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.

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.

Witchcraft, Gender, and Society in Early Modern Germany

Witchcraft, Gender, and Society in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Jonathan Bryan Durrant
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004160930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Using the example of Eichstatt, this book challenges current witchcraft historiography by arguing that the gender of the witch-suspect was a product of the interrogation process and that the stable communities affected by persecution did not collude in its escalation.

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.

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: 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.

Shaman of Oberstdorf

Shaman of Oberstdorf PDF Author: Wolfgang Behringer
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
"Shaman of Oberstdorf tells the fascinating story of a sixteenth-century mountain village caught in a panic of its own making. Four hundred years ago the Bavarian alpine town of Oberstdorf, surrounded by the towering peaks of the Vorarlberg, was awash in legends and rumors of prophets and healers, of spirits and specters, of witches and soothsayers. The book focuses on the life of a horse wrangler named Chonrad Stoeckhlin [1549-1587], whose extraordinary visions of the afterlife and enthusiastic practice of the occult eventually led to his death-and to the death of a number of village women-for crimes of witchcraft. Wolfgang Behringer is one of the premier historians of German witchcraft, not only because of his mastery of the subject at the regional level, but because he also writes movingly, forcefully, and with an eye for the telling anecdote."--Amazon.ca.

The Witchcraft Reader

The Witchcraft Reader PDF 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.

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes] PDF Author: Richard M. Golden Director, Jewish Studies Program
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851095128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1310

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Book Description
The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430–1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama—witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages.

History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe PDF Author: William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description


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.

"Evil People"

Author: Johannes Dillinger
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813928389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons. Narrowing his focus to two specific regions—Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier—he provides a nuanced explanation of how the tensions between state power and communalism determined the course of witch hunts that claimed over 1,300 lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Dillinger finds that, far from representing the centralizing aggression of emerging early states against local cultures, witch hunts were almost always driven by members of the middling and lower classes in cities and villages, and they were stopped only when early modern states acquired the power to control their localities. Situating his study in the context of a pervasive magical worldview that embraced both orthodox Christianity and folk belief, Dillinger shows that, in some cases, witch trials themselves were used as magical instruments, designed to avert threats of impending divine wrath. "Evil People" describes a two-century evolution in which witch hunters who liberally bestowed the label "evil people" on others turned into modern images of evil themselves. In the original German, "Evil People" won the Friedrich Spee Award as an outstanding contribution to the history of witchcraft.