Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria

Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria

Author: Wolfgang Behringer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-11-13

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780521525107

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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

Author: Jonathan Bryan Durrant

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 9004160930

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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

Author: Lyndal Roper

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780300119831

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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.


Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]

Author: Richard M. Golden Director, Jewish Studies Program

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-01-30

Total Pages: 1310

ISBN-13: 1851095128

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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.


Shaman of Oberstdorf

Shaman of Oberstdorf

Author: Wolfgang Behringer

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780813918532

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"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

Author: Darren Oldridge

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9780415214933

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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.


Witch Hunts in Europe and America

Witch Hunts in Europe and America

Author: William E. Burns

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2003-10-30

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0313093822

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From early sorcery trials of the 14th century—associated primarily with French and Papal courts—to the witch executions of the late 18th century, this book's entries cover witch-hunting in individual countries, major witch trials from Chelmsford, England, to Salem, Massachusetts, and significant individuals from famous witches to the devout persecutors. Entries such as the evil eye, familiars, and witch-finders cover specific aspects of the witch-hunting process, while entries on writers and modern interpretations provide insight into the current thinking on early modern witch hunts. From the wicked witch of children's stories to Halloween and present-day Wiccan groups, witches and witchcraft still fascinate observers of Western culture. Witches were believed to affect climatological catastrophes, put spells on their neighbors, and cavort with the devil. In early modern Europe and the Americas, witches and witch-hunting were an integral part of everyday life, touching major events such as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, as well as politics, law, medicine, and culture.


Witches and Witch-Hunts

Witches and Witch-Hunts

Author: Wolfgang Behringer

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2004-09-03

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780745627182

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In this major new book, Wolfgang Behringer surveys the phenomenon of witchcraft past and present. Drawing on the latest historical and anthropological findings, Behringer sheds new light on the history of European witchcraft, while demonstrating that witch-hunts are not simply part of the European past. Although witch-hunts have long since been outlawed in Europe, other societies have struggled with the idea that witchcraft does not exist. As Behringer shows, witch-hunts continue to pose a major problem in Africa and among tribal people in America, Asia and Australia. The belief that certain people are able to cause harm by supernatural powers endures throughout the world today. Wolfgang Behringer explores the idea of witchcraft as an anthropological phenomenon with a historical dimension, aiming to outline and to understand the meaning of large-scale witchcraft persecutions in early modern Europe and in present-day Africa. He deals systematically with the belief in witchcraft and the persecution of witches, as well as with the process of outlawing witch-hunts. He examines the impact of anti-witch-hunt legislation in Europe, and discusses the problems caused in societies where European law was imposed in colonial times. In conclusion, the relationship between witches old and new is assessed. This book will make essential reading for all those interested in the history and anthropology of witchcraft and magic.


Imagining the Witch

Imagining the Witch

Author: Laura Kounine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0192524801

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Imagining the Witch explores emotions, gender, and selfhood through the lens of witch-trials in early modern Germany. Witch-trials were clearly a gendered phenomenon, but witchcraft was not a uniquely female crime. While women constituted approximately three quarters of those tried for witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, a significant minority were men. Witchcraft was also a crime of unbridled passion: it centred on the notion that one person's emotions could have tangible and deadly physical consequences. Yet it is also true that not all suspicions of witchcraft led to a formal accusation, and not all witch-trials led to the stake. Indeed, just over half the total number put on trial for witchcraft in early modern Europe were executed. In order to understand how early modern people imagined the witch, we must first begin to understand how people understood themselves and each other; this can help us to understand how the witch could be a member of the community, living alongside their accusers, yet inspire such visceral fear. Through an examination of case studies of witch-trials that took place in the early modern Lutheran duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Laura Kounine examines how the community, church, and the agents of the law sought to identify the witch, and the ways in which ordinary men and women fought for their lives in an attempt to avoid the stake. The study further explores the visual and intellectual imagination of witchcraft in this period in order to piece together why witchcraft could be aligned with such strong female stereotypes on the one hand, but also be imagined as a crime that could be committed by any human, whether young or old, male or female. By moving beyond stereotypes of the witch, Imagining the Witch argues that understandings of what constituted witchcraft and the 'witch' appear far more contested and unstable than has previously been suggested. It also suggests new ways of thinking about early modern selfhood which moves beyond teleological arguments about the development of the 'modern' self. Indeed, it is the trial process itself that created the conditions for a diverse range of people to reflect on, and give meaning, to emotions, gender, and the self in early modern Lutheran Germany.