Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 1

Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 1

Author: Frederick H. Cryer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2001-12-13

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780812217858

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This volume, chronologically the first in the six-volume series, deals with the societies of the ancient Near East.


Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4

Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4

Author: Bengt Ankerloo

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2002-08-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1441127437

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The fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was a period of witchcraft prosecutions throughout Europe and modern scholars have now devoted a huge amount of research to these episodes. This volume will attempt to bring this work together by summarising the history of the trials in a new way - according to the types of legal systems involved. Other topics covered will be the continued practical use made of magic, the elaboration of demonological theories about witchcraft and magic, and the further development of scientific interests in natural magic through the 'Neoplatonic' and 'Hermetic' period.Amongst the topics included here are Superstition and Belief in high and popular culture, the place of Medicine, Witchcraft survivals in art and literature, and the survival of Persecution.


Witchcraft and Magic in Europe

Witchcraft and Magic in Europe

Author: Bengt Ankarloo

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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The six-volume set Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, of which this volume is the fifth, provides a scholarly survey of the supernatural beliefs of Europeans from ancient times to the present. Contributors combine political, legal, and social historical approaches with a critical synthesis of cultural anthropology, historical psychology, and gender studies. With the end of witch trials in the 18th century, the writers chart the process of and reasons for the decriminalization of witchcraft, but also challenge the widespread assumption that Europe became "disenchanted." Presented here are surveys of the social role of witchcraft, as well as a full treatment Victorian supernaturalism and the continued importance of witchcraft and magic as topics of debate among intellectuals and other writers. Three authors contribute three extensive articles: "The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions" by Brain P. Levack (U. of Texas); "Witchcraft After the Witch-Trials" by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (U. of Amsterdam); and "Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought" by Roy Porter (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Beyond the Witch Trials

Beyond the Witch Trials

Author: Owen Davies

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2004-11-27

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780719066603

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Beyond the witch trials provides an important collection of essays on the nature of witchcraft and magic in European society during the Enlightenment. The book is innovative not only because it pushes forward the study of witchcraft into the eighteenth century, but because it provides the reader with a challenging variety of different approaches and sources of information. The essays, which cover England, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, Scotland, Finland and Sweden, examine the experience of and attitudes towards witchcraft from both above and below. While they demonstrate the continued widespread fear of witches amongst the masses, they also provide a corrective to the notion that intellectual society lost interest in the question of witchcraft. While witchcraft prosecutions were comparatively rare by the mid-eighteenth century, the intellectual debate did no disappear; it either became more private or refocused on such issues as possession. The contributors come from different academic disciplines, and by borrowing from literary theory, archaeology and folklore they move beyond the usual historical perspectives and sources. They emphasise the importance of studying such themes as the aftermath of witch trials, the continued role of cunning-folk in society, and the nature of the witchcraft discourse in different social contexts. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the decline of the European witch trials and the continued importance of witchcraft and magic during the Enlightenment. More generally it will appeal to those with a lively interest in the cultural history of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the first of a two-volume set of books looking at the phenomenon of witchcraft, magic and the occult in Europe since the seventeenth century.


Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th-Century Europe

Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th-Century Europe

Author: Geoffrey Scarre

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1996-08-15

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9780333399330

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In his study of witchcraft and magic in 16th and 17th century Europe, Geoffrey Scarre provides an examination of the theoretical and intellectual rationales which made prosecution for the crime acceptable to the continent's judiciaries.


Witchcraft continued

Witchcraft continued

Author: Willem De Blecourt

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1526137976

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The study of witchcraft accusations in Europe during the period after the end of the witch trials is still in its infancy. Witches were scratched in England, swum in Germany, beaten in the Netherlands and shot in France. The continued widespread belief in witchcraft and magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France has received considerable academic attention. The book discusses the extent and nature of witchcraft accusations in the period and provides a general survey of the published work on the subject for an English audience. It explores the presence of magical elements in everyday life during the modern period in Spain. The book provides a general overview of vernacular magical beliefs and practices in Italy from the time of unification to the present, with particular attention to how these traditions have been studied. By functioning as mechanisms of social ethos and control, narratives of magical harm were assured a place at the very heart of rural Finnish social dynamics into the twentieth century. The book draws upon over 300 narratives recorded in rural Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provide information concerning the social relations, tensions and strategies that framed sorcery and the counter-magic employed against it. It is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania.


The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe

The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe

Author: E. Bever

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-06-11

Total Pages: 643

ISBN-13: 0230582117

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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 and Magic in Europe, Volume 4

Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 4

Author: Stuart Clark

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0485890046

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The fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was a period of witchcraft prosecutions throughout Europe and modern scholars have now devoted a huge amount of research to these episodes. This volume will attempt to bring this work together by summarising the history of the trials in a new way - according to the types of legal systems involved. Other topics covered will be the continued practical use made of magic, the elaboration of demonological theories about witchcraft and magic, and the further development of scientific interests in natural magic through the 'Neoplatonic' and 'Hermetic' period.Amongst the topics included here are Superstition and Belief in high and popular culture, the place of Medicine, Witchcraft survivals in art and literature, and the survival of Persecution.>


Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Author: Stephen A. Mitchell

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-06-06

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0812203712

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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.