CUNNING

di Asif Shah (Autore)

, exsUS4vynmxd379XN4yO (Narratore)

ASIF SHAH, 2026

CUNNING tells the buried history of the cunning folk — the village healers, midwives, charmers, and folk magicians who served as the world's unlicensed medical and spiritual system for over a thousand years, and traces how witch trials, medical guilds, and the Reformation erased them almost entirely. Opening with the 1576 trial and execution of Bessie Dunlop in Scotland, the book uses her deposition — a portrait of ordinary professional competence mistaken for witchcraft — as the lens for a global investigation spanning five phases: Foundation, Mastery, Fracture, Freefall, and The Loop. Drawing on cunning-folk traditions from Wales, Korea, West Africa, the Andes, Japan, and beyond, it documents what these healers actually did (herbal medicine, midwifery, divination, un-bewitching), how their knowledge worked (some of it verifiably — foxglove became digitalis, folk obstetrics saved lives), and how the same hands that cured could also curse. The middle chapters track the systematic destruction of the trade: the medical guilds' enclosure of unlicensed healing, the Reformation's theological war on competing sacred labor, the witch-hunt manuals that turned midwives into demons, and the paid contractors who profited from persecution — using real trial transcripts from Pendle, Würzburg, and the Basque country. The back half follows what survived: diaspora traditions like hoodoo, curanderismo, and braucherei, and traces the trade's ghost into the present — the wellness industry, AI health apps, and the informal economy of practitioners people call when the licensed system fails them. CUNNING argues the cunning folk were neither witches nor quacks but professionals — and that the modern world, having spent four centuries proving them unnecessary, is now quietly rebuilding their office in chrome.

• Autore: Asif Shah
• Narratore: , exsUS4vynmxd379XN4yO
• Durata in (hh:mm:ss): 14:13:21
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: ASIF SHAH
• Lingua: Inglese
• EAN: 1230010210017