Witches, witchcraft and witch craze Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Early Modern History, Nordic Studies, Masculinity Studies, Nordic History

Organisé par David Bardey (doctorant en histoire médiévale, UMR6298 ARTEHIS) et Rudi Beaulant (docteur en histoire médiévale, UMR6298 ARTEHIS).

- by Maxime Gelly-Perbellini and +1
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- Medieval History, European Witch Trials, Witchcraft (Magic), Witchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion)
- by Cephas M . Dapuri
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- Human Rights Law, African History, Witch Hunt Studies, Crime fiction

A short piece on the folklore surrounding bees - both honeybees and bumblebees

- by Ceri Norman
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- Ancient Egyptian Religion, Mythology And Folklore, Entomology, Folklore

Across early modern Europe, countless people were charged as witches, often subject to brutal torture and gruesome deaths. Within this, most witches were female, only in select areas, such as Russia, did male witches outnumber female witches. This is as witchcraft was a gendered crime. The theological construction of witchcraft pointed to the female sex as the weaker gender. Eve being the first woman to be tempted by the Devil served as a precedent for female weakness. On a local level, the anxieties surrounding childbirth created heightened tensions leading to women accusing other women of witchcraft. This was exacerbated by the economic distress caused by the Little Ice Age resulting in an increase in both child malnutrition and crop damage. This gave room for natural misfortunes to be pinned on witchcraft, magic that could only be enacted by a female witch. The trial of Walpurga Hausmännin provides a perfect example of how these elements of early modern society contributed to the way in which gender played a role in the persecution of witches.

- by Heidi Rimke
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- Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Sociology, Cultural Studies

During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the word "beguine" was used by women to identify themselves as members of a wide-spread and influential women's movement. The same term was used by their detractors and overt opponents, with the highly charged negative meaning of "heretic." The etymology of the term “beguine” and ultimate origins of the movement have never been satisfactorily explained.

- by Roslyn Frank
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- Feminist Sociology, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Medieval History

Witches’ Sabbath offers an overload of the emblematic characteristics which were attributed to witches during the early modern period, underpinned by the complete nudity of the witches. Naked witches were not often depicted in the illustrations of respectable, cautionary literary works concerning witches, hence this artistic choice on Baldung's part is a rather innovatory. Interestingly only a year after the unveiling of Witches' Sabbath in 1510, Die Emeis - which preocuppied itself with the Lenten sermons of Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg - was published in Strasbourg similarly depicting naked witches. Although we cannot say whether the inclusion of naked witches in Die Emeis was solely the result of Baldung’s depiction, it is very likely that Geiler would have been familiar with Baldung's work due to its popularity and this woodcut could have indeed influenced his own opinions and artistic choices. Whether Baldung intended his woodcut to not only reflect a “real-life” representation of witches but, more importantly, influence how they would be depicted by their persecutors in the future is debatable. Much of the debate surrounding this piece centres on this point: was it Baldung's intention to realistically depict witches or should Baldung’s work be viewed as satirical. Either way, there is much that this woodcut can tell us about what those who genuinely believed in the existence of witches and the way fear of witchcraft was constructed for public consumption.

- by Guadalupe Morales Gómez
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- Art History, Early Modern History, German History, Early Modern Europe
- by Dominick Zarrillo
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- History, European History, Early Modern History, Identity (Culture)
- by Dmitry Antonov
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- Mythology And Folklore, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Russian Studies

The figure of the witch is forever ingrained in American history and culture, and her powers still hold much strength today as she manages to linger and scratch at the American psyche. Though she represents many things, this thesis examines the relationship between witches and nature—specifically, the discarded parts of nature. Throughout American history, men have worked to maintain certain expectations for what it means to be an American man. This male subjectivity has often left men, from generation to generation, in a continuous existential angst over their position within their home, community, and nation. Worry cultivates fear, and both untamable nature and women have been feared, since together they threaten masculine identity and the structure of American patriarchy. The texts I analyze, Robert Egger’s 2016 film The Witch, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Andrew Fleming’s 1996 film The Craft, are American products from the twentieth and twenty-first-century; however, my research spans from the seventeenth-century to contemporary time. This research has revealed how the figure of the witch moves through multiple narrative forms across the history of American literature and culture as a figure for the ugly, wicked, or the abject side of nature. She is a figure who is both marginal and marginalized—a non-normative threat to the social order. The figure of the witch is a force of nature and a part of nature. With this in mind, this project reveals ecophobia as a lynchpin of American manhood.

- by Gretchen Barksdale
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- American Literature, Masculinity Studies, Ecofeminism, Ecocriticism
- by Eamonn P Kelly
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Salem Witchcraft Trials, Early Modern Ireland

«A Verzegnis, piccolo paese sulla sponda destra del Tagliamento di facciata a Tolmezzo, accade presentemente un fatto, non nuovo nella storia, ma abbastanza straordinario per i tempi che corrono. Molte ragazze di quel paese, da un mese circa a questa parte, sono, per dirla come dice la gente, spiritate»
(Giornale di Udine, Anno XIII, n. 303, 18 dicembre 1878)

- by Danielle Maion
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- Health, Witches, witchcraft and witch craze, Italian Local History

In the British mythology and historiography Jane Wenham of Hertfordshire functions as the last person sentenced to death for witchcraft in Britain. Her case was significant since it “occasion'd many and various Speculations upon the Subject of Witchcraft”, which were part of the last major intellectual debate on the subject, eventually leading to the repeal of old witchcraft laws in 1736. In the pamphlet battle that followed Wenham’s conviction there was, as usual, a clash between traditionalists defending the belief in witchcraft and skeptics who wanted to discredit it at all cost. Touching on the main general issues under discussion – such as, for instance, the nature and origin of witchcraft, its ancient and biblical precedents, role of the Devil or reliability of trial confessions – the present paper will concentrate on what the skeptical party liked to call vulgar superstition, the term that included all popular beliefs and practices related to magic (e.g. traditional methods for identifying and fighting witches). The critics ascribed all such manifestations of the supernatural worldview to the superstitious people’s persistent obscurantism, and dismissed them outright with scorn as totally irrational, which was naturally reflected in their ironic and condescending rhetoric.

- by Sarah Maycock
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- Colonial America, Colonialism, Witch Hunt Studies, Salem Witchcraft Trials

Das historische Bild der Hexe weicht stark von den neuzeitlichen, medial verbreiteten Darstellungen von rothaarigen, zauberkundigen Frauen ab. Vielmehr fließen hier stereotype Diskriminierungen zusammen: Ketzern wurde im Mittelalter beispielsweise eine Verehrung des Teufels zugeschrieben, sowie sexuelle Ausschweifung, Schadenszauber und der Missbrauch von Messwein und Hostien. Hier greift plakativ das sogenannte Umkehrprinzip, in dessen Logik Ketzer Messen in umgekehrter Form vom orthodoxen Ideal praktizierten: statt Gott, wurde der Teufel verehrt, die Hostie wurde während des Abendmahls nicht geehrt, sondern zertreten, es ministrierten Frauen anstatt Männern und die Messe wurde rückwärts vorgetragen. - derstandard.at/2000078351369/Orgien-Teufelsanbetung-Giftmischerinnen-Ueber-moderne-Hexenvorstellungen

The Chełmno law (ius culmense) and other legal systems in force protected good reputation. It was reflected for example in the fact of penalizing any kinds of verbal insults and slanders (calumny) which were not supported by appropriate evidence; they were treated The allegation of witchcraft as an insult in the judicial practice in a smaller town as an insult to the legal interest of a human being. It also concerned false allegations of witchcraft. The subject matter of the article is the practice of adjudicating cases concerning slander (calumny) and including the allegation of witchcraft in smaller towns of the Royal Prussia (the second half of the 17th–18th centuries). On the basis of the judicial files
of the town of Nowe nad Wisłą, the author presented the background of false allegations,
the model of conduct of the judicial bodies and the catalogue of punishments used by the courts. It constitutes a contribution to a more extensive discussion about trials concerning witchcraft in the Prussian province and other parts of the Polish Kingdom in the early modern period.

In this article I am taking up an argument originally offered by Jonathan Strauss regarding the notion of the irrational as a privileged space in medical discourses in France in the nineteenth century. Strauss argues that the role of irrationality and “nonsense” was that of a “legitimizing force” for medicine in that “the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes.” Building upon Strauss’s argument that the mastery of the irrational in the medical sciences was an essential ground legitimizing the expertise they purported to offer, I will demonstrate that a similarly privileged space was claimed by early anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the discipline’s purported ability to understand the seeming “nonsense” of “the native.” The empirical mastery of domains consigned to the illogical realm of human social life translates into the characteristic anthropological concerns with non-Western ritual and belief and the foundation of an empirical method based on experience that would allow field-workers to “see” unknown or irrational forces. I will demonstrate this central point by starting with an analysis of how figures of the invisible and irrational drove Bronislaw Malinowski’s foundational ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands. I will then go back in time to outline the precursors of these figures as seen in the problem of evidence and the modes of investigation deemed proper to the investigation of witchcraft in the context of the “witch craze” in sixteenth-century Europe. Arguing that the problem of establishing proof in reference to invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life ever since, I then bring this epistemological thread forward in time via an analysis of the irrational in Jean-Martin Charcot’s nineteenth-century research on hysteria. The essay then draws to a close roughly in the time period in which it began with a brief account of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s expulsion from an anthropology that was by the 1930s dominated by Malinowski’s vision of ethnographic method and the evidence this method could produce.

- by Richard Baxstrom
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- European History, Anthropology, Epistemology, Humanities

Breve Resenha de "A Bruxa" (2015), de Robert Eggers (Publicado originalmente no FB em 4 de março de 2016)