Witchcraft and Witch-Hunting : Perceptions, Interventions and Resolution

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...

Grain Price Fluctuations and Witch Hunting in Bavaria

Abstract Based on the data set of Behringer (1997), we develop and test competing models of the determinants of witch hunting in Bavaria in the period 1345-1750, which explain the cyclicity as well as the variation over time from the 14th to the 18th century. Our main focus is on economic factors and their influence on the intensity of prosecution. We analyse this issue by quantifying the impor...

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...

"Must I be...made a common sink?" witchcraft and the theatre in the Witch of Edmonton.

Monstrous Women: Exploring Historical Witchcraft and Its Presence in The Witch

I the 1600s, the Puritans were still sailing to the United States— to them, the “New World”—in search of religious freedom and new beginnings; however, in their attempt to leave behind England and its influence, the Puritans brought with them Europe’s archaic views of witchcraft and women as monsters. The Puritans projected these fears of witchcraft onto women in a variety of ways: accusations ...