The Renaissance and/of Witchcraft

Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe

B etween the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as one million individuals in Europe were executed for the crime of witchcraft. The majority of the trials and executions took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, the speed and volume of executions were astonishing: in one German town, as many as 400 people were killed in a single day (Midelfort, 197...

Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft

Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials

This paper re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with “elf-shot.” Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationship of these beliefs to witchcraft itself.

Witchcraft or mycotoxin? The Salem witch trials.

BACKGROUND The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 have been studied by many historians looking for the complex social, political, and psychological determinants behind the community-wide hysteria that led to a travesty of justice and the deaths of 20 innocent Puritans. Recently, ergot poisoning has been put forth by some as a previously unsuspected cause of the bizarre behaviors of the young adole...

Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft

PAUL BOYER and STEPHEN NISSENBAUM, Salem possessed. The social origins of witchcraft, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974, 8vo, pp. xxi, 231, illus., $10.00. Reviewed by Edwin Clarke, M.D., F.R.C.P., Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW] 2BP. Of all the outbreaks of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, that at Salem Village, Massachusetts, in...