As the subtitle of Eire’s book suggests, his book is a history of phenomena that we “know” are impossible – especially unaided human levitation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. Contemporaries of the time were not quite sure what to make of these human flights either, which makes them all the more interesting from a historical perspective.
In an early modern European society on the cusp of the scientific revolution, there were plenty of skeptics who wanted to see such miracles with their own eyes before they would believe – and they did. Some of the human flights were conducted outdoors in front of numerous witnesses, a phenomenon that Eire says was probably impossible to fake with any of the technology available at the time.
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