How long does it take to read Ecstasies?
Ecstasies by Carlo Ginzburg takes about 6 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1989. 352 pages, about 96,800 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 15 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, men and women in Europe accused of witchcraft told how they were taken to the Sabbath—the nocturnal gathering before the devil at which they took part in orgies and obscene parodies of Christian rites, eating corpses and casting spells. These accounts, usually extracted by torture, are regarded by most historians today as the products of the inquisitors' own obsessions. Ecstasies is the culmination of Carlo Ginsburg's longstanding fascination with popular myths that are shared across different cultures and eras. An expert in the field of microhistory—the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history—Ginsburg here compares and follows the stories and their forms, and gradually they begin to weave together into new and startling patterns. Why, for example, in 1321 were Jews and lepers the object of frenzied persecution, accused of conspiring to take over the French kingdom? What do Oedipus, Achilles, and Cinderella have in common? The answers to these questions and more lead to compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across the European continent for thousands of years.
Subjects: Sabbat, Witchcraft, Sabbath, History, Witchcraft, europe, Historia
