Author: Alan Charles Kors
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812217513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
A thoroughly revised, greatly expanded edition of the most important documentary history of European witchcraft ever published.
Author: Alan Charles Kors
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Middle Ages
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
Author: Jonathan Barry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521638753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.
Author: Bengt Ankarloo
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198203889
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
Based on extensive archival research, this study of European witchcraft and sorcery takes into account major new developments in the historiography of witchcraft.
Author: Richard Kieckhefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108861121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
How was magic practiced in medieval times? How did it relate to the diverse beliefs and practices that characterized this fascinating period? This much revised and expanded new edition of Magic in the Middle Ages surveys the growth and development of magic in medieval Europe. It takes into account the extensive new developments in the history of medieval magic in recent years, featuring new material on angel magic, the archaeology of magic, and the magical efficacy of words and imagination. Richard Kieckhefer shows how magic represents a crossroads in medieval life and culture, examining its relationship and relevance to religion, science, philosophy, art, literature, and politics. In surveying the different types of magic that were used, the kinds of people who practiced magic, and the reasoning behind their beliefs, Kieckhefer shows how magic served as a point of contact between the popular and elite classes, how the reality of magical beliefs is reflected in the fiction of medieval literature, and how the persecution of magic and witchcraft led to changes in the law.
Author: Brian P. Levack
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415195063
Category : Magic
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
This collection of trial records, laws, treatises, sermons, speeches, woodcuttings, paintings and literary texts illustrates how contemporaries from various periods have perceived alleged witches and their activities.
Author: Brian P. Levack
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of women and men for this offence. The trials resulted in as many as fifty thousand executions. These essays 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. They also relate these prosecutions to the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the introduction of new forms of criminal procedure, medical and scientific thought, the process of state-building, profound social and economic change, early modern patterns of gender relations, and the wave of demonic possessions that occurred in Europe at the same time. The essays survey the current state of knowledge in the field, explore the academic controversies that have arisen regarding witch beliefs and witch trials, propose new ways of studying the subject, and identify areas for future research.
Author: Darren Oldridge
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415214933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
The excellent reader offers a selection of the best historical writing on witchcraft, exploring how belief in witchcraft began, and the social and context in which this belief flourished.
Author: Robert Thurston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317865014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
Tens of thousands of people were persecuted and put to death as witches between 1400 and 1700 – the great age of witch hunts. Why did the witch hunts arise, flourish and decline during this period? What purpose did the persecutions serve? Who was accused, and what was the role of magic in the hunts? This important reassessment of witch panics and persecutions in Europeand colonial America both challenges and enhances existing interpretations of the phenomenon. Locating its origins 400 years earlier in the growing perception of threats to Western Christendom, Robert Thurston outlines the development of a ‘persecuting society’ in which campaigns against scapegoats such as heretics, Jews, lepers and homosexuals set the scene for the later witch hunts. He examines the creation of the witch stereotype and looks at how the early trials and hunts evolved, with the shift from accusatory to inquisitorial court procedures and reliance upon confessions leading to the increasing use of torture.
Author: Jeffrey Burton Russell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
All the known theories and incidents of witchcraft in Western Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century are brilliantly set forth in this engaging and comprehensive history. Building on a foundation of newly discovered primary sources and recent secondary interpretations, Jeffrey Burton Russell first establishes the facts and then explains the phenomenon of witchcraft in terms of its social and religious environment, particularly in relation to medieval heresies. Russell treats European witchcraft as a product of Christianity, grounded in heresy more than in the magic and sorcery that have existed in other societies. Skillfully blending narration with analysis, he shows how social and religious changes nourished the spread of witchcraft until large portions of medieval Europe were in its grip, "from the most illiterate peasant to the most skilled philosopher or scientist." A significant chapter in the history of ideas and their repression is illuminated by this book. Our enduring fascination with the occult gives the author's affirmation that witchcraft arises at times and in areas afflicted with social tensions a special quality of immediacy.
