Author: Willow Winsham
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1473870968
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
By the author of Accused comes “an entertaining as well as illuminating” history of Britain’s most infamous witch hunts and trials (Magnolia Review). With the echo of that chilling injunction, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” hundreds of people were accused and tried for witchcraft across England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With fear and suspicion rife, neighbor turned against neighbor, friend against friend, as women, men, and children alike were caught up in the deadly fervor that swept through villages. From the feared covens of Pendle Forest to the victims of the notorious and fanatical Witchfinder Generals Matthew Hopkins and John Stearns, so-called witches were suspected, accused, and dragged to trial to await judgement and face their inevitable and damnable fate. In this “interesting, informative and insightful” book, historian Willow Winsham draws on a wealth of primary sources including trial transcripts, parish, and country records, and the often sensational—and highly prejudicial—pamphlets that were published after each trial. Her exhaustive research reveals just how frightening, violent, and terribly common the scourge really was, and explores the social conditions, class divisions, and religious mania that stoked its flames (All About History).
Author: Alan MacFarlane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134644663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.
Author: David Pickering
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781445608617
Category : Tromura
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The fascinating story of one of England's darkest times.
Author: Peter Elmer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198717725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
Witchcraft, Witch-hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England constitutes a wide-ranging and original overview of the place of witchcraft and witch-hunting in the broader culture of early modern England. Based on a mass of new evidence extracted from a range of archives, both local and national, it seeks to relate the rise and decline of belief in witchcraft, alongside the legal prosecution of witches, to the wider political culture of the period. Building on the seminal work of scholars such as Stuart Clark, Ian Bostridge, and Jonathan Barry, Peter Elmer demonstrates how learned discussion of witchcraft, as well as the trials of those suspected of the crime, were shaped by religious and political imperatives in the period from the passage of the witchcraft statute of 1563 to the repeal of the various laws on witchcraft. In the process, Elmer sheds new light upon various issues relating to the role of witchcraft in English society, including the problematic relationship between puritanism and witchcraft as well as the process of decline.
Author: Gemma Hollman
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750993502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
'An important and timely book.' - Philippa Gregory Joan of Navarre was the richest woman in the land, at a time when war-torn England was penniless. Eleanor Cobham was the wife of a weak king's uncle – and her husband was about to fall from grace. Jacquetta Woodville was a personal enemy of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was about to take his revenge. Elizabeth Woodville was the widowed mother of a child king, fighting Richard III for her children's lives. In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives of these four unique women, looking at how rumours of witchcraft brought them to their knees in a time when superstition and suspicion was rife.
Author: Wallace Notestein
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465583580
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
Author: John Callow
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788314395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
"On the mornng of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Within hours, his household had convinced itself that the bird was sent by witches to destroy their lives. As a result of these allegations, three women from Bideford -- Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles -- came to be identified as witches and a full-scale witch hunt shook the town. Ultimately, they were condemned to hang, as the last group of women to be executed for the crime in English history. Never more than half-forgotten, the memory of these three women has been transformed from hatred to regret, and from regret into celebration. The horror of their judicial murder was discussed in the Parliamentary debates that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, while their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by women far beyond the wire at Greenham Common. This book explores this remarkable reversal of fate and the tale of want, sorcery and savage persecution that created the Bideford Witches." -- p. 4 of cover
Author: James Sharpe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317881303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
With the renewed interest in the history of witches and witchcraft, this timely book provides an introduction to this fascinating topic, informed by the main trends of new thinking on the subject. Beginning with a discussion of witchcraft in the early modern period, and charting the witch panics that took place at this time, the author goes on to look at the historical debate surrounding the causes of the legal persecution of witches. Contemporary views of witchcraft put forward by judges, theological writers and the medical profession are examined, as is the place of witchcraft in the popular imagination. Jim Sharpe also looks at the gender dimensions of the witch persecution, and the treatment of witchcraft in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Supported by a range of compelling documents, the book concludes with an exploration of why witch panics declined in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century.
Author: James Sharpe
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812216332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
The first comprehensive scholarly history of witchcraft in England in over eighty years.
Author: Charlotte-Rose Millar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134769814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.
