feminist discourse but can also bear the weight of such critical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

A literary criticism of the book "Roverandom" by J. R. R. Tolkien is presented. It outlines the adventures of a young dog, Rover. In the story, an irritable wizard turns Rover into a toy, and Rover goes to the Moon and under the sea in order to find the wizard again to turn him back into a normal-sized dog. more...

The paper analyzes the concepts of 'demon' and 'wizard' and the changes undergone by them from the 14th to 17th centuries in Western Europe. Both concepts were re-conceptualized into de Catholic Church and have been closely bound together in the Western religious thought during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The analysis is focused on two aspects: on the one hand, the increasing presence of demon in the studied period, and its relation with wizards, men and women, in order to help them in their sorceries, but always as an exchange of helping demon in its battle against God. On the other hand, the paper analyzes the many types of female wizards and the kinds of sorceries that these made, like to provoke sickness and healing, to cause death, or to foresee the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

An essay is presented on the author's ideas for liminal spaces, faces, and facing things to illuminate the motif co-created by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien called the "Materialist Magician." He argues the essence of understanding the artistic agendas of Lewis and Tolkien that relate to their war experiences. The author defines the "Materialist Magician" as wizatds of the past and scientists whose theories and inventions shape the future. more...

In the early post-independence period in Burma, a large number of hierarchical, initiatory, and secretive esoteric congregations were founded by charismatic leaders in urban areas. These attracted many devotees, including representatives of the state. The relationship between the state and the esoteric congregations was tense, especially during the rule of the military governments (1962-2011), and the state sought to suppress the congregations in the early 1980s. In this article, one esoteric congregation--the ariyā-weizzā organization--is taken as an example of these congregations. First, the article demonstrates how the members of this congregation view themselves as performing the state, and shows what kind of power they perceive themselves to exercise. Second, in socio-political terms, the article seeks to explain why tensions emerged between the state and the esoteric congregations, and it demonstrates how these congregations have contributed to performing the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

The Reading of documents of ecclesiastical source produced during Middle Ages provides the very clear percept of the presence of various categories of mediators between the natural world and mystical forces, in the daily routine of the western men. On the one hand, there were the wizards, expert supposedly endowed with special knowledge, who used as a resource various forms of exercise of divinatory arts and techniques of manipulation of elements of nature. During Middle Ages the ecclesiastical discourse searched opposing to their actions the knowledge and the achievements of the 'true' agents of sacred one, those who were organized in an ordo apart of the rest of society, ordoclericorum, enjoyed the privilege of access to the reading and writing of Latin. The concept of the clergy with which the Christian Church intended to qualify their members brought implicitly a cultural value which unified and distinguished them from the first ones. However, in the eyes of the people, the magical agents, as much as the clergies were endowed with specialized knowledge which granted to them the exercise of strange powers to the common mortals and made it possible for them controlling impersonal forces capable of altering the course of events. It is our intention to discuss the relationship between language, knowledge, and mystical Mediation in the current representations of magical agents and clergies in Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Analyzes a collection of Coptic papyri which appears to have been a hoard or library of ancient magical texts, produced by five copyists sometime in the fourth through seventh centuries and originating from an unknown location in Egypt. Nature and extent of the wizard's hoard; Codicological and textual relations; Magical book and its two texts. more...

Comments on the works of author Michelle Stephen with emphasis on her cultural construction of sorcery. Reference to her work on the Mekeo culture and society; Interpretation of the work; Perception of Stephen in regards to sorcerers. more...