San Antonio College Library

Spanning the period from 400 to 1700, the second edition of Witchcraft in Europe assembles nearly twice as many primary documents as the first, many newly translated, along with new illustrations that trace the development of witch-beliefs from late Mediterranean antiquity through the Enlightenment. Trial records, inquisitors' reports, eyewitness statements, and witches' confessions, along with striking contemporary illustrations depicting the career...

"Male witches in early modern Europe provides a critique of historians' assumptions about witch-hunting and the many explanations for the origins of this complex and perplexing phenomenon. The authors insist on the centrality of gender, tradition and ideas about witches in the construction of the witch as a dangerous figure. In doing so, they challenge the marginalisation of male witches by many historians, in particular those writing with a feminist...

"From the wicked witch of children's stories to Halloween and present-day Wiccan groups, witches and witchcraft still fascinate observers of Western culture. Witches were believed to affect climatological catastrophes, put spells on their neighbors, and cavort with the devil. In early modern Europe and the Americas, witches and witch-hunting were an integral part of everyday life, touching major events such as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution,...

This book illuminates the way in which people in the early modern era framed their ideas about the Creator and the created universe in terms of magic. This perspective informed and molded theology, philosophy, the law, medicine, and the sciences, as well as offered practical help with the problems of everyday life. The study of witchcraft (as a particular manifestation of this mental world), helps to illustrate many of the key concepts which governed...

Includes "surveys of the social role of witchcraft in European communities, as well as a full treatment of Victorian supernaturalism and of the continued importance of witchcraft and magic as topics of debate among intellectuals and others writers."--Cover.

The figure of the witch still has the ability to exert a powerful fascination on the modern mind. The vision of the elderly crone begging for charity at the crossroads, an object of fear and revulsion for her local community, has combined with the memory of prolonged judicial persecution and oppression to inspire contemporary movements as far removed from each other as Wiccans and women's liberation. In tackling such an emotive issue, where misogyny...