From bishop to witch. The system of the sacred in early modern Terra d'Otranto

This work explores "the system of the sacred" in early modern Terra d'Otranto, a province in the south east corner of the Kingdom of Naples. It aims to determine how far the people of the area participated in Christian civilization and how far they were subject to magical beliefs and "southern Italian religiosity". The book looks at levels of culture in the region and in the broader context of the social history of the counter-Reformation in Italy. To resolve the complexities of the innate tensions between the different levels of society, the research has been placed in a wide time-span - from the end of the Council of Trent (1563) to the 1818 concordat between Naples and the Papacy.