The Eighteenth-century Linguistic and Religious Hybridity in the Balkans: The Sermons against Witches and Sorceresses
The panel discusses the cultural and linguistic hybridity which characterises the didactic sermons produced in the eighteenth-century Balkan Slavonic milieu. It focuses on the collection of works against sorcery and magic practices, written by Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila Monastery. The papers examine the intricate religious hybridity presented in the sermons, in which local women-healers are stigmatised as the key agent in the deviation from Orthodoxy. The panel explores the linguistic conceptualisation of the woman and womanhood seen through the critical prism of the Christian priests, the terminology designating magic practices and their agents in these sermons, and the complexity of the language and the sources used to produce them.
