Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom Book

Cohn spends a great deal of time in deconstructing the work of other scholars, and although I was pretty much expressly forbidden from doing that in my dissertation (and I still don't quite understand why), I enjoy that kind of analysis, and Cohn is very good at it. His intellectual project is largely about the ways in which those arguments got constructed. Cohn is taking apart the myths modern scholars have invented and perpetuated about the origins of the European witch-hunts. His focus is the way that European commentators, scholarly and otherwise, chose stories that they wished to be true, and folded, spindled, and mutilated their source material until it seemed to be telling that story. It is not an accident that one of Cohn's other books is on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Warrant For Genocide: The Myth Of The Jewish World Conspiracy And The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion), which is one of the most ineradicable, evil fictions in the history of Western thought. Cohn emphasizes the necessity of going back to the primary sources and paying attention to what they actually say, rather than our preconceived notions of what they should say.