Download or read book Witch Hunts written by Rocky Wood and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For three centuries, as the Black Death rampaged through Europe and the Reformation tore the Church apart, tens of thousands were arrested as witches and subjected to torture and execution, including being burned alive. This graphic novel examines the background; the witch hunters' methods; who profited; the brave few who protested; and how the Enlightenment gradually replaced fear and superstition with reason and science. Famed witch hunters Heinrich Kramer, architect of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, and Matthew Hopkins, England's notorious "Witchfinder General," are covered as are the Salem Witch Trials and the last executions in Europe.
Download or read book Witches and Witch hunts written by Milton Meltzer and published by Scholastic Paperbacks. This book was released on 1999 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the origins and progression of hysteria, fear, and persecution associated with witches and witchcraft in western societies.
Download or read book The Witch Hunts written by Robert Thurston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tens of thousands of people were persecuted and put to death as witches between 1400 and 1700 – the great age of witch hunts. Why did the witch hunts arise, flourish and decline during this period? What purpose did the persecutions serve? Who was accused, and what was the role of magic in the hunts? This important reassessment of witch panics and persecutions in Europeand colonial America both challenges and enhances existing interpretations of the phenomenon. Locating its origins 400 years earlier in the growing perception of threats to Western Christendom, Robert Thurston outlines the development of a ‘persecuting society’ in which campaigns against scapegoats such as heretics, Jews, lepers and homosexuals set the scene for the later witch hunts. He examines the creation of the witch stereotype and looks at how the early trials and hunts evolved, with the shift from accusatory to inquisitorial court procedures and reliance upon confessions leading to the increasing use of torture.
Download or read book Caliban and the Witch written by Silvia Federici and published by Autonomedia. This book was released on 2004 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Women, the body and primitive accumulation"--Cover.
Download or read book Witchcraze written by Anne Llewellyn Barstow and published by Harper San Francisco. This book was released on 1994 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the annihilation of seven million women of spirit and intelligence under the guise of 'witch hunts' in Reformation Europe
Download or read book Witch Hunts in Europe and America written by William E. Burns and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Wheelwright s Daughter written by Eleanor Porter and published by Boldwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can she save herself from a witch's fate? Martha is a feisty and articulate young woman, the daughter of a wheelwright, living in a Herefordshire village in Elizabethan England. With no mother Martha's life is spent running her father's meagre household and helping out at the local school whilst longing to escape the confines and small-mindedness of a community driven by religious bigotry and poverty. As she is able to read and is well-versed in herbal remedies she is suspected of being a witch. When a landslip occurs - opening up a huge chasm in the centre of the village - she is blamed for it and pursued remorselessly by the villagers. **But can her own wits and the love of local stablehand Jacob save her from a witch's persecution and death... A brilliant and accomplished novel that perfectly captures the febrile atmosphere of Elizabethan village life in an age when suspicion and superstition were rife. Perfect for fans of Tracy Chevalier. What readers are saying about The Wheelwright's Daughter: ** 'It's a gripping story and such accomplished writing. I really enjoyed every moment of working on it.' Yvonne Holland, editor of Philippa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier 'A brilliant debut novel' 'An interesting read and an impressive debut novel' 'A wonderfully written story' 'A skilfully crafted story of love, betrayal, superstition and fear in 16th century England.' 'This is a story of courage, trust, betrayal and love.' 'A great historical novel I loved.' 'Keeps you hooked til the end.' 'An excellent read, highly recommended.' 'Full of historical detail and atmosphere' 'I enjoyed this thoughtful and well-written story by Eleanor Porter.' 'Atmospheric and evocative'
Download or read book In Defense of Witches written by Mona Chollet and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches is a “brilliant, well-documented” celebration (Le Monde) by an acclaimed French feminist of the witch as a symbol of female rebellion and independence in the face of misogyny and persecution. Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed? Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.
Download or read book Servants of Satan written by Joseph Klaits and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1987-02-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the persecution of witches reflected the darker side of the central social, political, and cultural developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the first book to consider the general course and significance of the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries since H.R. Trevor-Roper’s classic and pioneering study appeared some fifteen years ago. Drawing upon the advances in historical and social-science scholarship of the past decade and a half, Joseph Klaits integrates the recent appreciations of witchcraft in regional studies, the history of popular culture, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better illuminate the place of witch hunting in the context of social, political, economic and religious change. “In all, Klaits has done a good job. Avoiding the scandalous and sensational, he has maintained throughout, with sensitivity and economy, an awareness of the uniqueness of the theories and persecutions that have fascinated scholars now for two decades and are unlikely to lose their appeal in the foreseeable future.” —American Historical Review “This is a commendable synthesis whose time has come . . . fascinating.” —The Sixteenth Century Journal “Comprehensive and clearly written . . . An excellent book.” —Choice “Impeccable research and interpretation stand behind this scholarly but not stultifying account.” —Booklist “A good, solid, general treatment.” —Erik Midelfort, C. Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies, University of Virginia “A well written, easy to read book, and the bibliography is a good source of secondary materials for further reading.” —Journal of American Folklore
Download or read book Witches Witch Hunting and Women written by Silvia Federici and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the “New World,” this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity. As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.
Download or read book Witch Hunts written by Govind Kelkar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witch hunts are the result of gendered, cultural and socioeconomic struggles over acute structural, economic and social transformations in both the formation of gendered class societies and that of patriarchal capitalism. This book combines political economy with gender and cultural analysis to explain the articulation of cultural beliefs about women as causing harm, and struggles over patriarchy in periods of structural economic transformation. It brings in field data from India and South-East Asia and incorporates a large body of works on witch hunts across geographies and histories. Witch Hunts is a scholarly analysis of the human rights violation of women and its correction through changes in beliefs, knowledge practices and adaptation in structural transformation.
Download or read book The Witch Hunt Narrative written by Ross E. Cheit and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an accused molester had turned the dominant narrative on its head. In the early 1990s, a new narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a witch hunt. A central claim in this new witch hunt narrative was that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutorial suggestion. In time, the notion that child sex abuse was a product of sensationalized over-reporting and far less endemic than originally thought became the new common sense. But did the new witch hunt narrative accurately represent reality? As Ross Cheit demonstrates in his exhaustive account of child sex abuse cases in the past two and a half decades, purveyors of the witch hunt narrative never did the hard work of examining court records in the many cases that reached the courts throughout the nation. Instead, they treated a couple of cases as representative and concluded that the issue was blown far out of proportion. Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states, Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences, and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the problem. In sum, The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial and empirically powerful account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy.
Download or read book Witch Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England written by David D. Hall and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This superb documentary collection illuminates the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in seventeenth-century New England. The cases examined begin in 1638, extend to the Salem outbreak in 1692, and document for the first time the extensive Stamford-Fairfield, Connecticut, witch-hunt of 1692–1693. Here one encounters witch-hunts through the eyes of those who participated in them: the accusers, the victims, the judges. The original texts tell in vivid detail a multi-dimensional story that conveys not only the process of witch-hunting but also the complexity of culture and society in early America. The documents capture deep-rooted attitudes and expectations and reveal the tensions, anger, envy, and misfortune that underlay communal life and family relationships within New England’s small towns and villages. Primary sources include court depositions as well as excerpts from the diaries and letters of contemporaries. They cover trials for witchcraft, reports of diabolical possessions, suits of defamation, and reports of preternatural events. Each section is preceded by headnotes that describe the case and its background and refer the reader to important secondary interpretations. In his incisive introduction, David D. Hall addresses a wide range of important issues: witchcraft lore, antagonistic social relationships, the vulnerability of women, religious ideologies, popular and learned understandings of witchcraft and the devil, and the role of the legal system. This volume is an extraordinarily significant resource for the study of gender, village politics, religion, and popular culture in seventeenth-century New England.
Download or read book Witches and Witch Hunts written by Wolfgang Behringer and published by Polity. This book was released on 2004-09-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe written by Brian P. Levack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1450 and 1750 thousands of people – most of them women – were accused, prosecuted and executed for the crime of witchcraft. The witch-hunt was not a single event; it comprised thousands of individual prosecutions, each shaped by the religious and social dimensions of the particular area as well as political and legal factors. Brian Levack sorts through the proliferation of theories to provide a coherent introduction to the subject, as well as contributing to the scholarly debate. The book: Examines why witchcraft prosecutions took place, how many trials and victims there were, and why witch-hunting eventually came to an end. Explores the beliefs of both educated and illiterate people regarding witchcraft. Uses regional and local studies to give a more detailed analysis of the chronological and geographical distribution of witch-trials. Emphasises the legal context of witchcraft prosecutions. Illuminates the social, economic and political history of early modern Europe, and in particular the position of women within it. In this fully updated third edition of his exceptional study, Levack incorporates the vast amount of literature that has emerged since the last edition. He substantially extends his consideration of the decline of the witch-hunt and goes further in his exploration of witch-hunting after the trials, especially in contemporary Africa. New illustrations vividly depict beliefs about witchcraft in early modern Europe.
Download or read book Witch Hunt written by Gregg Jarrett and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Russia Hoax picks up where that book ended with this hard-hitting, well-reasoned examination of the latest findings about “collusion” between the Trump Administration and the Russians, offering further proof that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is nothing more than a politically motivated witch hunt. How did a small group of powerful intelligence officials convince tens of millions of Americans that the president is a traitor, without a shred of evidence? Now that every detail and argument set forth in The Russia Hoax has been borne out by the Mueller report, Jarrett returns with Witch Hunt, providing a hard-hitting, well-reasoned evisceration of what may be the dirtiest trick in political history. No marks have ever been as gullible as distraught Democrats in 2016. Washington insiders broke rule after rule investigating the president, chasing a conspiracy that turned out not to exist. Somehow this was spun into Donald Trump having something to hide. People associated with the president were pushed into plea deals that had nothing to do with Russian “collusion” or discouraged from serving by the threat of huge legal bills. Somehow this was spun into Trump’s lawyers being bullies. The president complained that the investigation was a waste of time, but he allowed it to continue unimpeded to the end. Somehow this was spun into obstruction of justice. In Witch Hunt, Gregg Jarrett uncovers the bureaucratic malfeasance and malicious politicization of our country’s justice system. The law was weaponized for partisan purposes. Even though it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that collected and disseminated a trove of lies about Trump from a former British spy and Russian operatives, Democrats and the media spun this into a claim that Trump was working for the Russians. Senior officials at the FBI, blinded by their political bias and hatred of Trump, went after the wrong person. At the DOJ, the deputy attorney general discussed secretly recording the president and recruiting members of the cabinet to depose Trump. Those behind the Witch Hunt have either been fired or resigned. Many of them are now under investigation for abuse of power. But what about the pundits who concocted wild narratives in real time on television, or the newspapers which covered the fact that rumors were being investigated without investigating the facts themselves? Factual, highly persuasive, and damning, this must-read expose makes clear that not only was there no “collusion,” but there was not even a basis for Mueller’s investigation of the charge that has attacked Trump and his administration for more than two years. It’s always been a Witch Hunt.
Download or read book Witch Hunts written by Robert Rapley and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007-02-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witch hunts are the products of intense fear and paranoia and the results are often terrible. The accused in three famous witchcraft cases - in Bamberg and Wurzburg, Germany, in Loudun, France, and in Salem, Massachusetts - were assumed to be guilty without proof. Secret accusations were accepted, evidence was falsified, and extreme pressures, including torture, were used. Arguing that fear was, and still is, a prerequisite to any witch hunt, Robert Rapley shows that the current hunt for terrorists mirrors the witch crazes of the past.