Will I love They Flew?

Impossible accounts of saintly miracles, witch hunts, and demon-possession are "medieval," right? Wrong—or not quite. The fever pitch of these phenomena struck in early modernity—precisely when Newton and Descartes were alive and kicking—and not merely among the illiterate unwashed but among the most learned elites of the age.

Eire, an award-winning historian, takes the reader on a fascinating expedition through the most famous (and infamous) levitators and bilocators of that era and the voluminous documentary witnesses to their feats. At the end he brings the pile-driver. In the 16th and 17th centuries, "everybody knew" that levitation was real. How did… show more.

I confess to being a nonfiction reader, and that's what's so striking about this book. Carlos Eire is a respected historian. They Flew, published by a mainstream university press (Yale), offers a no-nonsense, historical rendition of saints that were reported to have levitated, or outright flown. Like others who've addressed this topic seriously, Eire makes the point that we can't simply dismiss historical records because they don't match our modern expectations. This is a fairly big book, and it takes a lot for me to select a long book as my favorite for the year, but this one did so.… show more.