Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The
world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful,
these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we
often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny
that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were
prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently
as 2018. In Witchcraft, Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen
significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and
witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts
through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the
eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.
It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical
historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in
Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian
missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a
witch trial can come in many guises. Â Professor Gibson also
tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena
Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too
often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King
James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded
them. Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence
their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over
the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter
blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but,
as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial. Â
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