You might expect to find grimoires -collections of magic spells, recipes and charms - on the shelves of medieval mystics or in the pages of Harry Potter books. But as social historian Owen Davies shows, they are not confined to history and fantasy.rnIn the 1960s, for example, the German Lutheran minister Kurt Koch waged war against what he called the "flood of magical conjuration which washes the Alps", namely the superstitions he had found across southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. To his dismay, such beliefs were promoted in cheap, mass-produced grimoires such as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses - a title that had circulated in Europe since at least the eighteenth century.
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