Witches, witchcraft and witch craze

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.

ABSTRACT
The Jacobean era's infamous witchcraft trials are recalled after reservoir repairs close to Pendle Hill reveal a buried cottage with bricked‐up cat. Interpretations of the building as the site of Malkin Tower, recorded in court records as the venue of a witches coven are critically evaluated in the light of archaeological and historical evidence.

KEYWORDS
WITCH, PENDLE WITCH TRIALS, PENDLE HILL, MALKIN TOWER, FOLK BELIEF, MAGIC, LANCASTER ASSIZES, WISE WOMEN, CUNNING FOLK, ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SEVENTEENTHCENTURY, ALIZON DEVICE, SALEM WITCHES, THOMAS POTTS, LOWER BLACK MOSS, ELIZABETH SOUTHERNS, DEMDIKE, ELIZABETH DEVICE, JAMES DEVICE, ANNE WHITTLE, CHATTOX, ANNE REDFERNE, JANE BULCOCK, JOHN BULCOCK, ALICE NUTTER, KATHERINE HEWITT, ALICE GRAY, JENNET PRESTON, GUNPOWDER PLOT, CAT

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.

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.

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.

Consideration is given to how elements of the occult: witchcraft, magic and sorcery may be identified in the archaeological record. Working definitions of occult terminology are established before proceeding to propose a new approach, which triangulates data from historic and folkloric sources with archaeological evidence, to establish contextual narratives that stand for the past. Excavation of an occult ritual site at Barway, Cambridgeshire is presented to demonstrate how the approach works in practice. Archaeological evidence, combined with local folklore and historic accounts of spells and sorcery, identify the site as the locus of occult activity performed by cunning folk, or ‘white’ witches, during the seventeenth-century.

KEYWORDS
OCCULT, CUNNING FOLK, WITCH, WITCHCRAFT, SPELL, MAGIC, SORCERY, FOLKLORE, EAST ANGLIA, ELY, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY, GRIMOIRE, PENDLE WITCH TRIAL, MATTHEW HOPKINS, JOHN STEARNE.

What becomes of werewolves in a country without wolves? The present article addresses this question by surveying Eurasian traditions of "were-creatures," in which the species of shape-shifting human sorceresses varies according to the regional habitats of a variety of creatures: jackals, wolves, hyenas, foxes, bats, and owls. In ancient Roman and medieval Islamic traditions, descriptions of these creatures and their vampirizing practices were most often found in horror-genre literature and accounts of foreign exotica; however in medieval South and East Asia, these predatory "were-creatures" were integrated into esoteric traditions, wherein they played a salutary role in the transformation of tantric practitioners.

Résumé: Que deviennent les loups-garous dans les régions du monde où le loup n'existe pas-telle est la question à laquelle cet article s'efforce de répondre. Pour ce faire, il s'appuie sur un corpus de traditions eurasiatiques concernant les métamorphoses des sorcières en créatures « garou » dans lesquelles l'espèce de ces derniers change en fonction de l'habitat spécifique de la faune endogène: chacals, loups, hyènes, renards, chauves-souris, chouettes. Dans la Rome ancienne et dans l'Islam médiéval, la description de ces créatures et de leurs moeurs vampiriques se rencontre essentiellement dans des récits horrifiques à dominance exotique. En Asie du Sud et en Extrême-Orient, en revanche, ces mêmes prédateurs furent intégrés au sein des traditions ésotériques et furent dotés d'une valeur positive par les praticiens du tantrisme.

«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)

As is well known, the Western worldview brings into play an extended colour-coded cultural model known as the Great Chain of Being, grounded in a mutually exclusive, asymmetric opposition between ‘black’ and ‘white’. In contrast, the Basque model introduces complementary colour-coded oppositions consisting of ‘black’ and ‘red’. The Basque dataset model should not be understood as merely some kind of inversion of the Western one, but rather as being composed of a radically different set of cognitive alignments. Nonetheless, there are junctures where the reader may be able to identify a certain overlap between the component parts of the two systems. Moreover, in the case of the Basque model it is clear that these alignments harken back to earlier indigenous pan-European beliefs in the efficacy of the colour black, its intrinsic epistemological grounding in notions of fecundity and wholeness as well as the positive role of black animals in general.

So far our provisional research results argue for the following scenario: that in the case of Europe the powerful life-giving and protecting characteristics associated previously with the colour black have been distorted, although not totally eradicated from the consciousness of Europeans, in part because of the influence of the Catholic Church and the Inquisitional authorities. The task of countering black’s positive polarity was central to the Church’s efforts to win converts. Given that the colour black was a key component in the competing eco-centric cosmology, attempts to assign a different value to it constituted an assault on one of the principle tenets of the indigenous interpretative grid. The fact that the colour black continues to have a highly charged aura about it – the sudden appearance of a black cat still generates a certain level of uneasiness in modern urban dwellers – testifies to the resilient nature of the older eco-centric cosmology: it has not been forgotten.

In contrast to the hierarchical anthropocentric cultural model encountered in and propagated by the ontological metaphors encountered in the Western dataset, we allege that those found in the Basque dataset derive their vitality from this earlier pan-European eco-centric cosmology, grounded in a different myth of origins, namely, in the belief that humans descend from bears. Reflexes of the belief in the sacredness of bears are still encountered in the rich folkloric traditions and practices of Euskal Herria.

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.

Introduction:

“It’s all her fault! She’s a witch! Burn her!” Some variation of this would have likely been a popular phrase during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the ‘witch craze’ raged on. The witch craze in the Western world was full of false accusations and executions: many shared the same stories of seduction by the Devil, or at least involvement with Satan himself, and one could believe that these stories were all fictionalized. A great many people were accused, convicted, and executed during the witch craze, to the point that it is a part in history in which many people today have knowledge: it helps as well that popular shows such as The Simpsons and Sabrina the Teenage Witch dedicate portions of episodes to the events (both tackling the events of Salem, Massachusetts). However, despite the fact that the witch craze dominated the Western world for a couple centuries (the seventeenth century more so than the rest), there was a random decline as the eighteenth century progressed. Had people come to their senses and realized it was not going any good? The witchcraft decline of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went from stakes to ashes in a figurative sense: from risking everything just to put innocent people to their deaths, the interest in the witch hunt just simmered down and blew away like ashes in the wind.

This book tells the history of Cambridge from the earliest Roman and Anglo Saxon inhabitants through to the notorious Cambridge Spies, who actively spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Told in an accessible manner, and illustrated throughout, the contents are:
1. Etheldreda: Born a Princess, Died a Saint
2. Vanquished by the Vikings: the sacking of Cambridge
3. Fire, Death and Murder at the Fairs: Stourbridge and Midsummer Fairs
4. Jousting Tournaments: history of jousts at Cambridge
5. The Black Death: death in Cambridge
6. Peasants' Revolt: attacks on Cambridge colleges during the revolt
7. Bloody Mary's Revenge on Cambridge
8. Burnt at the Stake: John Hullier, the Protestant Martyr
9. Bear-Baiting: cruel sport in Cambridge
10. Witches and Witchcraft: women killed for being witches
11. Bull-Baiting: more cruel Cambridge sports
12. The English Civil War: the fortification of Cambridge
13. Oliver Cromwell's Missing Head
14. Pressed for an Answer: Peine Forte et Dure
15. One in the Eye for Sir Isaac Newton
16. Highway Robbery: highway men in Cambridge
17. Branding: punishment for crimes
18. Bloody Burwell Fire: the death of 70 innocent people
19. Dick Turpin: his time hiding in Cambridge
20. Cockfighting: history of cockfighting at Cambridge
21. The Resurrection of Tristram Shandy - death of Laurence Stearne: grave robbers steal his body for dissection in the university
22. Cambridge Gallows: the tragedy of those hung at Cambridge
23. The Tragical Death of the Revd Samuel Reeve
24. The Chimneysweep Burglars: thefts from colleges
25. Elizabeth Woodcock and the Curse of the Three Tuns Inn
26. General Tom Thumb Causes a Riot
27. Sister Act: The Cambridge Arsenic Poisoners
28. The Three Tuns Inn: Den of Thieves
29. Burned Alive
30. Bloody Students: The Battle of Town and Gown
31. Fatal Bumps: death on the river Cam
32. Suffragette's Protest
33. The Great War: the role the university played in WWI
34. The Judases Who Betrayed from Within: the story of the Cambridge spies: Blunt, Burgess, Philby, MacLean, and others
35. The Enigma of the Second World War: the role Cambridge played in cracking the German enigma codes at Bletchley Park

Also attached are reviews of the book in the Cambridge News by Emma Higginbotham and a piece about Oliver Cromwell's Head, taken from the book.

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

This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition to reunite all the known pages from one of the celebrated private albums of drawings by Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The so-called ‘Witches and old women’ album was produced in the fruitful last decade of the artist’s life. With its themes of witchcraft, dreams and nightmares, the album offers an important perspective on the development of Goya’s interest in old age, the fantastic and the diabolical. Above all, the drawings reveal Goya’s penetrating observation of human nature—our passions, fears, weaknesses and desires.

The drawings of the ‘Witches and old women’ album are here published in a reconstruction of their original sequence, each accompanied by detailed commentary and a full-scale reproduction. Outstanding drawings from Goya’s other albums are also included, as well as important related prints. This ground-breaking publication is a milestone in the study of Goya’s drawings and sheds new light on the artist’s methods and ideas.

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.

Encyclopedia Entry. In The Enlightenment: History, Documents and Key Questions. William Burns ed. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016. 161-165.

[Note: This is part of a historical debate format. Here I defend women in this period, critique patriarchy, and show how what we know as the authoritative figures in the Age of the Enlightenment often dis-empowered women, appropriated their knowledge, ignored their ways of knowing altogether, or obstructed their self-directed liberating activity. There is gender, race, class, and ecological approach and places this period in broader frameworks of Atlantic World History.

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.

Even though it happened more than 500 years ago, the Protestant Reformation continues to affect how Anglo-Saxon people use pictures to demonize Indigenous spiritualities today. Consider, when reading this article, how demonizing images, like those that circulated during the Protestant Reformation, continue to be used to equate Indigenous spirituality with ‘idolatry’. When doing this, let's think about how to resist that visual rhetoric, and how to strategize against it, and, how to repel its aesthetic message; by learning to identify what they look like and how it works. In endeavouring to do this, the work will articulate how the philosophical aesthetics of the Reformation have been constructed, aesthetically and philosophically, as a demonizing strategy, and, how it continues to propagate its demonizing rhetorics today.

For full text: https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004367418/BP000030.xml