Animal Transformation in Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets

Bedeviling Spectacle: Law, Literature, and Early Modern Witchcraft

English Reformation and Irish Witches the Effects of Confessionalisation in Suppressing Witchcraft Accusations in Early Modern Ireland

There was a witch in Youghal. l\1ary Longdon testified before the Assize at Cork on 11 September, 1661, that she had been bewitched by Florence Newton. Longdon said Newton, after kissing her on the forehead, had caused her to suffer fits and trances, during which Longdon saw Newton's face and knew that Newton was the cause of her malady. Longdon testified that during her fits she vomited foreig...

The Making of the Female Witch: Reflections on Witchcraft and Gender in the Early Modern Period

One day in the early decades of the seventeenth century, a farmhand and a shepherd in Rheden, a village north-east of Arnhem in the Dutch province of Gelderland, performed divination by sieve and shears. They let their contraption turn around while naming the women of Rheden one by one by their name and nickname. Whoever was named when the sieve turned and came to a full stop was proven to be a...

An Enchanting Witchcraft: Masculinity, Melancholy, and the Pathology of Gaming in Early Modern London

In seeking to illuminate the ways in which inchoate models of addiction emerged alongside the unprecedented popularity of gambling in Stuart London, this paper will explore the intersections between a rudimentary pathology of addiction and transformations in the epistemology of reason, the passions, and humoral psychology in the seventeenth century. By exploring the connections between endogeno...

Demons, nature, or God? Witchcraft accusations and the French disease in early modern Venice.

In early modern Venice, establishing the cause of a disease was critical to determining the appropriate cure: natural remedies for natural illnesses, spiritual solutions for supernatural or demonic ones. One common ailment was the French disease (syphilis), widely distributed throughout Venice's neighborhoods and social hierarchy, and evenly distributed between men and women. The disease was wi...