In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.

Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.

Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.

Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.

Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

In early modern Europe, ideas about nature, God, demons, and occult forces were inextricably connected and much ink and blood was spilled in arguments over the characteristics and boundaries of nature and the supernatural. Seitz uses records of Inquisition witchcraft trials in Venice to uncover how individuals across society, from servants to aristocrats, understood these two fundamental categories. Others have examined this issue from the points of view of religious history, the history of science and medicine, or the history of witchcraft alone, but this work brings these sub-fields together to illuminate comprehensively the complex forces shaping early modern beliefs.

A unique collection of materials, including works of literature as well as historical documents, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550 1750 provides a broad view of how witches and magicians were represented in print and manuscript over three centuries. It combines newly annotated selections from famous texts, such as Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, and The Faerie Queene with unjustly obscure ones: portrayals of witchcraft and magic from private papers, court records, and little-known works of fiction. In this rich, broad context, Marion Gibson presents the voices of "witches," accusers, ministers, physicians, poets, dramatists, magistrates, and witchfinders from both sides of the Atlantic. Each text is introduced with a short essay and fully annotated to explain unfamiliar words and concepts, give biographical details of participants and/or authors, and explore the context in which the text was produced."

Voices from the Pagan Census provides insight into the expanding but largely unstudied religious movement of Neo-Paganism in the United States. The authors present the findings of ""The Pagan Census"", which was created and distributed by Berger and Andras Corban Arthen of the Earthspirit Community. Analysing the most comprehensive and largest-scale survey of the Neo-Pagans to date, the authors offer a portrait of this emerging religious community, including an examination of Neo-Pagan political activism, educational achievements, family life, worship methods, experiences with the paranormal and beliefs about such issues as life after death. A collection of religious groups whose practices evolved from Great Britain's Wicca movement of the 1940s, Neo-Paganism spread to the US in the 1960s. While the number of people who identify themselves with the religion has continued to rise, quantitative study of Neo-Paganism has been difficult given the movement's lack of centralized leadership and doctrine and its development into scattered, independent groups and individuals. Endorsed by all major Neo-Pagan leaders, the results of this census provide in-depth information about the group.

For all their pride in seeing this world clearly, the thinkers and artists of the English Renaissance were also fascinated by magic and the occult. The three greatest playwrights of the period devoted major plays (The Tempest, Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist) to magic, Francis Bacon often referred to it, and it was ever-present in the visual arts. In "Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age" John S. Mebane reevaluates the significance of occult philosophy in Renaissance thought and literature, constructing the most detailed historical context for his subject yet attempted.

Dictionary of Witchcraft is a must-have resource for anyone interested in witchcraft, pagan religions, and the occult. This historical dictionary was the first reference work to seriously document superstitions, manifestations, magic, and superstitions. The author s interest was to compile a vast amount of matter that would interest, entertain and instruct others. This dictionary was consulted by some of the greatest Romantic writers, notably by Hugo. Collin de Plancy followed the tradition of many previous demonologists of cataloguing demons by name and title of nobility, as it happened with grimoires like Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and The Lesser Key of Solomon among others. It is considered a major work documenting beings, characters, books, deeds, and causes which pertain to the manifestations and magic of trafficking with Hell; divinations, occult sciences, grimoires, marvels, errors, prejudices, traditions, folktales, the various superstitions, and generally all manner of marvelous, surprising, mysterious, and supernatural beliefs. This edition was translated and introduced by occultist Wade Baskin. Collin de Plancy (1794 1881) was a French occultist, demonologist, author, and translator. His best-known work, Dictionary of Witchcraft (Dictionnaire Infernal), was published in 1818 but didn t receive wide acclaim until 1863 when a set of 69 illustrations by Louis Breton were added. Later in life, de Plancy converted to Catholicism and focused his studies on Catholic histories and mysticisms.

Magic and witchcraft have been important components of almost every human culture throughout history, and continue to be so in the present day, both globally and in the West. These topics have attracted an enormous amount of scholarship, but publications are often scattered, and scholars working in one area rarely address research produced in others. These volumes bring together important representative publications spanning antiquity to the present day, and setting Western developments in a global context. Significant attention has been given to the major witch hunts of early modern Europe, because scholarship on early modern witchcraft has often driven the field. But other periods and regions are not neglected. Important theoretical issues are also addressed, such as the conceptual relationship between magic, science, and religion, and the role of gender in the perception (and persecution) of magical practices in many parts of the world.

This work about witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, neuromancy, damnation, satanism and every kind of magic and occult is written by the undisputed scholar in the field and is a work of unprecedented authority, of interest to all who are connected with the subject.

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery.
The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.