They Flew

“This book is a life-time passion project and an academic game-changer. Eire engages in extensive primary textual work, especially in the Latin, Italian, and Spanish sources, practices the historian’s bracketing of the obvious truth questions (well, did these people fly or not?), and sincerely goes down all of the skeptical pathways. Still, it is finally very difficult to shake the sense that Eire’s deeper conclusion is secreted, or just shouted, in the title: They Flew. And that, well, that changes everything.”—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities “Eire has once again done the impossible: written a book with the pace of a thriller and the scope of a historical monograph. He has historically unraveled levitations and bilocations, where the temporal merges with the spiritual: Newton’s gravity with Teresa’s ecstasies. Specialists will find deep insights and general readers will enter a new fascinating universe.”—Jaume Aurell, author of Medieval Self-Coronations: The History and Symbolism of a Ritual “With sophistication and subtlety, sensitivity and sympathy, Carlos Eire follows the unlikely thread of abundant testimonies about human levitation and bilocation to disclose patterns in the lavish religious tapestry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic Europe.  His book indeed “vivifies the past,” but it also invites self-examination about cocksure assumptions and uncritical dogmatisms in the present.  A profound meditation on religion, history, and the meanings of modernity, They Flew shows that a history of the impossible is not just possible—it has now been realized.”—Brad S. Gregory, author of The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society