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Witchcraft traditionally means the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. A practitioner is a witch. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, accused witches were usually women who were believed to have attacked their own community, and often to have communed with evil beings. It was thought witchcraft could be thwarted by protective magic or counter-magic, which could be provided by cunning folk or folk healers. Suspected witches were also intimidated, banished, attacked or killed. Often they would be formally prosecuted and punished, if found guilty or simply believed to be guilty. European witch-hunts and witch trials in the early modern period led to tens of thousands of executions. In some regions, many of those accused of witchcraft were folk healers or midwives. European belief in witchcraft gradually dwindled during and after the Age of Enlightenment.
A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America took place in the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 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 and Cameroon today.
Ulick Peter Burke is a British historian and professor. He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother.
Sir Hew Francis Anthony Strachan, is a British military historian, well known for his leadership in scholarly studies of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He is currently professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Before that Strachan was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford.
John McManners (1916–2006) 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.
Belief in witchcraft in Europe can be traced to classical antiquity and has continuous history during the Middle Ages, culminating in the Early Modern witch trials and giving rise to the fairy tale and popular culture "witch" stock character of modern times, as well as to the concept of the "modern witch" in Wicca and related movements of contemporary witchcraft.
Christopher John Wickham, is a British historian and academic. From 2005 to 2016, he was Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford: he is now emeritus professor. He had previously taught at the University of Birmingham from 1977, rising to be Professor of Early Medieval History from 1997 to 2005.
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, 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.
Witch trials in the early modern period saw that between 1400 to 1782, around 40,000 to 60,000 were killed due to suspicion that they were practicing witchcraft. Some sources estimate that a total of 100,000 trials occurred at its maximum for a similar period. Groundwork on the concept of witchcraft was developed by Christian theologians as early as the 13th century. However, prosecutions for the practice of witchcraft would only reach a highpoint from 1560 to 1630 during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, with some regions burning those who were convicted at the stake, of whom roughly 80% were women,, mostly over the age of 40.
Guy Beiner is an Israeli historian of the late-modern period. He was formerly a full professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. In September 2021, he was named the Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies at Boston College, becoming the director of Irish Studies and a professor in the history department.
Brian Paul Levack is an American historian of early modern Britain and Europe.
Robin Fleming is a medieval historian, professor of history at Boston College, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She has written several books focusing on the people of Roman Britain and early medieval Britain, using both archaeological evidence and written records.
Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, is an Irish economist and historian, who specialises in economic history and international economics. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was Professor of Economics at Trinity College, Dublin from 2000 to 2011, and had previously taught at Columbia University and University College, Dublin. From 2011 to 2019, he was Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Christopher John Hesketh Duggan was a British historian and academic. He specialised in the political, social and cultural history of modern Italy. He began his career as a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and then at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1987, he moved to the University of Reading where he remained until his death. He was Professor of Modern Italian History from 2002.
Christopher Tyerman is an academic historian focusing on the Crusades. In 2015, he was appointed Professor of History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford.
Stephen Anthony Smith, FBA, FRHistS is a British historian and academic. Since 2012, he has been Professor of History at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1995, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy, in 2014.
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.
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