Download or read book Wives Widows Witches Bitches written by Janet A. Thompson and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1993 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of women and witchcraft in seventeenth-century Devon. It focuses on the social, political, economic, and religious factors in the county and various borough towns which led them to be likely to single out women for the crime of witchcraft. It also deals with female alehouse keepers, defamation suits brought by women against other women for sexual slander, wills, administrations, and the disposal of real and personal wealth by and to women in this period.
Download or read book The Last Witches of England written by John Callow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fascinating and vivid." New Statesman "Thoroughly researched." The Spectator "Intriguing." BBC History Magazine "Vividly told." BBC History Revealed "A timely warning against persecution." Morning Star "Astute and thoughtful." History Today "An important work." All About History "Well-researched." The Tablet On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches. Though 'pretty much worn away' the belief in witchcraft still lingered on for more than a century after their deaths. In turn, ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, it seems that the memory of these three women - and of their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – was transformed from canker to regret, and from regret into celebration in our own age. Indeed, their example was cited during the final Parliamentary debates, in 1951, that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, and their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by the women beyond the wire at Greenham Common. In this book, John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the remarkable tale of the Bideford Witches.
Download or read book Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe written by Andrew D. McCarthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collection scrutinizes the historical intersection of early modern European superstitions and English stage literature. Contributors analyze the cultural mechanisms that shape, preserve, and transmit beliefs. They investigate where superstitions come from and how they are sustained and communicated within early modern European society. It has been proposed by scholars that once enacted on stage and thus brought into contact with the literary-dramatic perspective, belief systems that had been preserved and reinforced by historical-literary texts underwent a drastic change. By highlighting the connection between historical-literary and literary-dramatic culture, this volume tests and explores the theory that performance of superstitions opened the way to disbelief.
Download or read book Taming Lust written by Doron S. Ben-Atar and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1796, as revolutionary fervor waned and the Age of Reason took hold, an eighty-five-year-old Massachusetts doctor was convicted of bestiality and sentenced to hang. Three years later and seventy miles away, an eighty-three-year-old Connecticut farmer was convicted of the same crime and sentenced to the same punishment. Prior to these criminal trials, neither Massachusetts nor Connecticut had executed anyone for bestiality in over a century. Though there are no overt connections between the two episodes, the similarities of their particulars are strange and striking. Historians Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown delve into the specifics to determine what larger social, political, or religious forces could have compelled New England courts to condemn two octogenarians for sexual misbehavior typically associated with much younger men. The stories of John Farrell and Gideon Washburn are less about the two old men than New England officials who, riding the rough waves of modernity, returned to the severity of their ancestors. The political upheaval of the Revolution and the new republic created new kinds of cultural experience—both exciting and frightening—at a moment when New England farmers and village elites were contesting long-standing assumptions about divine creation and the social order. Ben-Atar and Brown offer a rare and vivid perspective on anxieties about sexual and social deviance in the early republic.
Download or read book Alcohol Sex and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by L. Martin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-01-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines drinking and attitudes to alcohol consumption in late medieval and early modern England, France, and Italy, especially as they related to sexual and violent behavior and to gender relations. According to widespread beliefs, the consumption of alcohol led to increased sexual activity among both men and women, and it also led to disorderly conduct among women and violent conduct among men. Dr Lynn shows how alcohol was a fundamental part of the diets of most people, including women, resulting in daily drinking of large amounts of ale, beer, or wine. This study offers an intimate insight into both the altered states induced by alcohol, and, by opposition, into normal relations in family, community, and society.
Download or read book Witchcraft the Devil and Emotions in Early Modern England written by Charlotte-Rose Millar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.
Download or read book God s Fury England s Fire written by Michael Braddick and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 1093 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly researched and vividly written history of the English Civil Wars, from one of Britain's most prominent Civil War historians The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was the single most traumatic event in this country between the medieval Black Death and the two world wars. Indeed, it is likely that a greater percentage of the population were killed in the civil wars than in the First World War. This sense of overwhelming trauma gives this major new history its title: God’s Fury, England’s Fire. The name of a pamphlet written after the king’s surrender, it sums up the widespread feeling within England that the seemingly endless nightmare that had destroyed families, towns and livelihoods was ordained by a vengeful God – that the people of England had sinned and were now being punished. As with all civil wars, however, ‘God’s fury’ could support or destroy either side in the conflict. Was God angry at Charles I for failing to support the true, protestant, religion and refusing to work with Parliament? Or was God angry with those who had dared challenge His anointed Sovereign? Michael Braddick’s remarkable book gives the reader a vivid and enduring sense both of what it was like to live through events of uncontrollable violence and what really animated the different sides. God’s Fury, England’s Fire allows readers to understand once more the events that have so fundamentally marked this country and which still resonate centuries after their bloody ending.
Download or read book Words Like Daggers written by Kirilka Stavreva and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dramatic and documentary narratives about aggressive and garrulous women often cast such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority. Contending narratives, however, sometimes within the same texts, point to the effective subversion and undoing of the normative restrictions of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested to in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. Examining the framing and performance of violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England. Blending gender theory with detailed historical analysis, Words Like Daggers asserts the power of women's language--the power to subvert binaries and destabilize social hierarchies, particularly those of gender--in the early modern era. In the process Stavreva reconstructs the speech acts of individual contentious women, such as the scold Janet Dalton, the witch Alice Samuel, and the Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge. Because the dramatic potential of women's powerful rhetorical performances was recognized not only by victims and witnesses of individual violent speech acts but also by theater professionals, Stavreva also focuses on how the stage, arguably the most influential cultural institution of the Renaissance, orchestrated and aestheticized women's fighting words and, in so doing, showcased and augmented their cultural significance.
Download or read book The Path of the Devil written by Gary F. Jensen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945. Entries include: * advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading. The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book Dangerous Liaisons written by Charles Frank Robinson and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the South after the Civil War, segregation--and race itself--was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking book, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced antimiscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecutions under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters.
Download or read book Contemporary Authors written by Kathleen Edgar and published by Contemporary Authors. This book was released on 1996 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your students and users will find biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers in this volume of Contemporary Authors(R).
Download or read book Alcohol Violence and Disorder in Traditional Europe written by A. Lynn Martin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Europe had high levels of violence and of alcohol consumption, both higher than they are in modern Western societies, where studies demonstrate a link between violence and alcohol. A. Lynn Martin uses an anthropological approach to examine drinking, drinking establishments, violence, and disorder, and compares the wine-producing south with the beer-drinking north and Catholic France and Italy with Protestant England, and explores whether alcohol consumption can also explain the violence and disorder of traditional Europe. Both Catholic and Protestant moralists believed in the link, and they condemned drunkenness and drinking establishments for causing violence and disorder. They did not advocate complete abstinence, however, for alcoholic beverages had an important role in most people's diets. Less appreciated by the moralists was alcohol's function as the ubiquitous social lubricant and the increasing importance of alehouses and taverns as centers of popular recreation. The study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative evidence from a wide variety of sources to question the beliefs of the moralists and the assumptions of modern scholars about the role of alcohol and drinking establishments in causing violence and disorder. It ends by analyzing the often-conflicting regulations of local, regional, and national governments that attempted to ensure that their citizens had a reliable supply of good drink at a reasonable cost but also to control who drank what, where, when, and how. No other comparable book examines the relationship of alcohol to violence and disorder during this period.
Download or read book Sex and the Gender Revolution Volume 1 written by Randolph Trumbach and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolution in gender relations occurred in London around 1700, resulting in a sexual system that endured in many aspects until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. For the first time in European history, there emerged three genders: men, women, and a third gender of adult effeminate sodomites, or homosexuals. This third gender had radical consequences for the sexual lives of most men and women since it promoted an opposing ideal of exclusive heterosexuality. In Sex and the Gender Revolution, Randolph Trumbach reconstructs the worlds of eighteenth-century prostitution, illegitimacy, sexual violence, and adultery. In those worlds the majority of men became heterosexuals by avoiding sodomy and sodomite behavior. As men defined themselves more and more as heterosexuals, women generally experienced the new male heterosexuality as its victims. But women—as prostitutes, seduced servants, remarrying widows, and adulterous wives— also pursued passion. The seamy sexual underworld of extramarital behavior was central not only to the sexual lives of men and women, but to the very existence of marriage, the family, domesticity, and romantic love. London emerges as not only a geographical site but as an actor in its own right, mapping out domains where patriarchy, heterosexuality, domesticity, and female resistance take vivid form in our imaginations and senses. As comprehensive and authoritative as it is eloquent and provocative, this book will become an indispensable study for social and cultural historians and delightful reading for anyone interested in taking a close look at sex and gender in eighteenth-century London.
Download or read book The Witches of Fife written by Stuart MacDonald and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Along the coast of Fife, in villages like Culross and Pittenweem, history records that some women were executed as witches. Nevertheless, the reality of what happened the night that Janet Cornfoot was lynched at Pittenweem is hard to grasp as one sits by the harbour watching the fishing boats unload their catch and the pleasure boats rising with the tide. How could people do this to an old woman? Why was no-one ever brought to justice? And why would anyone defend such a lynching? The task of the historian is to try to make events in the past come alive and seem less strange. The details of the witch-hunt are fascinating. Some of the anecdotes are strange. The modern reader finds it hard to imagine illness being blamed on the malevolence of a beggar woman denied charity, or the economic failure of a sea voyage being attributed to the village hag, not bad weather. Witch-hunting was related to ideas, values, attitudes and political events. It was a complicated process, involving religious and civil authorities, village tensions and the fears of the elite. The witch-hunt in Scotland also took place at a time when one of the main agendas was the creation of a righteous or godly society. As a result, religious authorities had control over aspects of people's lives which seem as strange to us today as beliefs about magic or witchcraft. It was not accidental that the witch-hunt in Scotland, and specifically in Fife, should have happened at this time. This book tells the story of what occurred over a period of a century and a half, and offers some explanation as to why it occurred.
Download or read book Making Witches written by Barbara Rieti and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2008 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a little-known tradition of witch lore in Newfoundland culture. Those believed to have the power to influence the fortunes of others are not mythological characters but neighbours, relations, or even friends. Drawing from her own interviews and a wealth of material from the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive, Barbara Rieti explores the range and depth of Newfoundland witch tradition, looking at why certain people acquired reputations as witches, and why others considered themselves bewitched. The tales that emerge - despite their seemingly fantastic elements of spells and black heart books, hags, and healing charms - concern everyday affairs and reveal the intense social interdependence central to outport life. Frequently featuring women, they provide fascinating new perspectives on female coping strategies in a volatile economy.By addressing the perennial human issues at the heart of witchcraft - construction of enmity and intertwined fate - these narrative accounts also illuminate older witch beliefs revealed in witchcraft trial documents. Making Witches shows that in storytelling communities with a rich legacy of witch lore, witch tradition has endured well into the twentieth century.
Download or read book Marks of an Absolute Witch written by Dr Orna Alyagon Darr and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the social foundation of evidence law in a specific historical social and cultural context - the debate concerning the proof of the crime of witchcraft in early modern England. In this period the question of how to prove the crime of witchcraft was the centre of a public debate and even those who strongly believed in the reality of witchcraft had considerable concerns regarding its proof. In a typical witchcraft crime there were no eyewitnesses, and since torture was not a standard measure in English criminal trials, confessions could not be easily obtained. The scarcity of evidence left the fact-finders with a pressing dilemma. On the one hand, using the standard evidentiary methods might have jeopardized any chance of prosecuting and convicting extremely dangerous criminals. On the other hand, lowering the evidentiary standards might have led to the conviction of innocent people. Based on the analysis of 157 primary sources, the book presents a picture of a diverse society whose members tried to influence evidentiary techniques to achieve their distinct goals and to bolster their social standing. In so doing this book further uncovers the interplay between the struggle with the evidentiary dilemma and social characteristics (such as class, position along the centre/periphery axis and the professional affiliation) of the participants in the debate. In particular, attention is focused on the professions of law, clergy and medicine. This book finds clear affinity between the professional affiliation and the evidentiary positions of the participants in the debate, demonstrating how the diverse social players and groups employed evidentiary strategies as a resource, to mobilize their interests. The witchcraft debate took place within the formative era of modern evidence law, and the book highlights the mutual influences between the witch trials and major legal developments.
Download or read book Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy written by Jennifer Panek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The courtship and remarriage of a rich widow was a popular motif in early modern comic theatre. Jennifer Panek brings together a wide variety of texts, from ballads and jest-books to sermons and court records, to examine the staple widow of comedy in her cultural context and to examine early modern attitudes to remarriage. She persuasively challenges the critical tendency to see the stereotype of the lusty widow as a tactic to dissuade women from second marriages, arguing instead that it was deployed to enable her suitors to regain their masculinity, under threat from the dominant, wealthier widow. The theatre, as demonstrated by Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher and others, was the prime purveyor of a fantasy in which a young man's sexual mastery of a widow allowed him to seize the economic opportunity she offered.
