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Witchcraft is the use of alleged supernatural powers of magic. A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft. Traditionally, "witchcraft" means the use of magic or supernatural powers to inflict harm or misfortune on others, and this remains the most common and widespread meaning. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination", but it "has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world". The belief in witchcraft has been found throughout history in a great number of societies worldwide. Most of these societies have used protective magic or counter-magic against witchcraft, and have shunned, banished, imprisoned, physically punished or killed alleged witches. Anthropologists use the term "witchcraft" for similar beliefs about harmful occult practices in different cultures, and these societies often use the term when speaking in English.
A witch hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. In medieval Europe, witch-hunts often arose in connection to charges of heresy from Christianity. An intensive period of witch-hunts occurring in Early Modern Europe and to a smaller extent Colonial America, took place from about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 executions. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia, Cameroon and South Africa today.
Joseph Glanvill was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. Not himself a scientist, he has been called "the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi", or in other words the leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers of the later 17th century. In 1661 he predicted "To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic conveyances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence."
Ulick Peter Burke is a British polymath, historian and professor. He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother.
Ronald Edmund Hutton is an English historian specialising in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol, Hutton has written over a dozen books, often appearing on British television and radio. He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.
Owen Davies is a British historian who specialises in the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine. He is currently Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire and has been described as Britain's "foremost academic expert on the history of magic".
John McManners was a British clergyman and historian of religion who specialized in the history of the church and other aspects of religious life in 18th-century France. He was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1984. He also served as Fellow and Chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1964 to 2001.
Lyndal Anne Roper is a historian. She was born in Melbourne, Australia. She works on German history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and has written a biography of Martin Luther. Her research centres on gender and the Reformation, witchcraft, and visual culture. In 2011 she was appointed to Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford, the first woman and first Australian to hold this position.
European belief in witchcraft can be traced back to classical antiquity, when magic and religion were closely entwined. During the pagan era of ancient Rome, there were laws against harmful magic. After Christianization, the medieval Catholic Church began to see witchcraft (maleficium) as a blend of black magic and apostasy involving a pact with the Devil. During the early modern period, witch hunts became widespread in Europe, partly fueled by religious tensions, societal anxieties, and economic upheaval. European belief in witchcraft gradually dwindled during and after the Age of Enlightenment.
Leo Ruickbie is a British historian and sociologist of religion, specializing in exceptional experiences, paranormal beliefs, magic, witchcraft and Wicca. He is the author of several books, beginning with Witchcraft Out of the Shadows, a 2004 publication outlining the history of witchcraft from ancient Greece until the modern day. Ruickbie was born in Scotland and took a master's degree in Sociology and Religion at the University of Lancaster. He then studied at King's College London and was an awarded a PhD for his thesis entitled The Re-Enchanters: Theorising Re-Enchantment and Testing for its Presence in Modern Witchcraft. On Samhain 2007 he launched Open Source Wicca, a project inspired by the open-source software movement aimed at making the founding texts of Wicca more readily available by releasing them under a Creative Commons licence. In 2008 and 2009 he exhibited on the subject of witchcraft in France. He is also a council member of the Society for Psychical Research, a professional member of the Parapsychological Association, the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, and is on the committee of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 2022 a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He is the current editor of the Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research.
Sir Keith Vivian Thomas is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986 to 2000, he was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Hans Christian Erik Midelfort is C. Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist of the German Reformation and the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.
Paul Samuel Boyer was a U.S. cultural and intellectual historian and Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus and former director (1993–2001) of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He had held visiting professorships at UCLA, Northwestern University, and William & Mary; had received Guggenheim Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships; and was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society.
In the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, about 100,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and British America. Between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed, almost all in Europe. The witch-hunts were particularly severe in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Prosecutions for witchcraft reached a high point from 1560 to 1630, during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion. Among the lower classes, accusations of witchcraft were usually made by neighbors, and women made formal accusations as much as men did. Magical healers or 'cunning folk' were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused. Roughly 80% of those convicted were women, most of them over the age of 40. In some regions, convicted witches were burnt at the stake, the traditional punishment for religious heresy.
The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. According to its proponents, accused witches were actually followers of this alleged religion. They argue that the supposed 'witch cult' revolved around worshiping a Horned God of fertility and the underworld, whom Christian persecutors identified with the Devil, and whose followers held nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.
Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Hungary written by the Hungarian historian Éva Pócs. The study was first published in Hungarian in 1997 as Élők és holtak, látók és boszorkányok by Akadémiai Kiadó. In 1999, it was later translated into English by Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb and published by the Central European University Press.
Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt is a historical study of the beliefs regarding European witchcraft in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, with particular reference to the development of the witches' sabbat and its influence on the witch trials in the Early Modern period. It was written by the English historian Norman Cohn, then of the University of Sussex, and first published by Sussex University Press in association with Heinemann Educational Books in 1975. It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled 'Studies in the Dynamics of Persecution and Extermination' that were funded by the Columbus Centre and edited by Cohn himself.
Brian Paul Levack is an American historian of early modern Britain and Europe.
Witch trials and witch related accusations were at a high during the early modern period in Britain, a time that spanned from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century.
Malcolm John Gaskill FRHistS is an English academic historian and writer on crime, magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, and the supernatural. Gaskill was a professor in the history department of the University of East Anglia from 2011 until 2020, when he retired from teaching to give more time to writing.
References
- 1 2 3 4 "Briggs, Robin", Who's Who (online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2017). Retrieved 2 May 2018.
- 1 2 3 "Robin Briggs", All Souls College, Oxford. Retrieved 2 May 2018.
- 1 2 "Mr Robin Briggs", British Academy. Retrieved 2 May 2018.
- ↑ Briggs, Robin (1989). Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. vii. ISBN 0198219814.
- ↑ Briggs, Robin (2007). The Witches of Lorraine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. viii. ISBN 9780198225829.
