When a close friend dies from an apparent suicide just before his family is brutally murdered, a CIA agent travels from Europe to America in search of a killer whose methods have been borrowed from Native American mysticism.

This set of twenty-four lectures examines aspects of elite and popular culture in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, focusing on the way in which men and women seeking to explain, order, and escape the terrors of their lives embraced transcendental religious experiences, dreamed of and worked for the coming of the apocalypse, and seized on a widespread belief in witchcraft and Satanism.