RICHARD DEACON, Matthew Hopkins; Witch Finder General, London, Frederick Muller, 1976, 8vo, pp. 223, illus., £6.50. The current interest in witchcraft and the occult continues unabated, and no doubt this book is intended for this insatiable appetite. In addition, however, the author, who is a professional writer, claims the relevance of historical witchcraft to similar practices today, which is...

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 ...

The belief in occult forces is still deeply rooted in many African societies, regardless of education, religion, and social class of the people concerned. According to many Africans its incidence is even increasing due to social stress and strain caused (among others) by the process of modernization. Most often magic and witchcraft accusations work to the disadvantage of the poor and deprived, ...

THE YEAR of 1660 witnessed important political and scientific developments in England. The restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England occurred with the return of Charles II after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the Puritan influence. The Royal Society, after informal meetings for nearly fifteen years, was established as a scientific organization in 1660 and received its Royal...

Adam Ashforth has written one of the recent political ethnographies I most admire. His Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa draws on a total of about three years’ residence during the 1990s in Soweto (South West Township), an Apartheid-built black suburb of Johannesburg, plus subsequent visits to his adopted family and friends there. Earlier, Ashforth wrote an impressive historic...

the stories we tell about our lives unveil their content just as much as the lexical choices we make index a certain worldview, attitude, positionality, and relationship to reality. in essence, in narratives, individuals construct the self and denote personal identities. the available narrative identity studies have largely ignored the language employed by the bewitched while narrating their ex...

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...

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...