The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: E. Bever
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230582117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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Book Description
Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: E. Bever
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230582117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 643

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria

Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria PDF Author: Wolfgang Behringer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521525107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of witchcraft in modern-day Bavaria between 1300 and 1800.

Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe

Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Kathryn A. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317138341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages PDF Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.

Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe

Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: A. Rowlands
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230248373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Men – as accused witches, witch-hunters, werewolves and the demonically possessed – are the focus of analysis in this collection of essays by leading scholars of early modern European witchcraft. The gendering of witch persecution and witchcraft belief is explored through original case-studies from England, Scotland, Italy, Germany and France.

The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America

The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America PDF Author: Brian P. Levack
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199578168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
A collection of essays from leading scholars in the field that collectively study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.

Languages of Witchcraft

Languages of Witchcraft PDF Author: Stuart Clark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 033398529X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Different conceptions of the world and of reality have made witchcraft possible in some societies and impossible in others. How did the people of early modern Europe experience it and what was its place in their culture? The new essays in this collection illustrate the latest trends in witchcraft research and in cultural history in general. After three decades in which the social analysis of witchcraft accusations has dominated the subject, they turn instead to its significance and meaning as a cultural phenomenon - to the 'languages' of witchcraft, rather than its causes. As a result, witchcraft seems less startling than it once was, yet more revealing of the world in which it occurred.

Between the Living and the Dead

Between the Living and the Dead PDF Author: ?va P¢cs
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 963911619X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The author, one of the most highly respected scholars of historical anthropology, has undertaken extensive research on folk beliefs related to communication with the supernatural sphere. In this book, she examines the systems of such communication known by early modern Hungarians, and the role these systems played in the everyday life of the village. New types of mediators are identified such as "the neighborhood witch, " the healing witch, and the demons seen in dreams. Representing a major contribution to the most up-to-date international research, Eva Pocs draws on significant East European material and literature not previously coordinated with that from the West. In so doing, she makes a valuable contribution to a subject that has recently attracted the attention of several leading scholars.

Witch Craze

Witch Craze PDF Author: Lyndal Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300119831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A powerful account of witches, crones, and the societies that make them From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches--of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops--and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond. Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families, and tribulations. She also explores the psychology of witch-hunting, explaining why it was mostly older women that were the victims of witch crazes, why they confessed to crimes, and how the depiction of witches in art and literature has influenced the characterization of elderly women in our own culture.

Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 1500-1800

Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, 1500-1800 PDF Author: W. Wyporska
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137384212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This comprehensive study examines Polish demonology in relation to witchcraft trials in Wielkopolska, revealing the witch as a force for both good and evil. It explores the use of witchcraft, the nature of accusations and the role of gender.