Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

Author: Jonathan Barry

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-03-12

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780521638753

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Ruin of All Witches

The Ruin of All Witches

Author: Malcolm Gaskill

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2024-08-20

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0593467108

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. “The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing." —Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf Hall In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams and visions proliferate. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary. Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in omens, curses and enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.


Rebel Witch

Rebel Witch

Author: Kelly-Ann Maddox

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1786784688

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A truly contemporary take on how to be a witch, Rebel Witch is an antidote to the cookie-cutter witchcraft agenda that gives a new perspective on the craft, asking each reader to create a powerful, personalized practice that taps into the current mood of female empowerment and spiritual rebellion. Rebel Witch reminds witches of the wondrous opportunity to jump into experimentation and invent something wild and individual, a practice shaped by their individual personality and life journey, rather than allowing themselves to be spoon-fed. It challenges witches to design a nurturing practice that is truly theirs. There's information about all the elements of the craft, from energy raising, sacred space creation and receiving signs to casting spells, holding rituals, scrying, potions and much more … crucially, in each case the topic is discussed from an exciting contemporary perspective. So, when Kelly-Ann talks about sacred texts, she stresses that you can choose the texts that resonate with you – so why not Alice in Wonderland or Narnia? Maybe you want to move away from the traditional Wheel of the Year and create your own divisions? Instead of honouring a traditional deity, why not construct your own, choosing elements from rock stars, movie icons or fictional heroes? Or embody magical signs in your clothing and jewellery? Creativity and experimentation are encouraged, with tips to help the reader to be inventive. A curious reader with a desire to create an inspired, deeply personal path and free themselves from conformity will finish the book ready to take action and make magick happen!


The Witches Are Coming

The Witches Are Coming

Author: Lindy West

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 031644989X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this wickedly funny cultural critique, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and Hulu series Shrill exposes misogyny in the #MeToo era. This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you. From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one. In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history. West writes, "We were just a hair's breadth from electing America's first female president to succeed America's first black president. We weren't done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog's whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, 'If I can't have you, no one can'—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House." We cannot understand how we got here‚—how the land of the free became Trump's America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact-checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.


Witchcraft in Early North America

Witchcraft in Early North America

Author: Alison Games

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2010-10-16

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1442203595

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games's engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents begin with first encounters between European missionaries and Native Americans in New France and New Mexico, and they conclude with witch hunts among Native Americans in the years of the early American republic. The documents—some of which have never been published previously—include excerpts from trials in Virginia, New Mexico, and Massachusetts; accounts of outbreaks in Salem, Abiquiu (New Mexico), and among the Delaware Indians; descriptions of possession; legal codes; and allegations of poisoning by slaves. The documents raise issues central to legal, cultural, social, religious, and gender history. This fascinating topic and the book’s broad geographic and chronological coverage make this book ideally suited for readers interested in new approaches to colonial history and the history of witchcraft.


This Coven Won't Break

This Coven Won't Break

Author: Isabel Sterling

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 045148035X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Isabel Sterling's gripping sequel to These Witches Don't Burn is equal parts sweet romance and thrilling mystery. Hannah Walsh just wants to finish high school. It’s her senior year, so she should be focusing on classes and hanging out with her new girlfriend, Morgan. But it turns out surviving a murderous Witch Hunter doesn’t exactly qualify as a summer vacation, and now the rest of the Hunters seem more intent on destroying her magic than ever. Of course, Hannah knows a thing or two about juggling romance and recon missions, so when she learns the Hunters have armed themselves with a serum capable of taking out entire covens at once, she doesn’t think twice about helping. Hannah could be the best shot at finally defeating the Hunters. After all, she’s one of the only Witches to escape a Hunter with her magic intact. Or so everyone believes… As the Hunters get dangerously close to their final target, and Hannah is at risk of losing everything she’s ever known, will all the witches in Salem be enough to stop an enemy determined to destroy magic for good?


Witches of America

Witches of America

Author: Alex Mar

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books

Published: 2015-10-20

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0374709114

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Witches are gathering." When most people hear the word "witches," they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, witchcraft is a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day magic. Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon. This sprawling magical community compels Mar to confront what she believes is possible-or hopes might be. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.


Eternity

Eternity

Author: Maggie Shayne

Publisher: Oliver-Heber books

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A rich, sensual, bewitching adventure of good vs. evil with love as the prize.” ~Publisher’s Weekly on ETERNITY WINNER: RT Book Reviews: Reviewers Choice Award WINNER: Reviewer's Listserv: Best Paranormal Romance Award WINNER: New Jersey Romance Writers: Golden Leaf Award One of BN.com's "Top 12 Reads of the Year" 300 years ago, Raven St. James was hanged for witchcraft. But she revives among the dead to find herself alive. She is an Immortal High Witch, one of the light. A note from her mother warns that there are others, those of the Dark, who preserve their own lives by taking the hearts of those like her. Duncan Wallace’s forbidden love for the secretive lass costs him his life. 300 years later, he loves her again, tormented by hazy memories of a past that can’t be real. She tells him of another lifetime, claims to be immortal. Though he knows she’s deluded, he can’t stay away. And the Dark Witch after her heart is far closer than either of them know. If you liked OUTLANDER, or HIGHLANDER, you will LOVE this series. Don’t miss Book 2, INFINITY or Book 3, DESTINY. “A hauntingly beautiful story of a love that endures through time itself.” ~New York Times Bestselling Author, Kay Hooper “This captivating story of a love that reaches across the centuries, becomes as immortal as the lover’s themselves, resonates with timeless passion, powerful magic, and haunting heartbreak.” ~BN.com’s official review